I have this foreboding feeling that my family is going to have a very unwelcome visitor.. one you dread its coming and wish for it to leave, but are virtually powerless to prevent. This intruder isn’t a person, it is the Canadian government.
Usually, the news is a good antidote for happiness and contentment, but a couple of stories have stood out recently and gotten lots of attention in the press.
#1:: A Quebec court allowed a 12 year old girl to take her dad to court over his refusal to allow her to go on a school field trip. The judge decided that it was “excessive punishment” and permitted her to go on the trip.
An editorial in the National Post says this on the issue:
The courts have no business — none — in such routine family matters. This ruling is so profoundly intrusive we can only hope the Quebec appeals court strikes it down, and quickly.
A 12-year-old Gatineau girl repeatedly disobeyed her father’s rules about staying away from Internet chat rooms that he deemed inappropriate for a child her age. Eventually, she chose to circumvent his rules by going to a friend’s place to access Web sites he had banned her from viewing at home. She then compounded her disobedience by posting salacious photos of herself on one of the banned sites. So the father grounded her, telling her she could not go on the year-end camping trip for her Grade 6 class.
The girl, whose parents have been divorced for a decade, then left her dad’s house and moved in with her mother, even though the father has 100% custody. But because she still needed her father to sign the consent form for the field trip, she and her mother convinced a court-appointed lawyer to take the father to court.
www.ctv.ca/servlet/ArticleNews/story/CTVNews/20080620/
Quebec_appeal_080620/20080620?hub=Canada
#2:: An unelected Liberal Senator brought forth a motion in the Senate to criminalize spanking.
www.ctv.ca/servlet/ArticleNews/story/CTVNews/
20080618/spanking_senate_080618/20080618/
While her motion passed in the Senate, it still needs to be approved by the House of Commons. The Senator has already stated that she will continue to bring this motion forward until it is accepted and made a law and she has been able to erode parental control and decision making.
Whatever you think on the issue of spanking, I think most people would agree that it is a decision that is best left up to the parents, not the nanny state.
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Does the state really know better than me how to raise my children? At times I think that they barely know how to run themselves, yet alone my kids. Should they have the right to stick their nose into my parental decisions that will affect the future of my child’s development? They already have the education system, now they want my home.
And what about the ideas being promoted in general in our society? After several decades of increasingly liberal ideas of parenting, are they showing dividends in better behaved, more respectful, better balanced children who become better behaved, more respectful, well balanced citizens? No.. I think most observers would agree that our society is not on that idealistic upward spiral. Look at the problems faced in our school systems, workplaces and the general increase of other societal problems.. The spiral is going down, not up.
What are parents to do? On one hand some politicians are trying to interfere in families by saying spanking is a criminal activity and other forms of discipline should be use. On the other hand we have courts setting legal precedent that parents don’t have the right to ground children. What is left? If this continues, then the decision making and leadership of families will shift from the parents to the children and the government, neither of which I trust to be making parenting decisions.
Where is my pen, I’m writing my Member of Parliament.