Granny Government and Helicopter Parents Gone Wild

I recently met Helen Denton, the personal secretary who typed up General Eisenhower's orders for D-Day. What a fascinating and intelligent woman she is! Helen's grandfather moved with his 12 year old son (Helen's father, eventually) from New York to North Dakota and built a sod house on the prairie. He left the 12 year old there by himself and returned to New York to retrieve the rest of the family. The boy spent the long lonely nights playing his violin while the local Sioux population listened outside. In the dead of winter, the native Sioux would leave meat and wood for him, and one time, a buffalo robe. After more than five months, the family arrived to join the 12 year old boy. Years later, when Helen asked her father how he had survived 5 months of winter alone as a 12 year old, he replied, “I was a man.”

A 12-year old man? Unheard of these days. Compare the story of Laura Dekker, the 13-year old Dutch girl who wants to become the youngest person ever to sail around the globe solo. Laura has grown up on the water, having already sailed around the world with her parents, and having spent the first four years of her life at sea. Laura is able, accomplished, and courageous. Her parents have nervously, but proudly, approved her venture.

Laura has been sailing solo since the age of six. She has been planning this trip around the globe for over three years. For now, however, the trip has been put on hold.

What's the problem? The government. Dutch officials have stepped in to prohibit Laura from making the journey, citing her age and the potential dangers that might await her on the high seas. Government trumps parents; government trumps accomplished, courageous, risk-taking teen. Government knows all but knows no boundaries.

Caroline Vink, a social worker at the Netherlands Youth Institute in Utrecht, a research organization that advises the government on youth policy, said ultimately, “the state and society had a moral obligation to intervene when the safety of a child was at risk.” Laura Dekker is now under supervision by the state. She will be evaluated by a state-approved child psychologist. A “moral obligation” in spite of the girl's obvious skills? In spite of her parents' approval and blessing? To what end?

Observers like myself have long noted that we live in an age of hovering, helicopter parents. Overweening parents monitor their child's every move, seeking to eliminate all risk (as if that were possible) and endeavoring to manipulate every circumstance for their child's success. Too many parents now believe that each time their child leaves parental eyesight, that child must be accompanied by a security detail.

However, we now are making childhood almost impossible for those who actually want to grow up to be independent, strong, and self-sufficient. Meet Granny Government, the new supra-parent in the West, where government evaluates and critiques parents' skills and decisions. Welcome to a new era where Government is the Supreme Second-Guesser and plays the role of Uber Hall Monitor. What might have happened if the government had supervised Western settlers like Helen Denton's family? We likely would all still be living in the East.

Laura Dekker seeks to outdo Mike Perham, the 17-year old British teen who recently circumnavigated the globe solo and unsupported. Her parents approve. The Dutch government seeks to squelch the idea. Granny Government needs no invitation.

Lenore Skenazy cultivates her “free-range parenting” philosophy in New York City at considerable risk. She encourages her son, Izzy, 10, to ride the subway and train by himself, in order to foster independence and competence. Every so often, Izzy encounters an excitable conductor on the train, or an overzealous police officer on the platform, who deems it necessary to call Lenore to excoriate her for not supervising her son at every turn. Officials like to remind Lenore that Granny Government has an eye on you and can take your children.

Parents in Wisconsin and Oregon choose not to seek medical aid for their children, instead trusting their faith to bring healing from disease. The children die from their parents' decisions and exercise of religious liberty. The government prosecutes the parents for reckless homicide. Granny Government second-guesses parents after the fact, and punishes those whose religious beliefs lie outside the general consensus of accepted beliefs.

A divorced New Hampshire woman home schools her daughter, a young lady who scores well in all academic tests. The ex-husband, and girl's father, pushes for the girl to attend public school, even though he is not the primary custodial parent. The government intervenes to force the girl into the public schools against her own and her mother's wishes. Granny Government knows best. Heed her wisdom or else. And by all means, you will resist her schooling at your own peril.

Good government is not rocket science, nor is it parenting. Good parents are authoritative, not authoritarian nor irresponsibly laissez-faire. Good parents make decisions to grow their children into healthy, independent adults. Government cannot take that role, nor should it try.

Any strong society is dependent on healthy families as the location where healthy citizens are reared. As my grandmother often reminded me, “You raise pigs; you rear children.” Government has no ability to engender love, to cultivate responsibility, to encourage risk and reward, and to foster ambition in children. Government can provide a framework where those parental functions (and rights, I might add) can more easily occur, but government can never replace the family.

Good parenting involves risk. Life involves risk. No amount of Granny Government can alter those facts. However, an overbearing Granny Government can create the new risk of so gutting the role of parent, and so weakening the life of a child, that a new generation will fail to launch. Any such generation then become a directionless, listless amalgam of paranoid, dependent children walking around in adult bodies. For a good example, see Russia.

When that occurs, we need not worry about ever conquering another new frontier. And the likes of Helen Denton will never be met again.

More and more I think we are at a tipping point.

We may have the technology right now to make governments very, very powerful and oppressive.
Or
We may have the technology right now to make governments largely unnecessary.

I think both statements are true and I think we are coming to a time for choosing. Slavery or Freedom: what will it be?

When I was in junior high, my friends and I would grab our BB guns and pellet guns and walk through the neighborhood over to the abandoned gravel plant. We shot anything and everything...just not each other. Sometimes we would take something of an “explosive” nature. Mostly they fizzled because we were as clueless as we were curious.

Today, I represent juveniles in that situation; they call out the SWAT team and bomb squad, take all the kids to the detention center, brand them as “terrorists” and seek to waive them to adult court.

Times have changed.

You have to be a strong parent and stay “under the wire” in order to raise your children to have an opportunity to BE children as well as an opportunity to learn to make their own decisions to grow into informed adults.

If you ruffle the feathers of anyone who can ‘report you to authorities’ you may lose your parental rights. This is just plain WRONG. It does NOT fall under the “general welfare” clause, no matter what Big Gov tries to tell you.

For my worthless two cents, I’ll take Slavery.

The New Gods of Health and Safety Uber Alles are the ones we now prostate ourselves to, genuflecting and kowtowing in a manner that would have made the ancient Persian Monarchs proud.

Times have changed

Here is an unusual place to see evidence of the changing times but you can find it in an old episode of the Andy Griffith Show.

The scenario :
The carnival is in Mayberry and Opie wants to win a prize for his father's birthday at the carnival's shooting gallery. Opie takes his money to the shooting gallery to win a fancy electric razor for Andy Taylor.

The Story: (which is immaterial to the example of change I alluded to)
The carnival shooting gallery has the rifle sights bent ensuring that neither Opie, nor anyone else using that particular rifle, can win a prize.

The Change :
Going to the carnival and shooting at targets was a common event, one I experienced myself at age ten or eleven. When I saw the original airing of this episode the story was about the carnival folks trying to cheat the boy and how the boy's father, Mayberry's Sheriff, made things right.

I saw a rerun of that episode many years later. The story for me now was trying to picture someone giving a ten year old boy a loaded rifle in sight of mothers with children in tow on a crowded midway.

The problem is that back then in Mayberry, and many other places (including the henkster household) the ten year old had been taught firearm safety several years earlier, and had practiced shooting firearms under adult supervision for several years. Opie was probably a pretty good shot. So were we. One of our favorite “sports” was wasp or bee shooting. We’d take our pellet gun and sit about 10-15 yards from a bee’s or wasp’s nest. We’d wait for a bee or wasp to return to the nest; there is that brief moment when a bee hovers at the entrance before lighting. Wasps will light and then stay still on the nest for a brief time. That’s when we’d shoot them. Takes a lot of discipline, some anticipation and a good shooting eye. We didn’t always get hits, but we got enough to make it worth our while.

Your story recounting BB guns and the early days of youth reminded me of those days too. I think it was early middle school when my brother, my best friend from next door and I would go to the vacant farm fields and shoot our BB guns, and yes, sometimes at each other! Dumb, but it taught me and early lesson. We would also take empty tin cans and Black Cat firecrackers and with a little water, send them flying 50 feet into the air!

I have mixed feelings about this. I’ve been responsible for three kiddos, and while they were perfectly able to watch after themselves, it’s better having someone there to supervise.

Let them do their own thing but keep an eye and an ear out.

Supervision is a must, however that shouldn't keep children from growing up. I drove my kids nuts with checking on whether they were at a certain place or not, or what sites they were viewing on the Internet. I did allow them significant leeway to make mistakes, but would not allow them to be prayed upon.

There's an agenda behind it. A criminal record means they will, eventually, lose their right to buy a gun later on. This is deliberate, to erode the rights of the individual, and get them used to government bullying. Trump up charges, chip away at us, one kid at a time, one right at a time, so eventually a whole generation is on the govt's sh*t list. Just my two cents.

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