Tapu Misa: Get parenting right and all the problems will be solved

My 10-year-old son's last homework for this year was to look after an egg for a week. The egg was meant to represent a baby, but as my boy managed to break it within minutes of adopting it, he decided it really wasn't the same thing.

Eggs aren't babies, he pronounced airily, as he took another one out of the fridge. He was a little more attentive to that one, and after I reminded him about the need to think about what was best for his egg, he even went as far as to make it a bed. But after that, he neglected it while he went out to play, leaving it in perilous places where it came close to meeting the fate of his first.

At the end of the week I asked him what he'd learned from his brief parenting stint. "That I can't take care of a baby - and that's why I'm not going to have any," he said cheerfully.

I thought it was more that he wasn't cut out to take care of an egg, since he's somewhat more conscientious with his younger cousins, but it was good to see he'd given the whole parenting thing a moment's consideration.

The evangelistic Christian youth worker I profiled many years ago would have approved of this early parenting training, I'm sure, for as well as preaching the virtues of loving one's fellow man, he held that almost all the social problems of the modern world could be laid at the feet of bad parents.

He was a particularly big fan of the idea of requiring all prospective parents to sit a licence test to prove they were worthy of bearing and raising offspring - a position I thought he was probably entitled to, given that he worked daily with troubled kids, the casualties of homes where abuse and neglect were endemic.

He was a family man with an adoring wife and lovely children, so it was a shame that he turned out to be part of the problem. A few years after I met him, he was convicted of sexually abusing some of the broken youngsters who had been entrusted into his care.

I've never forgotten the idea, though, that good parenting was something that needed to be taught. Especially after speaking in more recent times to people who have concluded, after many hours spent working with inmates from prisons around the country, that if there was one common strand connecting them all, it was that most of them had been failed by abusive, neglectful, monumentally inept parents - particularly fathers.

Only a few could be said to have gone astray despite having what they themselves described as "good" parents.

I was reminded of this in light of the heat and fury which continued to be generated over the Civil Union Bill passed last week. A week or so ago a reader chided me for a column in which I argued that children who grew up outside the traditional heterosexual marriage model weren't necessarily worse off. He'd grown up in a separated household and knew from his own experience that it was bad for children. Surely I would want my own children to grow up with both a mum and a dad?

Of course, and they do. In an ideal world every child would grow up in a household with two parents who love and respect each other, as well as their children. But wishing for it doesn't make it so. And neither does forcing people to live with their mistakes.

I've been inclined to think that some people give up on their marriages a little too quickly, especially when there are children involved, but after watching two miserable and highly destructive relationships at close range, I've concluded there are some relationships that ought not to be prolonged - for the sake of everyone concerned, especially the children.

In both cases, the children were being sent the damaging messages that daily conflict and verbal and physical abuse was the norm. In one case, both parents were so consumed with acting out their undisguised contempt for each other that they were incapable of being good parents.

So, what about the children? Is the civil union law bad for children, particularly if it makes it easier for homosexual couples to adopt?

It seems to me pretty obvious that children are, in most cases, better off - economically, socially, emotionally - with two parents rather than one, especially if they're biological parents rather than step-parents.

I've no argument, either, with the proposition that a child is safer, by and large, with people who are genetically wired to care for them than with, say, the psychotic step-father or boyfriend who ought to be kept as far away as possible from children.

It seems fairly obvious, too, that economic hardship has a deleterious impact on most parents and their children.

But as anyone knows, many fine children are produced by poor and single parents, many step-parents are an improvement on the biological ones, and many neglected and sad children are the product of wealthy but perpetually distracted parents.

Proving, it seems to me, that what is best for children is to have at least one person in their lives who loves them unconditionally and is prepared to put their interests first.

Show parents how to do their job properly, and lovingly, and support them with the right social and economic environment, and you've pretty well solved the problems of the universe.

Against that, sexuality, marital status, religion and the rest pale into insignificance.