5 Articles About the State Taking Parent’s Rights

Via The Daily Bell

The state is deciding who is fit to be parents, keeping parents from treating their sick kids, and arresting parents if their kids skip school. Oh but don’t worry about that smart device in the home. All that info it’s collecting on your kids could never fall into the wrong hands.

1. State Decides If You Are Smart Enough to Keep Your Kids

Parents in Oregon have had two of their children taken away by the state. There is no evidence, or even accusation, of abuse or neglect. But the parents have low IQs. So the state can take your kids if they decide you are too dumb.

2. Charlie Gaurd’s Parents Still Fighting– U.S. Dad Speaks Out

The psychopaths in the British government are still trying to prevent a baby with a rare disease from getting treatment in America. The U.S. Congress has granted the child citizenship in order to circumvent British authorities. Now an American dad of a child recovering from a similar condition speaks out.

3. California Court Makes it Easy for State to Take Kids

If your child faces a “substantial risk” of injury or illness, the state of California can take them away to protect them. So that just about covers everyone. Of course the all knowing state has a perfect record of keeping children safe… right?

4. Parents of Truant Children Told to Turn Themselves in to Police

The Mobile County Sheriff’s website alerts the public to an elderly home invasion, a body found in the trash, and a murder suspect on the loose. On another page, they list with pictures the parents of “truant” children. Parents are being told to turn themselves in for their crime of failing to send their kids to school. The Sheriff’s Office posted on Facebook to shame and intimidate parents.

5. Media Selling Smart Speaker as  Perfect for Entertaining Kids

So with all the risks, the state poses to parents, why on earth would anyone introduce a smart speaker into their home? Already a smart speaker has called police during a domestic disturbance. Is it an innocent play thing that makes parenting easier or a spy device that could be used to assess your parenting?

Are You Addicted to Sharenting?

It is becoming more common for parents to share pictures of their children – sharenting – since they are babies. Many do it innocently but experts warn of future dangers.

The trend is now labeled as “Sharenting” or the out of control desire that parents have to expose their children on social media.

According to the British Collins dictionary, the English term sharenting is “the practice of parents to use social networks to communicate abundant and detailed information about their children.”

Digital reputation is one of the new dilemmas faced by modern societies. It has become a necessity for many parents to presume about their children online.

The practice has been adopted by celebrities in an attempt to cash in as they sell photos of their children to magazines and newspapers. This trends has caught up with normal people who also share photos of their offspring on social networks.

When someone search engines our name they may find photos from 10 years ago that no longer represent us and we would prefer that no one could see.

But, what if it wasn’t you who uploaded that photo or video? And if it was your parents who uploaded a picture of you naked to Instagram when you were 2 years old as you ran on the beach?

What if you feel that some of those innocent photos “haunt you” when someone looks for information about you?

Sharenting is more serious in countries where technology has been available for longer time. In the US, for example, 92% of minors get a digital identity at two years of age.

That reality makes it necessary to ask: Is the privacy of minors today a lost right on social networks? (Vote on our poll)

Before turning five, parents of a minor publish an average of 1,000 photos on Instagram or Facebook.

Before the child even creates a profile of his own or gives his first “Like” on Facebook, his face and most important moments of his life have already been seen by others without his consent.

Parents are the watchers of their children’s stories. If third parties want to share information about their children, they have the right not to allow it. However, parents are becoming helpers of their children’s lack of privacy.

“When parents want to share information about their children, there is no ‘doorman’,” explains Stacey Steinberg, a law expert at the University of Florida, USA.

In networks there is no clear line about where the rights of parents end up sharing the experience of raising their children and the right to privacy that the minors have.

For this reason, Steinberg proposes to create a “public health campaign” on sharenting “for the current lack of a guide available to parents.”

The expert suggests that it is necessary to follow two maxims: the first is “to be clear about the privacy policy of sites where they share content.

Facebook allows you to specify the audience for each photo or post. The second is to “set up notifications like Google Alerts to be notified when your children’s names appear on Internet sites.”

Why do more and more parents do sharenting? “For many, their children are their world. They center their sources of interest and attention on them.”

Children represent them and hence they want to share each of their moments,” says Marisa Russomando, a psychologist specializing in parenting and family.

According to the psychologist, parents often have a “look of tenderness or comedy” in front of photos of their children.

“But there are scenes that maybe their protagonists prefer to keep in the private realm.”

Letting Your Baby Cry Himself To Sleep Is Safe, Study Finds

You just put your baby in his crib for the night, and he’s wailing up a storm. You just want to watch a little Netflix before getting some sleep, but you’re wracked with guilt. If this sounds familiar, you’re not alone. Not by a long-shot. But a recent study finds that letting your baby cry himself to sleep won’t harm him, so grab the remote control.

Researchers in Australia worked with 43 sets of parents who had babies between 6 and 16 months of age, all of whom had the same problem: their little ones had trouble sleeping. The researchers taught about 1/3 of the parents about graduated extinction, or simply “crying it out.” Parents were asked to leave the room within 1 minute of putting their baby back to bed and, if their baby cried, to wait increasingly longer periods of time before going back into the room and comforting them.

Another third of the parents were asked to try an approach called bedtime fading, in which parents put their baby to bed closer to the time he or she usually fell asleep and were allowed to stay in the room until their child dozed off.

The rest of the parents, the control group, did not attempt any sleep training and instead received information about infant sleep.

Three months after the experiments began, the babies in the cry-it-out group were falling asleep 15 minutes faster than babies in the control group. The babies in the bedtime fading group fell asleep about 12 minutes faster compared with the control group.

Michael Gradisar, associate professor of psychology at Flinders University in Adelaide, Australia, said:

“What our data probably does not capture is the peace of mind surrounding bedtime that we see when we work with families.”

Additionally, the graduated extinction group bested the fading group in other measures, including the number of times the babies awoke during the night and their total sleep time. [1]

One of the concerns that parents and medical professionals share is that letting a baby cry itself to sleep could cause the child stress, which could lead to bigger problems. The study measured levels of the stress hormone cortisol in the infants’ saliva both in the morning and in the afternoon, looking for elevated levels that could indicate long-term stress.

The study did not find elevated levels of cortisol in the infants in the graduated extinction group, and no significant differences were observed in parental attachment or behavioral problems in those infants 12 months later.

Gradisar said of the findings:

“It looks like you’ve got two effective treatments that don’t necessarily lead to negative outcomes.”

He acknowledged, however, that listening to your child cry himself to sleep could make you want to rip your hair out. He said:

“It is a stressful thing for parents to go through.”

A 2012 study of 326 children with sleep problems at age 7 months had similar results. There was no evidence that letting babies cry themselves to sleep had any long-term negative impact on their sleep or behavior 5 years later. [2]

Letting your baby cry it out might be tough to handle, but it might be worth it for those extra 15 minutes of “grown-up time.”

The new study is published in the journal Pediatrics.

Sources:

[1] CNN

[2] CBC News

---

---

About Julie Fidler:
	Julie Fidler is a freelance writer, legal blogger, and the author of Adventures in Holy Matrimony: For Better or the Absolute Worst. She lives in Pennsylvania with her husband and two ridiculously spoiled cats. She occasionally pontificates on her blog.

How Government Literally Makes People Go Insane

Via The Daily Bell

The most effective way to change the world if you have kids is to treat them right. Everything could change in one generation if there were a radical shift in parenting.

Unfortunately, some indicators suggest things are getting worse. For instance, there has been an increase in kids hospitalized for attempted suicide or suicidal indicators.

Now we can just hope that parents are becoming more alert to the warning signs and are therefore properly identifying them early in order to prevent suicide.

But the most concerning thing is that these incidents tend to be concentrated at certain times of the year. One of the most likely times for a kid to need a hospital visit because of suicidal tendencies or attempts is in the fall when school starts back up.

There are two probable reasons for this. One, being ridiculed and bullied by their peers makes kids feel like social outcasts, and transitioning to a new school year could increase that. Evolution has programmed the human mind to want acceptance of the group for survival reasons, so being ostracized can make you literally feel like you are going to die because if this was 10,000 years ago, you probably would.

And then there are the drugs. You know, the legalized forms of cocaine and heroine that we give to kids to make them alert, focused, or calm, and manageable. There are all sorts of side effects to the drugs, and based on the spiking and dropping levels of dopamine and other chemicals in the brain, this can cause erratic behavior.

But either way, the school system seems to be the root of the problem, whether it is exposing kids to negative people they don’t need in their lives, drugs to help them function “normally” in an abnormal school environment, or just the unnatural environment itself where one is trapped, caged, and coerced in order to prepare them for an equally coercive society afterwards.

Coercion is Ruining Society

It turns out coercion is a serious problem that can lead to mental health issues. Coercion might even cause most of the ills we see in society today. The same thing that makes a teenager lash out and act erratically in opposition to strict rules is what makes people do crazy things in a society dominated by arbitrary and oppressive government edicts.

According to Bruce Levin, PhD, in his article, Societies With Little Coercion Have Little Mental Illness:

Coercion—the use of physical, legal, chemical, psychological, financial, and other forces to gain compliance—is intrinsic to our society’s employment, schooling, and parenting. However, coercion results in fear and resentment, which are fuels for miserable marriages, unhappy families, and what we today call mental illness.

It Starts With Your Kids

Most parents have their kids’ best interests at heart when parenting, yes some still treat their child like a wild animal that must be broken. So many people in our society would have no idea what to do with freedom because all they have ever known is oppression. It starts in childhood, and evidence suggests that a more free child leads to a happier adult.

Levin points out that some cultures see very little mental illness, and he suggests it is because of the way the children are reared.

For many indigenous peoples, even the majority rule that most Americans call democracy is problematically coercive, as it results in the minority feeling resentful. Roland Chrisjohn, member of the Oneida Nation of the Confederacy of the Haudenausaunee (Iroquois) and author of The Circle Game, points out that for his people, it is deemed valuable to spend whatever time necessary to achieve consensus so as to prevent such resentment. By the standards of Western civilization, this is highly inefficient. “Achieving consensus could take forever!” exclaimed an attendee of a talk that I heard given by Chrisjohn, who responded, “What else is there more important to do?”

Among indigenous societies, there are many accounts of a lack of mental illness, a minimum of coercion, and wisdom that coercion creates resentment which fractures relationships.

How could we expect coercion to yield results as positive as agreement? All interaction should be voluntary; you cannot have positive ends if you do not use positive means to achieve those ends. I am not a parent, and I don’t expect perfection from anyone, but parents should at least try to solve issues with their kids without being so forceful and coercive.

Let kids be who they want to be, with the steady hand of your guidance, not an iron fist. Clearly, a child cannot always get what they want, and I am not advocating giving in to any random whim. Just realize how important freedom is for children in order to grow and learn.

This is why the public school system is horribly damaging to a large percentage of children. That is not the only nor best way to learn, and in fact really just teaches obedience to authority. Public schooling sets children up to be mindless drones in the work world, where they will be used to the coercion, but not happy about it.

[Jared] Diamond, in The World Until Yesterday (2012), reports how laissez-faire parenting is “not unusual by the standards of the world’s hunter-gatherer societies, many of which consider young children to be autonomous individuals whose desires should not be thwarted.” Diamond concludes that by our society’s attempt to control children for what we believe is their own good, we discourage those traits we admire:

“Other Westerners and I are struck by the emotional security, self-­confidence, curiosity, and autonomy of members of small-scale societies, not only as adults but already as children. We see that people in small-scale societies spend far more time talking to each other than we do, and they spend no time at all on passive entertainment supplied by outsiders, such as television, videogames, and books. We are struck by the precocious development of social skills in their children. These are qualities that most of us admire, and would like to see in our own children, but we discourage development of those qualities by ranking and grading our children and constantly ­telling them what to do.”

Bravo to home-schoolers and free range parenting. They are ahead of the curve by going back to the basics.

Then It’s Your Job…

I don’t believe the reason so many hate going to work is not the work itself, but the fact that we cannot act like ourselves when at work. We feel coerced in one way or another into not being who we want to be. This is a mild form of coercion, one that often doesn’t go beyond venting over a beer after work, or every once in a while both middle fingers and: “I quit!” screamed at the boss.

But is the quiet desperation of a 9-5 you hate–saving for retirement, but probably drinking yourself to death before you get to enjoy it–really the way to live? What if we couldn’t afford cable, couldn’t afford a new car, or a perfect house–but were happy?

Critics of schooling—from Henry David Thoreau, to Paul Goodman, to John Holt, to John Taylor Gatto—have understood that coercive and unengaging schooling is necessary to ensure that young people more readily accept coercive and unengaging employment. And as I also reported in that same article, a June 2013 Gallup poll revealed that 70% of Americans hate their jobs or have checked out of them.

Unengaging employment and schooling require all kinds of coercions for participation, and human beings pay a psychological price for this. In nearly three decades of clinical practice, I have found that coercion is often the source of suffering…

In all societies, there are coercions to behave in culturally agreed-upon ways. For example, in many indigenous cultures, there is peer pressure to be courageous and honest. However, in modernity, we have institutional coercions that compel us to behave in ways that we do not respect or value. Parents, afraid their children will lack credentials necessary for employment, routinely coerce their children to comply with coercive schooling that was unpleasant for these parents as children. And though 70% of us hate or are disengaged from our jobs, we are coerced by the fear of poverty and homelessness to seek and maintain employment.

In our society, we are taught that accepting institutional coercion is required for survival. We discover a variety of ways—including drugs and alcohol—to deny resentment.

And the government is perfectly happy with the arrangement because it is easier to control–and tax–“normal” people who just go to work every day.

Government Enforces and Exacerbates the Problem

We cannot even live on a piece of land without being coerced by government to earn some money in order to pay the property taxes. But we have to earn more than the amount owed in property taxes because we are taxed on our earnings as well. We are taxed on the vehicle and gas that gets us to work, which require more work to pay off–earnings, again, that must go above and beyond what we need because it will be taxed.

Could this be the overlooked factor that makes America more violent than some other developed nations? Has the American government piled so many laws, regulations, and statutes on top of each other that American citizens can’t just go through life without being told perfectly normal, non-violent behavior is wrong?

I think this highlights the problem with mass shootings that many have been pointing out. Whoever the shooters feel they are being oppressed by, they are correctly identifying that they are being coerced. Of course, their response is insane, and probably related to the drugs they take (some of which we also give kids), but there would never be a need for drugs if a coercive society had not reared them.

The hopelessness felt when being forced to spend money, behave a certain way, or notdo something you want to do, is one of those gut wrenching deep feelings of despair that grow inside some people until they burst.

But now imagine that the government has taken everything from you. Imagine if they took your car as a civil asset forfeiture? What if your tax burden is 50%? What if you give up on that business you want to start because of the pile of paperwork and extra costs required by the government?

What if they take your kids because they are home schooled, or shoot your dog for no reason whatsoever? All these things happen, unfortunately relatively regularly, in America.

Many of us are baffled by why someone would become a terrorist, especially a suicide bomber. Again, this is the coercion the Middle East is smothered in by the USA. Imagine losing your childhood because you could not go outside because of the American drones. Imagine family members having been murdered by laughing soldiers. Imagine all your hopes and dreams bombed away in the blink of an eye. Again, this is the unfortunate reality for many people today.

In the 1970s, prior to the domination of the biopsychiatry-Big Pharma partnership, many mental health professionals took seriously the impact of coercion and resentful relationships on mental health. And in a cultural climate more favorable than our current one for critical reflection of society, authors such as Erich Fromm, who addressed the relationship between society and mental health, were taken seriously even within popular culture. But then psychiatry went to bed with Big Pharma and its Big Money, and their partnership has helped bury the commonsense reality that an extremely coercive society creates enormous fear and resentment, which results in miserable marriages, unhappy families, and severe emotional and behavioral problems.