What the Hell Happened to Childhood?

Some recent news on how we raise our children. First is a news story about a mother who let her 9 year old son ride alone on the subway. There is nothing wrong with the story, except for the fact that it qualifies as news. Kids have been taking mass transit on their own at that age for years, but in this plan-every-minute soccer mom stamp-out-independent-thought culture we have, it gets a significant amount of media play.

We are raising kids who will never have the smallest adventure, nor the smallest sense of responsibility.

Kudos New York Sun Columnist^* and mom, Lenore Skenazy for not buying into the toxic waste paranoia of the phony missing child hysteria of the mid-1980s.

On the darker side, we have a six year old kid who is labeled a sexual harasser for smacking a girl on the butt.

The police were called, and his school record now lists him as a sexual harasser.

This is insane. Did the kid do something wrong, of course he did, and his parents should have been called in, and he should have gotten a few days detention, but it's not sexual harassment.

We was 6 years old, not 13.

Then we have an 8 year old child suspended because he is alleged to have sniffed line from a marker on his shirt. School administrators are suggesting that he was "trying to get high", aka "huffing".

There are two problems with all of this, the first is that we are allowing people who are clearly psychopaths abuse their authority, and the second is that increasingly, there are policies in place to support these psychopaths.

Osama bin Laden does not have to destroy America, we are doing it through what we do to the next generation.

^*When I say the phrase "Kudos to NY Sun Columnist", something is very, very, wrong with reality.