Homeschooling to hide the bruises

Here we go again.

Apparently there was a heinous case in Florida earlier this year in which a ten-year-old girl named Nubia was murdered, allegedly at the hands of her adoptive parents.

This is, of course, tragic beyond words. It's all the more so because it was preventable. The girl's adoptive parents "had been investigated multiple times by the DCF [Department of Children and Families] for serious allegations of abuse and neglect. These investigations occurred while they were foster parents, during the adoption of the children, and afterward. In fact, they pulled the children out of the public school in the middle of yet another DCF investigation," notes a report by the Homeschool Legal Defense Association.

That's right: little Nubia was being (cough) "homeschooled" at the time of her murder.

So guess what was the conclusion reached by the grand jury investigating this case? That's right -- ALL homeschooling parents are therefore suspect. Surprise!

Almost without exception, every homeschooling parent at one time or another has been on the receiving end of anything from mild surprise to outright hostility for choosing to educate our children at home. After all, why else would we make such a decision unless we wanted to hide the bruises?

But Nubia wasn't murdered because she was homeschooled. She was murdered because bureaucrats didn't do their job. Even the grand jury makes it clear that if governmental officials had properly followed existing procedures, Nubia would not be dead.

So what do they suggest? How's this for insanity: "The grand jury recommends that the law be amended to require every notice of intent for a home education program to 'be forwarded to DCF to determine if any reports have been made to the DCF Hotline,'" notes the HSLDA. "The grand jury went on to recommend that if parents had ever been the subject of a Department of Children and Families (DCF) investigation, they were to be immediately subject to a new investigation by DCF and required to submit to a period of monitoring, even if the previous investigation completely cleared them."

In 2009, over 80% of Florida child abuse reports that were actually investigated were determined to be unsubstantiated, meaning there was "not sufficient evidence under State law to conclude or suspect that the child was maltreated or at-risk of being maltreated." Remember, all it takes is one disgruntled coworker or snarky relative making an anonymous call to have you investigated for child abuse. It doesn't mean you're guilty.

Anyone who's ever read Mary Pride's downright scary book The Child Abuse Industry knows that anonymous and unsubstantiated "tips" by unfriendly neighbors or weird relatives to the Child Protective Services hotline can start a nightmare of an investigation in which the parents are presumed guilty on all counts and an impartial investigation is virtually impossible. Frequently families are ripped apart for no reason.

So now all homeschooling parents in Florida are automatically suspected of keeping their kids home in order to hide the bruises. "The recommendations are stunning because they assume that the lawful decision of parents to teach their children at home must be examined by DCF every single time," reports the HSLDA. "Even more concerning is the grand jury’s declaration that if parents had been falsely reported up to seven years ago and completely exonerated, they would be subject to an investigation and undetermined period of monitoring by DCF."

See? Innocence isn't good enough. All homeschoolers are guilty.

"While the purpose of such an investigation is 'to make sure motives are pure and covert child abuse is not the true goal,'" says the HSLDA report, "these recommendations go well beyond the realm of reason and what is warranted by this terrible situation. They would result in parents who choose a valid and legal educational option in Florida being treated as suspected criminals. Additionally, these recommendations would not have prevented the events in this case... While many serious concerns about Nubia’s adoptive family were reported time and time again, state officials failed to properly follow up on them."

A bunch of bureaucrats fell down on the job, little Nubia died, and they're fixing the blame on the wrong parties. Hellooooo??

Grrrr. Stuff like this makes me see red.

Baby-naming child abuse

Here's a provocative column written by columnist Phil Elmore, who doesn't hesitate to calls 'em like he sees 'em.
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His name is "Like," and his parents are idiots.

An Israeli couple previously named young Like's sisters "Pie" (yes, as in the dessert) and "Dvash" (Hebrew for "honey"). They have stated quite explicitly that the inspiration for Like's name is Facebook, a social media site where users can affirm their friends' posts by clicking the "like" button. "Like" doesn't merely sound like the popular website feature (recently adopted by Microsoft's Bing in heroic "me-too" fashion). It is every bit the contemporary popular culture reference it seems.

Little Like is not alone in having parents who are morons. Has-been actress Alicia Silverstone recently named her son "Bear Blu," joining the ranks of such imbecile parents' children as Rob Morrow's child "Tu" ("Tu Morrow," get it?), ponytailed pseudo-Libertarian Penn Jilette's "Moxie Crimefighter," comic-book obsessed Nicolas Cage's "Kal-El" (named for Superman's Kryptonian identity), Gwyneth Paltrow's “Apple” (surprisingly quaint in proximity to these others), Sylvester Stallone's "Sage Moonblood," Jermaine Jackson's "Jermajesty" (a name for which Jermaine deserves to be jerbeaten), and Lance Henriksen's "Alcamy" (for only sorcery could transmute that terrible name into something decent). The bizarre compulsion to turn your child into a freak at birth, however, is not limited to famous people.

(Read the rest here.)

Stupidity never ceases to amaze me

A reader sent this email in reference to my Poor Little Girl post. I thought I would highlight it here as a classic example of how STUPID parents can be.
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I remember one Halloween many years ago taking my children around the large block we lived on dressed as cowboys, kitty cats and the like seeing a little girl, with her mom, dressed as a playboy bunny, complete with ears and tail. Her little body suit was brief and tight and revealing and she couldn’t have been older than 8 or 9 years old. I wonder how she grew up.
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I wonder too. Honest to goodness, don't these parents have any brains?

We have a neighbor who has no children of her own. A few years ago she worked at a local Head Start preschool. (I emphasize preschool. As in, under five years old.) One time just after Halloween she asked me, "Just what are Bratz dolls, anyway?" Turns out a number of mothers had dressed their little darlings like Bratz dolls for Halloween. (Between ourselves, my husband and I used to refer to them as Slutz dolls.)

The wonder about the commercial success of Bratz dolls is not just that they were popular; it's that the parents were buying this crap for their daughters. I don't get it. I absolutely don't get it. Why would parents buy their girls dolls that look like skanks? Much less willingly dress their daughters to look like members of the world's oldest profession?

Ironically some of what I address in The Simplicity Primer is just that - the stupid choices people make that will sabotage the chances of their children growing into stable, productive, balanced adults. Trust me, dressing your little darlings in cone bras or Playboy bunny outfits is not a smart choice. Duh!

Okay. I'll calm down now.

Bummer children

Recently I went to visit my friend Enola Gay. It was evening and her youngest son, Master Calvin, had sacked out in her arms, safe and secure.

We started talking about a horrific case of child abuse that recently came to light in a nearby city. It seems identical twin girls, two years old, were found living in conditions of such squalor and abuse that an investigating police officer vomited from the smell. They were naked and covered with feces and scabs. The girls lived with their (cough) “mother” and (cough) “grandmother.” The toddlers were so identical that the grandmother could only tell them apart by their injuries. “They [the mother and grandmother] didn't seem to think that it wasn't that unusual, they weren't that alarmed by it,” said one of the responding officers.

Let me revert for a moment to a livestock analogy. For those familiar with sheep (and we’ve never raised sheep so I cannot speak from personal experience), apparently it is not uncommon for a mother sheep to reject her lamb, either unable or unwilling to nurse and care for her own offspring. These “bummer lambs,” as they’re called, must be bottle-raised. Although it’s a lot of hard work for the people doing the bottle-raising, the lambs grow up just fine.

Until they have lambs of their own. Apparently many bummer lambs grow up to be lousy mothers. Apparently lambs must have mothering techniques demonstrated to them before they can successfully nurture their own lambs. Apparently a sheep’s mothering instinct is so fragile that if for whatever reason a lamb’s upbringing is interrupted, a cycle of bummer lambs can result.

This doesn’t happen all the time, of course. Some bummer lambs grow up to become fine mothers. But the incidence of bummer lambs rejecting their own offspring is much higher than with sheep-raised lambs.

Enola is the one who told me about this, and she’s the one who drew the brilliant parallels to human mothering skills as well.

We discussed whether the greater increase in “bummer children” – children of divorced or single-parent homes, children of career women, children who have been raised in daycare, preschool, and public schools – is leading toward greater incidences of child neglect and child abuse. It’s as if the mothering instinct in some women is so fragile that any interruption results in abuse and neglect of their children. And so a cycle begins and continues.

It’s pretty obvious that the (cough) mother and grandmother of these two-year-old twins do not have the faintest idea how to mother. The mothering instinct was either squelched early or never existed at all. Do you think these little twin girls were ever nursed at their mother’s breast? Held by a loving father and waltzed around the room? Rocked and sang to by their grandmother?

Don playing with Younger Daughter

 Of course not. These poor kids are clearly “bummer children” – the neglected and abandoned offspring of a “bummer mother” who undoubtedly never learned a bit about mother skills from her own mother. I wonder how many generations have passed since a real mom was on the scene? Or a real dad? And will these poor orphaned girls become bummer mothers when they reach adulthood, or were they rescued in time? What a pitiful – as in, full of pity – scenario.

Which does NOT excuse what these creatures did to those children.

Enola pointed out how Scripture frequently refers to us as sheep and lambs. And, like sheep, we can sometimes be really, really stupid. Too many women have rejected the highest calling a woman can have, her God-given talent to mother. Too many mothers create bummer lambs because they cannot or will not mother their own children.

Older Daughter with her "lambs" cozily tucked in for a nap.

Modern feminism as well as the pressures of modern life (heavy taxation, high mortgages, unemployment, etc.) have combined to eject countless millions of women from the home and into the workplace. Yes, I’m well aware that it is often unavoidable, so I will never roundly condemn a woman who must work. But somewhere along the lines we have rejected the notion that women should be stewards of the home. It is no longer an honorable profession, but instead has become a profession to sneer at, a profession to escape from.

But mothers – real mothers – know better. Do you realize just how much teaching takes place in the home? And just how much of that learning is lost if no one is home to teach it?

The obvious beneficiaries of this education are girls. They learn to cultivate their natural-born instinct to nurture. Under the tender guidance of their own mother, they learn the critical skills to raise children with love and discipline.

Less obvious but just as critical is the benefit a nurturing stay-at-home mother brings to boys. Boys learn what a mother should be. They learn how to treat girls. And when these boys grow into men, ideally they strive to marry a woman something like their own mother, a woman who will make a balanced life partner and thus pass the nurturing instinct on to future children. And so the healthy cycle continues.

But that cycle can be broken in countless ways. In the past, family cohesion was frequently broken by deaths. Tragically, today that cohesion is more often broken by divorce or worse, unmarried mothers. Too often these women are forced (or prefer to) work outside the home, leaving their children to grow up in institutionalized day care… where mothering does not exist. (Mothering does not exist in daycare because, almost by definition, it cannot.)

All too often, bummer children often grow up to become bummer parents. After all, they never had a role model to cultivate their mothering and fathering skills. They never had anyone there to tenderly kiss the boo-boos, anyone to teach them how to bake cookies, anyone to show what a joy it is when Father comes home after a hard day’s work and rejoins the family for the evening.

The saddest part of these neglected and abused twin girls is that we have no way of knowing – until they’re adults – how much of their early “bumming” will stick.

I pray a solid, stable, intact family adopts these toddlers and teaches them how to nurture their innate mothering instincts, so when the time comes for them to marry and become mothers themselves, they won’t reject their own lambs.

Don reading to the girls.

As I post this, my husband is reading out loud to the girls, as he does every evening for half an hour or so.  He has done this since they were old enough to walk.  Both girls are superb and advanced readers, but they love listening to their father read out loud.  He has read to them many books of classic literature.  But more important, he - and I - are insuring that our girls will never become bummer children.

This guy's face gave me the shudders

I'm trying to figure out how I'd react if this happened to my kid. (Here's the article.)

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(CNN) -- A Georgia man allegedly slapped a toddler at a Walmart store because she wouldn't stop crying, authorities said.

Roger Stephens allegedly slapped a stranger's crying toddler in a Walmart store in Stone Mountain, Georgia.

Roger Stephens, 61, was arrested Monday and charged with first-degree cruelty to children. An incident report obtained from police in Gwinnett County indicated Stephens did not know the 2-year-old girl he stands accused of hitting.

The confrontation happened shortly before noon at the Walmart in Stone Mountain, a suburb of Atlanta.

According to the arresting officer, the child's mother said her daughter was crying as they walked down one of the aisles.

The mother said a stranger later identified as Stephens approached them and said, "If you don't shut the baby up, I will shut her up for you."

A few moments later, while the mother and the crying child were in another aisle, Stephens allegedly grabbed the girl and slapped her across the face.

Police said he hit her four or five times. "See, I told you I would shut her up," the suspect allegedly told the mother.

Authorities described "slight redness" to the toddler's face. Before he was arrested, Stephens apologized to the mother for striking the girl, the incident report said.

Stephens, a Stone Mountain resident, is being held by the Gwinnett County Sheriff's Department.