October 19, 2009 04:49 PM UTC

O'bamas attend Sasha's parent-teacher conference

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• by: allyncooper

From the AP

BETHESDA, Md. – President Barack Obama and first lady Michelle Obama are at daughter Sasha’s school for a parent-teacher conference.

The Obamas traveled by motorcade early Monday morning to the elementary school campus of the private Sidwell Friends School, where Sasha, 8, is a seond-grader.

Her sister, Malia, 10, attends Sidwell’s Washington, D.C., middle school campus.

There was no media coverage of the private event, the White House said.

I remember candidate Obama saying that “being a father isn’t having a child, being a father is being there to raise that child”. There are those who talk the talk, and those who walk the walk.

Coming from a dysfunctional family in which my father wasn’t emotionally there and had little involvement in raising his children, I can attest to the importance of a father being involved in the raising of his children. Obama has regularly attended parent teacher conferences. He could easily just put this off on his wife and not attend, but Barack O’bama knows that’s not being a father.

This Thursday, Oct. 22 there is a panel event being held in Grand Junction “Prison Spending, Sentencing, and the Colorado Budget: How many more prison beds can we afford?” (For more info log onto the Independence Institute website). No matter what your party affiliation or political ideology, the fact is the increasing cost of Colorado’s prison population is fiscally unsustainable in even normal times, and with the state broke, even more so.

There is a connection between how children are raised and the number of prison beds we have to pay for. And its all about personal responsibility and not just “talking the talk, but walking the walk.”  Until parents take an active part in raising their children and are there teaching them, not only by words but by example, ethical and moral standards of behavior, we can just keep paying for more prison beds.