Parents rejected for spanking beliefs

The Mass. supreme court is famous for being the first state court to mandate same-sex marriage, and even teaching it in schools, based on centuries-old constitutional language.

But what happens when a white Christian cis-gendered heteronormative traditional family wants to care for a foster child? They are ostracized for beliefs shared by 90% of the population a generation ago. Eugene Volokh reports:

The Massachusetts high court held today, in Magazu v. Dep‘t of Children & Families, that the state may refuse to place foster children with parents who occasionally spank their own children. This is so even if the parents promise to spank their children outside the foster children’s presence (because they already administer spankings only in private, without their other child watching).

I sometimes hear people say that we need more foster parents. It is all a lie. If you are a normal well-adjusted parent, the foster child agencies do not want you. They specialize in damaged kids, and keeping them damaged.

The research on spanking is that excessive spanking, such as several severe beatings a week, is correlated with worse outcomes later. No harm has been shown for moderate spanking, and no research has shown that any other method of discipline works better.

A lot of liberals today have the view that spanking is the choice of a low-class black family, and they are better than that.

I am just posting this to note the trend towards liberal agencies working to control families and deny personal freedoms. They will not stop until we are slaves to their collectivist ideology.

Libertarian attacks on marriage

A common libertarian reaction to issues like same-sex marriage is to say that govt should get out of the marriage business, and let any consenting adults agree to whatever behavior and contracts they please. Religions could perform whatever ceremonies they please. This is standard libertarian doctrine, as they believe that just about any problem is better solved by private contracting than by govt.

A libertarian magazine, Reason, published an article attacking this view. The article seemed like heresy to many. Here is a video attacking the article.

The trouble with the libertarian argument is that you cannot make a binding legal contract for sexual services, or child custody, or child support. That is, American law will not uphold such a contract.

When the govt gives benefits like tax-free inheritance or joint tax returns or green cards, it is not going to do that for random groups of people writing their own contracts.

Maybe the libertarians would say that in their perfect world, there would be no taxes or green cards anyway. Let me know if that ever happens anywhere.

I have posted a libertarian definition, but I don't think I ever explained how family law is a huge blind spot for libertarians.

There are web sites for matching alternative parents. You can find your own match from people all over the world, and write your own contract to divvy up the parental rights and responsibilities however you please. It seems like a libertarian paradise until you learn that none of it works, and none of the contracts are enforceable. These web sites have very few people who even try, once they find out the complications.

Libertarians might say that such contracts should be enforceable, but as far as I know, there is no libertarian explanation of how that would ever work. Even hard-core libertarians seem to accept that in anything but a traditional two natural parent family, some family court judge gets to decide the BIOTCh (best interest of the child). Some of them even brag that this is the truly libertarian view, because it protects the rights of the child.

I happen to think that some contracts could be enforced with minimal government intervention, in my hypothetical libertarian society. But it does not matter. I cannot convince the libertarians, or Republicans or Democrats or anyone else.

I have occasionally praised the merits of the American nuclear family, as shown in the 1950s and 1960s TV shows like Leave it to Beaver, and Ozzie and Harriet. Some readers complain that this is antiquated, or unrealistic, or coupled with obsolete moral values, or not sufficiently respectful of feminists or LGBTQIA folks, or contrary to liberal political goals. Maybe so, but those families are the only free ones. All other arrangements are subject to micro-management by the family court.

I post these arguments because of the widespread view that if too much govt is the problem, as I have often argued on this blog, then the libertarians might have a solution. The libertarians do not have a solution. They either ignore the problem, or make proposals that will make it worse.

The best proposed solution is shared parenting, as advocated by the Fathers' rights movement, National Parents Organization, and this blog. Some states have passed laws in this direction, declared a presumption of shared parenting unless some judge finds it contrary to the BIOTCh.

But even with these laws, the parents still have no individual constitutional rights to their kids, and the family court judge is firmly in control of child custody issues, parenting plans, and finances.

Here is Rand Paul's libertarian response to the US Supreme Court mandating same-sex marriage:

While I disagree with Supreme Court’s redefinition of marriage, I believe that all Americans have the right to contract. ...

Do consenting adults have a right to contract with other consenting adults? ...

Perhaps the time has come to examine whether or not governmental recognition of marriage is a good idea, for either party. ...

Perhaps the time has come to examine whether or not governmental recognition of marriage is a good idea, for either party.

He is disconnected from reality. The family court already ignores marriage for most questions about child custody, parenting, and support. Getting away from recognition of marriage has only increased govt control over private lives.

Paul has many other libertarian views, but is strangely silent on what is the biggest govt usurpation of our liberties.

A more libertarian approach view requires:

* Abolish forced child support.
* Give single or divorced parents constitutional rights to the care, custody, and upbringing of their kids, just as married parents have.
* Abolish BIOTCh, special masters, forensic psychologists doing anything but DMS-5 diagnosis, and guardians ad litem.
* Reduce family court jurisdiction to monetary remedies of contractual disputes, such as dissolving joint property after divorce.
* Establish paternity by marriage or DNA test.

These changes seem as far-fetched as other radical ideas, such as the anti-feminist TWRA (Traditional Women’s Rights Activist). They want to re-instate the husband as legal head of household, with an obligation to support his wife and kids, and re-instate the Tender Years Doctrine, so the mom is in charge of young kids. There is a certain logic to this, but most people would reject it as sexist.

Anyway, I post this to further explain the hopelessness of reforming the system. Fathers are slaves, and not even the libertarians recognize that or object to it.

Cosby cannot have moral opinions and privacy

I have defended Bill Cosby here several times, because I believe people are innocent until proven guilty, and because the decades only charges seemed implausible and gold-digging.

But now documents show that he admitted in 2005 to getting quaaludes for sexual activity.

These admissions damaging, but not conclusive. From what I see, he admitted buying the quaaludes decades ago, and to intending to give them to women he was going to seduce. But it is unclear whether they took the pills, and whether they were voluntarily and consensually taking them. Apparently a lot of people used to take these pills to enhance a sexual experience.

It is not a date-rape drug, as far as I know.

This story is being reported as proof of Cosby's built. I don't see it that way, but we will see. If so, he will lose millions of dollars in lawsuits. If you do not hear about big payoffs soon, then his accusers do not have the evidence.

Anyway, what disturbs me about this story is something else. A judge released what had been a sealed 2005 deposition, and here was his reasoning:

This case, however, is not about Defendant’s status as a public person by virtue of the exercise of his trade as a televised or comedic personality. Rather, Defendant has donned the mantle of public moralist and mounted the proverbial electronic or print soap box to volunteer his views on, among other things, childrearing, family life, education, and crime. To the extent that Defendant has freely entered the public square and “thrust himself into the vortex of th[ese] public issue[s],” he has voluntarily narrowed the zone of privacy that he is entitled to claim.

Wow, I did not know that a man loses his privacy rights by expression his opinions on "childrearing, family life, education, and crime." I have given opinions on some of those things on this blog. Does that mean that I have no privacy? That some judge will soon be unsealing my court files?

In my case, the most embarrassing things are already on the public file, and even searchable on the web.

Here is the Cosby moral opinion, referred to by the judge:

I’m talking about these people who cry when their son is standing there in an orange suit. Where were you when he was two? (clapping) Where were you when he was twelve? (clapping) Where were you when he was eighteen, and how come you don’t know he had a pistol? (clapping) And where is his father, and why don’t you know where he is? And why doesn’t the father show up to talk to this boy?

The church is only open on Sunday. And you can’t keep asking Jesus to ask doing things for you (clapping). ...

50 percent drop out rate, I’m telling you, and people in jail, and women having children by five, six different men. Under what excuse, I want somebody to love me, and as soon as you have it, you forget to parent. Grandmother, mother, and great grandmother in the same room, raising children, and the child knows nothing about love or respect of any one of the three of them (clapping). All this child knows is “gimme, gimme, gimme.”

Apparently there is a widespread belief that if you even promote Christian morals, and if you ever had any un-Christian behavior in the past, then you must be punished by any means possible.

Dennis Hastert might fill that pattern. He was a Republican Speaker of the House, and now he is indicted for lying about why he was withdrawing cash from the bank. It is strange that anyone would even be keeping track of his bank transactions. It appears to be some sort of Democrat payback.

All this seems to intimidate politicians and others into never expressing a moral opinion. If you do, the anti-moralist will do everything to destroy you.

Massachusetts finds right to spank

Eugene Volokh reports:

Parents have a right to reasonably spank their children, says Massachusetts high court

Such a right has been recognized throughout American history, as a defense against a charge of battery (under criminal law or tort law). In this case, the state trial judge seemed to conclude no such right existed, at least in public, saying,

If you’re in public with your kids, it’s not appropriate to discipline in this fashion.

But yesterday, the Massachusetts high court unanimously reversed, in Commonwealth v. Dorvil, concluding that there was indeed a common-law right to spank:

[A] parent or guardian may not be subjected to criminal liability for the use of force against a minor child under the care and supervision of the parent or guardian, provided that (1) the force used against the minor child is reasonable; (2) the force is reasonably related to the purpose of safeguarding or promoting the welfare of the minor, including the prevention or punishment of the minor’s misconduct; and (3) the force used neither causes, nor creates a substantial risk of causing, physical harm (beyond fleeting pain or minor, transient marks), gross degradation, or severe mental distress….

Part of why this dad was prosecuted was because he appeared to be angry. The incident was quite trivial, but many so-called experts say that discipline should not be done in anger.

As far as I know, there is no legal doctrine that you are certain rights as long as you are not angry.

If you spank in public, you are always subject to some jerk calling 911 just because he or she does not approve of spanking.

I am skeptical that observers or cops can even tell whether a parent is angry. Often a parent pretends to be angry as a way of impressing seriousness on the child.

People who are truly angry can make bad judgments, but the law should apply to what they do, not their emotional states.

CPS backs down in Meitiv case

The Wash. Post reports:

Maryland officials have taken steps to clarify their views about children playing or walking alone outdoors in a new policy directive that says Child Protective Services should not be involved in such cases unless children have been harmed or face a substantial risk of harm.

The directive, part of a public statement to be issued Friday, follows a nationally debated case involving “free range” parents Danielle and Alexander Meitiv, who let their young children walk home alone from parks in Montgomery County.

Now the Meitivs have been cleared of all charges.

Of course they suffered a lot of headache and legal expense to keep the privilege of their kids walking to a playground. Glad to see CPS bullying was stopped.

Scotland to have Named Person for every child

I regularly post articles warning about the creeping nanny state, and against judge-appoint guarian ad litems, and other attempts for the state to usurp the roles of parents.

But this story has me puzzled. Did Scotland just pass a law to assign a govt busybody social worker for every kid, whether there is an alleged need or not?

The Scottish Government has been accused of setting out to “fundamentally undermine” the role of Scotland’s parents by appointing a state guardian for every child under 18.

According to campaigners, the hugely controversial plan to appoint a so-called “named person” for ever child is about empowering a state employee to police the happiness of the country’s children.

An event is being held at Hamden Park in Glasgow on Saturday to help explain the controversial policy, and the legislation is due to come into force in August next year, although opponents are still pursuing a legal bid to stop it.

Nicola Sturgeon, the First Minister, claims the scheme, affecting one million children, will help the vulnerable and families in need while campaigners say it breaches the human rights of parents.

“The named person policy is wrong because it fundamentally undermines the role of parents and families and because it gives monitoring power to the state.

“It also takes resources away from the most vulnerable children. The more parents find out about this policy the more they object to it because they see the extent of its intrusion into family life. ..." ...

She added: “You are talking about significant intervention into family life, looking at minutiae with regards to whether the child is achieving, whether it is nurtured enough, whether it is happy enough.

“It is totally unnecessary and is going to cost an enormous amount of money at a time when funding for children’s services is so pushed.”

A spokesman for the Scottish Government said tomorrow’s event was about engaging with parents while continuing to improve services for children and families in Scotland, and was not centred around the implementation of the named person service.

Someday all kids will be wards of the states, and parents will be reduced to babysitters.

Endless demands from gay lobby

The leftist NY Times is all excited about the upcoming US Supreme Court ruling on same-sex marriage, and reports:

If same-sex marriage is legalized nationwide as part of the monumental case before the Supreme Court — a decision is expected this month — it would become possible for more same-sex married couples to establish legal ties with their children.

No, this has nothing to do with legal ties with their children.

They already have legal ties to their kids. The issue here is creating legal ties to kids who are not their kids.

The article tells about some Ohio white lesbians who have taken in black foster kids, but only one of the lesbians has been able to legally adopt them.

They live in Ohio because Jessica’s job as an air traffic controller is there. So Melissa, who stays home to care for the children, must carry around a permission slip of sorts when she takes them to the doctor or other appointments. “I am with them all day every day,” Melissa said. “I take care of their day-to-day needs, and I have no rights to them legally. It’s hurtful.”

The article tries to make it sound like a special hardship, but there are millions of step-parents in a similar situation. That is, when a parent divorces and remarries, the new spouse has no legal rights to the kid, and may have to get one of the real parents to sign a permission slip.

The LGBTQIA crowd will not be happy with this, until they completely destroy how marriage, divorce, and adoption work for straight couples.

Legalizing same-sex marriage will not eliminate the potential for discrimination over parental rights in every corner of the country, particularly in places already working on legislation that would undermine a pro-marriage ruling. Michigan just passed a law that would allow state-funded child welfare agencies to deny services to people — including same-sex couples who want to provide foster care or adopt — based on religious grounds. Virginia and North Dakota already have similar religious exemption laws, according to the Movement Advancement Project, and Alabama and Texas have proposed them.

So the "Movement Advancement Project" wants to force religions to place kids for adoption into lesbian households?

On another matter, the Obama administration has caved into demands to put a woman on our paper money:

Growing numbers of Americans are going cashless, but demands to finally put a woman on paper currency persist. And now the Treasury has announced that a portrait of a woman, to be determined soon, will grace the $10 bill. ...

Susan B. Anthony, the social reformer, appeared on silver dollars minted from 1979 to 1981, and again in 1999, and Sacagawea, the Shoshone guide to the Lewis and Clark expedition, was featured on gold-colored dollar coins from 2000. Both coins, which were often confused with quarters, proved unpopular, and production of them was stopped.

Obviously, people do not want these women polluting our money. How long before they put LGBTQIA folks on our money, or maybe a trans-racialist or trans-ablist? They should be putting Ronald Reagan on our money, not these obscure women.

Using social media against anti-freedom lobbyists

A Santa Cruz Sentinel editorial complains:

The debate over Senate Bill 277, which would make vaccinations compulsory for schoolchildren, has taken an ugly turn. Although we understand the rights of opponents to express themselves, their tactics have gone way too far.

A group of opponents have taken to social media — and not merely to state their views. Instead, they’ve been sharing not only personal information about the bill’s lobbyists, but they’ve also decided to publish photos online of their whereabouts.

There is a big difference between activism and harassment.

The California Medical Association, a supporter of compulsory vaccination, has complained about a video by California Chiropractic Association President Brian Stenzler in which he urges an SB 277 foe to follow them “all day long — follow them to a T,” according to an account in the Sacramento Bee. ...

Apparently, however, some opponents aren’t so restrained. Some of the activists are taking to the Internet and social media to track the activities of supporters. Doing so crosses the line.

We acknowledge that we support the idea of compulsory vaccination. To us, the science is clear, that the vaccination of children is necessary to avoid the spread of diseases like pertussis, measles and more.

Despite that stand, we understand that some people are going to push back, and that the idea of compulsory vaccination is a tough pill to swallow for some advocates of free choice.

This complaint seems a little premature, as it appears that no one has been harassed.

Here is the offending video. Maybe I am misinterpreting it, but I don't see any advocacy of harassment. He mentions the name of a lobbying on his side, to distinguish her from two other lobbyists on the other side. He says to follow them, but in the sense of "follow the money". Maybe he just wanted to identify the financial interests wanting to force vaccines.

Here is Democrat state senator Pan assuring the public that they will have a choice, and then introducing a law to eliminate that choice.

I wonder why there are not more social media attacks on public officials. Obviously some parents get very upset at laws that force medical injections of marginal value. Parents also get upset at public officials who try to take their kids away, especially when they act out of corruption, maliciousness, or incompetence. I do not favor any harassment, but I certainly think that public officials should be exposed when they are acting against the public interest.

Pope values parents over so-called experts

The Vatican does not seem to have much influence anymore, as it cannot even persuade Ireland to stop same-sex marriage:

The overall result, of course, is most important. With opinion polls suggesting the Yes side will win comfortably, Ireland looks poised to become the first country in the world to legalize same-sex marriage via a nationwide vote.

The Pope has said and done some goofy things, but I am glad to see him stick up for parents over so-called experts:

(Vatican Radio) In his catechesis at the General Audience on Wednesday, Pope Francis focused on the role of parents in the education of their children, which he called “an essential characteristic” of the family.

The Holy Father noted the many difficulties facing parents today, especially those who find themselves in difficult situations. He spoke especially about the difficulties of separated couples, calling on them to “never, never, never take the children hostage!”

He spoke out strongly against “intellectual critics” who have “silenced” parents in order to defend younger generations from real or imagined harm. This has opened up a fracture between families and societies, leading to a crisis in the relationship between families and society. So-called experts have often taken the place of parents, depriving them of their proper place in the education of their own children, “even in the most delicate and personal aspects of their lives.” Parents often are afraid to correct their children, leaving it instead to experts.

That neatly summarizes a major theme of this blog.

A hot issue in California is mandatory vaccines. Most of the experts recommend the vaccines. At least 95% of the kids get the vaccines, and maybe 1% get a medical exemption. A new law is going to force nearly everyone to get the vaccines.

The risk from the vaccines is very small, but the risk of getting the diseases if you are unvaccinated is also very small. So the benefit of the vaccines is debatable.

There was a measles outbreak in Disneyland, but it was a few dozen adults catching it from a Filipino visitor. A stricter vaccine policy on American schoolkids would not have made a difference.

Nearly all parents are doing what the experts say, and there is little or no harm in others not going along, so what is the problem? Who cares?

I think that it is simply a power play in a plan to eliminate parental rights and informed consent. More of this will come, and parents will not have the authority to rear their kids according to their own beliefs.

Studies used to influence high court

Among the arguments over same-sex marriage before the US Supreme Court are those saying that kids do worse or as well as normal families. Eg, see Mark Regnerus and his critics. No one has a large sample of kids fully reared by same-sex couples, so there is a debate over how to count women who had a kid in a regular marriage, and then went lesbian. I have mentioned the controversy.

I doubt that any of this will matter. The liberal justices will want to strike a blow for leftist social justice, regardless of the consequences.

Here is a simple example of how a study can get distorted. Philip Greenspun notes:

“Mom: The Designated Worrier” is a Mother’s Day gift from the New York Times, an example of “tall poppy syndrome” in which the best way to build up mothers is to point out how useless fathers are.

Here’s a representative quote:

Half of the men surveyed in a Families and Work Institute study from 2008 said they were either the responsible parent or shared the role equally with their spouse, while two-thirds of the women said they were the one in charge. This suggests that either men overestimate their contribution or women define the work differently.

Apparently neither the writer nor the editors of the New York Times thought that it was possible for a woman to overestimate her contributions as a parent.

Good point. I am all for credit moms on Mothers Day, but this one is just another husband belittling nut.

Free Range Day

NPR Radio reports today:

A Maryland couple made national headlines after Child Protective Services investigated them for letting their children walk home from a park alone. Now, other parents are staging a defiant protest in support.

It discusses the Meitive case, which I have posted about.

The Colorado supreme court is hearing a case of a biological dad against the "psychological parents" who, with the cooperation of the mom, essentially kidnapped the kid for several years. This is a serious attack on parental rights, using BIOTCh argument, and another encroachment of psychobabble. We will want to keep an eye on this case.

Abolish the family for social justice

Here is the anti-family leftoid mind at work:

The power of the family to tilt equality hasn’t gone unnoticed, and academics and public commentators have been blowing the whistle for some time. Now, philosophers Adam Swift and Harry Brighouse have felt compelled to conduct a cool reassessment.

Swift in particular has been conflicted for some time over the curious situation that arises when a parent wants to do the best for her child but in the process makes the playing field for others even more lopsided.

‘I got interested in this question because I was interested in equality of opportunity,’ he says.

‘I had done some work on social mobility and the evidence is overwhelmingly that the reason why children born to different families have very different chances in life is because of what happens in those families.’

‘One way philosophers might think about solving the social justice problem would be by simply abolishing the family. If the family is this source of unfairness in society then it looks plausible to think that if we abolished the family there would be a more level playing field.’

Swift also says:

“Evidence shows that the difference between those who get bedtime stories and those who don’t — the difference in their life chances — is bigger than the difference between those who get elite private schooling and those that don’t,” British academic Adam Swift told ABC presenter Joe Gelonesi.

Gelonesi responded online: “This devilish twist of evidence surely leads to a further conclusion that perhaps — in the interests of levelling the playing field — bedtime stories should also be restricted.”

Another Swift once proposed that poor Irish sell their babies to the rich for food.

A good rule of thumb is to be against anything that social justice warriors want.

Scaring people with 700 kids a day

A viral video scares parents into not letting their kids talk to strangers Over 700 Children are Abducted a Day. The Free-Range Mom points out that there haven't been that many abductions in the last 5 years, total.

I was in the local park yesterday, and a bunch boys and girls of age 5-6 or so kept asking me to lift them up to pick fruit out of a tree. I tried to convince them that the fruit might be poisonous, but they assured me that they ate it last week and no one died. One girl insisted on sitting on my shoulders. These kids were not worried about being abducted. I was the one worried about an accusation of improper behavior.

Christian views of spanking

The LA Times reports on the latest confusing quote from the Pope:

A group of child abuse experts summoned by Pope Francis to help tackle priestly abuse in the Roman Catholic Church has criticized remarks made by the pope himself in which he suggested that it was permissible for parents to spank their wayward children.

Two members of the 17-strong commission, holding its first full meeting at the Vatican, said Saturday they objected to Francis’ comments, made last Wednesday, in which he backed corporal punishment.

Leading British anti-abuse campaigner Peter Saunders, abused by two Catholic priests as a child, said the committee would ask the pope to reconsider his remarks.

“It might start off as a light tap, but actually the whole idea about hitting children is about inflicting pain,” Saunders said at a news conference at the Vatican.

“That's what it's about and there is no place in this day and age for having physical punishment, for inflicting pain, in terms of how you discipline your children,” he said.

Those so-called experts are mixed up, if they think sex abuse is like spanking.

Here is a Biblical view:

The Bible, not personal experience is our guide to the validity of spanking ...

There has always and will always be misuse of authority, but biblical authority is a good thing created and designed by God for the flourishing of his creation. So Adam and Eve were to rule and subdue and have dominion (Genesis 1:28). Husbands are heads in the home, with authority over their wives (Ephesians 5:23). Parents, and especially fathers, are called to bring up their children in the discipline and instruction of the Lord (Ephesians 6:4).

This includes corporal discipline for children. A reaction against spanking ignores the biblical premise that "Whoever spares the rod hates his son, but he who loves him is diligent to discipline him" (Proverbs 13:24). So we have a generation of children who are left undisciplined and unloved. Yes, it is un-loving not to spank your children when required.

Children are not born wise, they are born sinners. Children need boundaries. It is good for them to know that if they cross them there is a consequence. When they are young that consequence is sometimes a short sharp administration of pain through spanking. It should be precipitated by warning and accompanied by teaching, but if necessary it must be done.

Surveys show that a large majority of parents believe that spanking is sometimes necessary. A lot of child psychologists have tried to prove that it is not, and they have failed.

My position is that parents ought to be able to use their own judgment.

Followups on child support and parents rights

I cited a law professor saying that Free Range Parenting is a Constitutional Right. Now he admits that, as a practical matter, it is nearly impossible for parents to assert those constitutional rights.

I posted last year Old Iowa man charged with raping his wife because prosecuted said that her dementia was bad enuf to prevent her from legally consenting. Now he has been acquitted of all charges in a jury trial. Remember that whenever someone tells you that the jury system is obsolete. Sometimes the jurors are the only ones in the justice system with any common sense.

I posted about a proposed California vaccine law, and now:

Vaccine laws across the nation may be toughened, observers say, if California passes a fervently debated bill that would strip parents' rights to exempt kids from immunizations based on personal beliefs.

A potential end to California's opt-out provision gained ground Wednesday when the state senate's education committee voted 7-2 to require full vaccinations for almost all public school students. ...

But some experts see California as the most potent social and medical laboratory, the state where such legislative action could create national waves. ...

That's a roadmap that worries some parents like Shtein, who describes herself not as anti-vaccination but as "pro-health" with deep concerns about any government dictating any child's vaccination schedule.

And she believes the momentum from California, should the bill become law, could color future immunization laws for Americans of all ages.

The ACLU is against it because:

If the bill passes, vaccine-resistant parents will have to home-school their children.

They are left-wingers who are probably against home-schooling. I would rather oppose the law on the grounds that parents should have the right to direct the medical care of their kids. The measles outbreak was caused by Filipinos visiting Disneyland, so it would make more sense to vaccinate Filipinos visiting Disneyland.

I have posted about kids arrested for walking home unsupervised, and the usual response is that kids did this a generation ago, but the world is more dangerous today. A Wash. Post article debunks this notion:

The first thing to note is that the overall child mortality rate in the United States has literally never been lower. In 1935, for instance, there were nearly 450 deaths for every 100,000 children aged 1 to 4. Today, there are fewer than 30 deaths for every 100,000 kids in that age group -- more than a tenfold decrease. ...

Part of that decline is a drop in child homicides. As of 2008, the homicide rate for kids under the age of 14 stood at a near-record low 1.5 cases per 100,000, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics. And the homicide rate for teens ages 14 to 17 plummeted from 12 homicides per 100,000 in 1993 to just 5.1 in 2008, another near-record low.

Long story short: for a kid between the ages of 5 and 14 today, the chances of premature death by any means are roughly 1 in 10,000, or 0.01 percent. ...

The FBI has several decades of data on missing persons now, and those numbers show that the number of missing person reports involving minors has been at record low levels in recent years. Overall, the number of these reports have fallen by 40 percent since 1997. This is more impressive when you consider that the overall U.S. population has risen by 30 percent over that same time period, meaning that the actual rate of missing person reports for children has fallen faster than 40 percent. ...

Data from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration shows that between 1993 and 2013, the number of child pedestrians struck and killed by cars fell by more than two-thirds, from more than 800 deaths to fewer than 250. The number of traffic-related pedestrian injuries in this age group fell by a similar percentage over the same period. Again these are raw numbers, and as the population has grown over that period, the actual rate has fallen even faster.

So being a child is safer than ever before, whether at home or in public.

I posted Idaho against federalized child support, and a week later the NY Times got excited about it:

It took five years for negotiators to work out the details of a multinational treaty on child support that would make it easier to track delinquent parents around the world. It took only a couple of minutes for a committee of the Idaho Legislature to endanger America’s participation.

In a 9-to-8 vote in the closing hours of the legislative session, the House Judiciary, Rules and Administration Committee killed a bill that state and federal officials had said was crucial to the finely crafted choreography of the child support treaty reached at The Hague. All 50 states must approve the mechanics of the treaty for American ratification to proceed, and 19 have signed off thus far.

A major factor seems to be Idaho’s ornery streak, the part of the state’s identity that does not like the federal government — or, worse still, foreign governments — telling it what to do.

Idaho's action would make more sense if foreign countries were imposing onerous child support orders. But the USA is by far the worst country in the world, as documented by this draft book: Real World Divorce. It has a wealth of info about differing state child support laws.

Most people think that child support is purely a matter of state law, but this story shows how federal policy and money drives much of what the states do. See this article for more detail. Here is the official federal and Idaho sides to the story.

It is true that some legislators expressed concern about foreign countries imposing onerous child support orders, but what Idaho really did was to resist the United States government imposing onerous child support rules and regulations on Idaho -- even though the government's position is that no state can operate its own child support system (or enforce its own child support orders) without the supervision and assistance of the federal child support agency.

So now, the federal agency is threatening to exclude Idaho from the entire system unless Idaho passes this bill. This proves that the whole child support system is controlled and managed by the federal government under rules passed by Congress, and states have no significant discretion to vary those required rules and procedures.

THere is more fallout in Idaho on Allgov.com and Idaho TV.

I posted on Why Scott was running from the police, and 11 days later the NY Times said similar things in a front page story titled Skip Child Support. Go to Jail. Lose Job. Repeat. It was sympathetic to the black man who was killed while in child support arrears. I guess the liberal NY whites can side with a dad if he is a black fugitive in the South, and his problems can be blamed on white people. The article drew over 1000 comments, and an editorial opinion debate.

The NY Times calls it a debate, but all the debaters are in favor of extracting more money from dads and giving it to moms.

Most of the comments agree that the child support system has many inequities that should be reformed. But there are a distressing number of comments that say that there should be no limits to the punitive measures imposed on deadbeat dads. Here is one of those solicited debate opinions:

As a single mother who has raised a child with virtually no assistance from the biological father, I feel strongly that child support enforcement measures are not strong enough. ...

He is one of many parents who avoid child support obligations, by working under the table jobs such as yard work, or by obtaining fake Social Security numbers to work under a different identity, or by dealing drugs. Many of these individuals may already have criminal records that may act as very real barriers in obtaining legitimate employment. But this does not mean that they should be absolved of their responsibility to their children. ...

A noncustodial parent's financial hardship should not absolve them of responsibilities to the children who they choose to create. The custodial parent often has an even harder time.

So she had a kid with a criminal drug-dealer who cannot get a legitimate job, and she complains about the child he chose to create? And his lack of money should not be any excuse for his lack of money?!

Unfortunately these dopey single mom opinions intimidate politicians against doing anything to solve the problem. Unless you agree that women have an unrestricted right to choose an abortion at any time and for any reason, and to choose to have sex with any man at any time, and to freeload off welfare, and to cut the dad off from even seeing his kid, then you are part of the war on women. And if the man does not want to spend all his money on the child he supposedly chose to create, then no punishment is too severe.

This country is doomed.

Dopey fat CPS agent tortures a dad

Ever wonder what it is like for CPS to give some ordinary dad the third degree? Watch this video.

The CPS woman is fat, ugly, and stupid. She complains that he gave his kid a soda with caffeine. He explains that it was zero calories and no caffeine. She then argues that "zero calories" means that the soda had "empty calories". He tries to explain, but it is hopeless.

She also objects to him being concerned about the daughter's weight. The CPS agents insists that his concern should be that the kid become a happy adult, and only the pediatrician should have an opinion about her weight.

I would have said, "I watch her weight because I don't want her to become a fat slob like you."

The kid is on some psychiatric drug, and the dad wants to know what it is and what the effects are. The CPS agent says that he has no right to that info. She says that he just has 8 hours of visitation each Sunday, and he can call an ambulance if there is a medical emergency. Otherwise he should shut up and ignore the problem.

There is more to the guy's story here and here. I did not read it as I was mainly interested in the behavior of the CPS agent. She is a disgrace, but probably doing what she was trained to do.

Robert Franklin comments on the Meitiv case:

The lesson is that CPS can and will do what it likes regarding your children. Caseworkers and their supervisors don’t like parents who fail to kowtow to CPS power. The Meitivs are learning that the hard way and countless other parents are attending to their travail. They too will learn the lesson CPS seeks to teach – parents, regardless of how responsible and loving, go their own way at their own risk. Do you think you know best about how to raise your kids? Think again. CPS makes the rules and those who fail or refuse to abide by them do so at their peril and that of their children. It matters not that your children aren’t harmed or placed in danger.

One of those rules is that you can never believe the facts about children’s safety in this country and act accordingly. Those facts demonstrate that, on average, the risk of harm to children, particularly from strangers, is vanishingly small. In neighborhoods like the Meitivs’, it’s even smaller. So parents like them are perfectly safe in sending their kids off to the park to play, particularly given the children’s careful upbringing.

But to an astonishing degree, the issue is not about children’s safety; the issue is about CPS’s power. Parents must conform or pay the price because Big Sister knows best.

Yes, CPS is all about bullying people with its power.

Free Range Parenting is a Constitutional Right

I have followed the Maryland Meitiv kids, who keep getting arrested for being alone a few block from home.

Libertarian Russian-American law professor Ilya Somin writes:

The bottom line is that the CPS’ actions here seem to be the result of exactly the kind of “mere disagreement” with parental choices that the Supreme Court specifically barred as a basis for overriding parents’ constitutional right to direct their children’s upbringing. Economist Bryan Caplan, an expert on child safety data, sums it up well: “it’s crazy, people are being persecuted for doing things that are extremely statistically safe just because other people disagree.”

As Megan McArdle points out, today’s controversial “free-range” parenting largely consists of practices that were considered perfectly normal throughout most of American history. When I was growing up in the 1980s in a suburb similar to the one where this incident occurred, elementary school kids routinely walked all over the neighborhood by themselves. By the standards of today’s Montgomery County, I would have been detained by child welfare officials almost every day.

Sadly, incidents like this one now happen with some regularity, as “helicopter parents” and officious bureaucrats have promoted unrealistic parenting norms that have no real basis in legitimate safety considerations. In an ideal world, we wouldn’t need constitutional litigation to put an end to such abuses. Simple common sense should suffice.

I am tempted to hope that this case gets litigated to the US Supreme Court, and it makes a broad declaration for parental rights just as it is about to mandate same-sex marriage.

But that would not work. The public has to be somehow convinced that routine parental decisions are not the business of CPS, unless there is some demonstrable serious harm.

California Democrat is like Hitler with measles

I am always glad to see people stick up for parents' rights. AP reports:

SACRAMENTO, Calif. (AP) — A California bill that would sharply limit vaccination waivers after a measles outbreak at Disneyland has generated such an acidic debate that the proposal's author was under added security this week.

Authorities said wouldn't specify the extra protections around state Sen. Richard Pan on Friday, but the level of anger over the measure has been clear.

Opponents have flooded the Capitol to stand up for parental rights, and images that compare Pan to Adolf Hitler have circulated online.

"Unfortunately, there is a sub-segment of the group that seems to want to engage in vitriol and intimidation and bullying in order to get their way," said Pan, a Democratic pediatrician from Sacramento.

Sen. Carol Liu, chair of the Education Committee, which will hear the bill next week, said through a spokesman that the proposal has generated more calls to her office than any other this year, including measures on immigration, doctor-assisted suicide and police shootings. ...

If it becomes law, California would join Mississippi and West Virginia as the only states with such strict vaccine requirements.

Bullying?! No other country mandates vaccine, and only 2 states refuse reasonable exemptions. This Democrat want to force parents to make a minor medical choice, and he accuses the voters of bullying when they object!

The Disneyland outbreak was caused by people who just got off the boat from the Phillipines, and most of those infected were adults. Unvaccinated kids had nothing to do with it. It might have been prevented by requiring foreigners and adults to get measles vaccines, but no one is proposing that. They always blame the kids.

Even tho the vaccine exemptions are currently easy to get, well over 95% of California kids get vaccinated. Passing oppressive laws to raise the rate to 98% seems ill-considered and anti-freedom to me.

Critics, however, have turned out in force. Before the bill's first legislative hearing this week, hundreds of opponents attended a rally that featured an appearance from Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who has said the number of children injured by vaccines amounts to "a holocaust." During the hearing, an opponent threated [threatened?] to ask God to curse legislative supporters.

That is a little extreme. It is very unlikely that the vaccines will do your kids any good or any harm.

Brian Stenzler, president of the California Chiropractic Association, has testified against the bill and condemned the threats against lawmakers as unacceptable. But even though opposition leaders are focused the merits of the legislation, there are some things they can't control, he said.

"It's kind of like a mother bear," he said. "You come near a cub, that mother will do anything they have to do."

"Right now," he added, "these parents are running on pure emotion and pure adrenaline."

Where are these people on other parents' rights issues?

My guess is that these are a bunch of hysterical paranoid moms who do not understand or believe the studies.

My concern is over parental rights. Even if we assume that the vaccines are beneficial, those benefits are probably less, on average, than the benefits of brushing teeth. But we do not have a law requiring kids to brush teeth everyday, no matter how many people recommend it. We just don't believe in the nanny state being that intrusive.

This moral panic will pass

Razib Khan writes:

…Kidnapping by strangers is wildly uncommon; in New York State, for instance, the Division of Criminal Justice Services announced that 20,309 children were reported missing statewide in 2011; exactly one of those children was confirmed abducted by a stranger. Most — 94 percent — were runaways, most of them teenagers. ...

Free range being what used to be called normal parenting as far back as the 1980s. Looking at the statistics above this is a clear case of moral panic. It will abate. Too many cultural forces, from overtaxed working mothers to libertarians and Christian parents’ rights sorts, object to the dominant ethos.

Khan was hired as a part-time opinion columnist for the NY Times, but then fired when some liberals complained that some of his articles on genetics were not quite politically correct.

I have read his columns off and on for years, and I have not seen anything as offensive as the NY Times columnist telling Christians that they must be forced to change their beliefs about what is sinful.

Speaking of moral panic and the NY Times, the paper pretends to correct earlier phony stories about a Rolling Stone hoax:

Rolling Stone magazine retracted its article about a brutal gang rape at a University of Virginia fraternity after the release of a report on Sunday ...

No, there was no rape of any kind. A girl was catfishing a fellow student she wanted as a boyfriend.

“Ultimately, we were too deferential to our rape victim,” Mr. Woods, the article’s editor, said in the report. ...

Ms. Erdely, Mr. Wenner said, “was willing to go too far in her effort to try and protect a victim of apparently a horrible crime. She dropped her journalistic training, scruples and rules and convinced Sean to do the same. There is this series of falling dominoes.”

No, Jackie was not a victim. The only victims were the students and fraternities who were falsely accused. Also:

Teresa A. Sullivan, the president of the University of Virginia, in Charlottesville, issued a statement late Sunday.

“Rolling Stone’s story, ‘A Rape on Campus,’ did nothing to combat sexual violence, and it damaged serious efforts to address the issue. Irresponsible journalism unjustly damaged the reputations of many innocent individuals and the University of Virginia.

Sullivan was a chief offender, as she punished the fraternity in spite of overwhelming evidence that nearly everything the article said about the fraternity was false. Erdely and Sullivan are not even apologizing to those they falsely accused.

Sailer is all over this story. These stories pretend that the problem was just that the details were not verified according to journalistic standards. No one wants to admit that the whole thing was a hoax. The accused rapist, Haven Monahan, does not even exist. The fraternity was not even having a party. Erdely and Sullivan are not being fired.

Instpundit comments:

One person who shouldn’t get off the hook here is UVA President Teresa Sullivan. She essentially found the fraternity guilty based on a story in a music tabloid. She could have told the University community that “we don’t convict people based on stories in the media,” that she was going to independently investigate the accusations, and that people named in tabloid stories should be regarded as innocent until proven guilty in the American tradition. She did no such thing. She hastily imposed a group punishment on the entire Greek system, and pretty much stood by while angry crowds mobbed and vandalized the fraternity house. (Faculty members didn’t help by staging their own marches; they may want — especially now — to characterize those marches as “anti-rape” or “pro-woman,” but there’s no getting around the fact that they were perceived at the time, and probably meant, as targeting the accused. In this case, the falsely accused.) As I’ve said before, there’s no place in America today where the authorities are more likely to be found siding with (or at least enabling) a lynch mob than on a university campus, and that’s a disgrace. ...

“Sullivan, in her statement Sunday, made no apology to those fraternity members she treated as guilty without evidence.”

Also the Erdely and the Rolling Stone seem pretty adamant about not apologizing to the falsely accused. In spite of everything, Erdely still claims that something bad happened to Jackie that night.

This is disgusting. I am waiting for anyone in the major news media to say the obvious -- that this story was a hoax, that it was wildly implausible, that almost every checkable assertion turned out to be false, that the main perp turned out to be a fictional character invented to make another boy jealous, that Jackie is unlikely to have even ever set foot in the fraternity, and that nothing in this story shows any true evidence of a rape culture at UVa.

Update: This whole UVa story was manufactured by Jews who hate white Christians.

Update: Dr. Helen notes:

I am struggling to come to terms with this new reality wherein sticking to an objective view of the facts is considered a conservative trait. The campus left’s complete unwillingness to adjust their opinions of these cases to fit with the facts shows a thought process completely devoid of reason.

It got me thinking about the whole UVA case and the lies that the reporter so easily swallowed from “Jackie,” the woman who was supposedly raped. There is a lot of controversy surrounding the Rolling Stone Magazine article and the facts are being picked apart but that is not the real story. The real story is that liberal rags like the Rolling Stone mag, the liberal media, and liberal politicians in general are so used to getting away with lies, exaggeration, and twisting the facts to suit their agenda that they don’t even bother to conceal it anymore (if they ever did is perhaps debatable).

Yes, the Right focuses on facts and results, and the Left on feelings and intents.

Quantity or quality parenting time

I follow the scientific evidence on parenting practices, and the sad fact is that there is barely any evidence for some practices being better than others. Nearly all parents believe that their nurturing is making a positive difference, but we cannot prove it, so the difference is almost surely a lot less than you think.

Here is the latest, from economist Justin Wolfers in the NY Times:

The latest salvo in the mommy wars is that all that time you spend parenting just doesn’t matter. But it’s a claim that, despite the enthusiastic and widespread coverage by news media outlets that include The Washington Post, Vox, The Guardian, The Independent, The Globe and Mail, NBC News, The Chicago Tribune and The New York Times’s Motherlode, does not hold water.

The claim that parenting time doesn’t matter is the bottom line of a single recent study by a team of sociologists who suggest that child outcomes are barely correlated with the time that parents spend with their children. It’s essentially a nonfinding, in that they failed to find correlations that could be reliably discerned from chance.
This nonfinding largely reflects the failure of the authors to accurately measure parental input.

Wolfers hires a high-end nanny to take care of his kids, so he is convinced that the extra money is worth it.

This study has been reported as reassurance to moms that quality time can substitute for quantity time.

His main complaint is that the study used statistical sampling. Of course all the other social science studies do also. Wolfers is just an economist, and not an expert on child-rearing.

This is why most high-quality studies of parenting time focus instead on how often parents read to their children, play with them or help them with homework over a period of a month or longer — long enough to represent their different approaches to parenting.

Those high-quality studies have never been able to show any benefit for parents reading to kids or helping with homework.

For the evidence that nurturing is irrelevant, see the book, The Nuture Assumption. excerpted here and discussed on PBS TV.

For evidence that genetic influences are much more important, see JayMan.

In animal studies, it has been noted that some species invest a lot of resources into a small number of offspring (K-selection), and others just produce as many offspring as they can (r-selection). You see these differences in people also. This is quality v. quantity again.

These trade-offs now are a lot different than for primitive societies. Today almost all kids get enuf nutrition, care, and schooling to become prosperous adults. Rich families prefer to have very few kids, and to spend a lot of money on nannies and private schools. It is debatable whether all that money is of any significant long-term benefit to the kids. As JayMan explains, the major influences appear to be genes, then maybe the external non-family environment, and then random unexplained factors.

Parents are more eager than ever to get their kids into an elite college and pay immense tuitions, but NY Times columnist Frank Bruni has a book out on how this is all a foolish waste.

Razib Khan also cites The Nuture Assumption, and writes:

But one thing bothers me about these treatments in the press: the totally confounded nature of causality. Consider:

The one key instance Milkie and her co-authors found where the quantity of time parents spend does indeed matter is during adolescence: The more time a teen spends engaged with their mother, the fewer instances of delinquent behavior. And the more time teens spend with both their parents together in family time, such as during meals, the less likely they are to abuse drugs and alcohol and engage in other risky or illegal behavior. They also achieve higher math scores.

The implication above is that “time engaged with mother” → “less delinquent behavior.” But we don’t know that that’s causal at all. Rather, it could be a correlation between a third factor, term in “prosociality,” and these two variables. More generally if you look for references to genetics in the original paper you won’t find it. It strikes me that one of the reasons that parental investment doesn’t seem to matter so much is that there are many outcomes they just aren’t effecting, because their primary contribution in heritable, with a major secondary contribution to the environmental context in which children grow up (the “non-shared environment”).

Yes, the causality is probably backwards. The lesser dilinquent personality is causing the greater engagement with the mother.


Update: The Dilbert cartoonist has some sensible comments, and a link to the original study:

Today I read an opinion that I didn’t understand, criticizing the media for not understanding a study. So I read that study. I didn’t understand it. And I still have an opinion. Because this is the Internet, damn it.

The topic of the study is whether or not the amount of time a mother spends with a kid matters to the outcome. Seems important to know, right?

Maybe not.

It might be better NOT knowing the truth in this case. Because the truth is about an average. And no individual is average.

If you tell mothers that the average mom does X to get a good result, peer pressure causes all moms to do X, or to feel guilty for not. Even if it kills the kid. Music lessons are a valuable learning experience for some kids and torture for others.

What are the odds that one flavor of parenting will be the right fit for every culture, every kid, every parent, and every situation? I’m going to say zero.

Let’s try this experiment: If your kids are well-behaved and mine are not, let’s switch kids for a month and see what happens. Will your awesome parenting fix them? Good luck with that, sucker!

The sameness illusion is what makes most management fads start out smart and morph into pure ridiculousness. The thing that worked for Apple is not necessarily going to work for… well, anyone else.

Career advice has the same limitation. I could tell you every trick I used to become a famous cartoonist but it would not help you become one. You and I are different people in different times and different circumstances. Your strategy needs to be crafted for your situation.

I am a big believer in scientific research, and we have some legitimate resarch on parenting methods. But most of it is nearly worthless for giving practical advice to parents.