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Voting for a President
The Future of Our Country Is the Future of Your Child
By Carma Haley Shoemaker
Parents often plan for their child's future before the child is actually born. When a woman learns she is pregnant, she protects her child by discontinuing smoking, eating healthy and getting plenty of rest. During the pregnancy, parents design a nursery with all the trimmings and gather all the "staples" needed for baby's arrival. The time and effort put into this type of planning is to ensure that the child has only the best for his development, his birth and his future.
So who decides the future of our children? Parents? Teachers? Government officials? The president? Ideally, it is a combination of these people, all working together for a common goal: the future of our children.
The candidate who is elected to the position of President of the United States this November will still be in office when a majority of today's toddlers begin kindergarten or the first grade. The bills passed and the changes made will affect these children's lives. It's no surprise, then, that many parents may base the decision of their ballot on where a candidate stands on the "important" issues.
The issues that are most important to parents differ widely from household to household. Some parents are up in arms over gun control and school violence; others are sick with worry over health care and tax issues. But no matter what their stand on the issues, parents feel that the candidates for any office, not just the presidency, should address issues in an honest, concise manner.
"I do not pick [a candidate] by party, but by the causes s/he supports," says Brigitte Thompson, a work-at-home mother from Vermont. "I also look for someone who seems 'real.' I don't like the canned responses most [candidates] give and would prefer to vote for someone sincere."
Several issues seem to carry weight with a majority of parents, regardless of their chosen party or candidate: gun control, health care and school violence. With the recent epidemic of "school shootings" in the past few years, gun control and school violence have become forefront in both the media and the presidential campaign. "Any candidate I vote for must approve gun-control measures," says Elisa Sonnenberg, freelance writer and mother of two. "Sure, people kill people, but people with guns kill a whole lot more people than those without."