Do We Really Want To Criminalize Bad Parenting?
During a recent appearance on Rick Jensen’s show on KHND AM1310 we talked about a bill before the North Dakota legislature that would allow parents whose children are chronically tardy or missing from school to be charged with a crime. The Grand Forks Herald has the story:
BISMARCK — Parents who are chronically negligent in seeing that their children attend school could face misdemeanor criminal charges under a bill heard in the House Wednesday.
Senate Bill 2217 was introduced by Mandan legislators after school officials there convinced them that there is a growing problem with grade school students missing large amounts of school.
“This is a very important step that has to be taken,” said Sen. Dwight Cook, R-Mandan. “Unfortunately, we have a real truancy problem.”
Cook and others who favor the bill, including Mandan Superintendent Wilfred Volesky, said elementary students who miss a lot of school are being set up to fall behind and drop out when they reach 16.
Most high school drop-outs did not develop the habit of skipping school after they got to high school, Volesky said. It results from how their families enforced attendance in grade school.
“Truancy at this level is more often a parent issue,” he said.
For obvious reasons, not sending your kids to school on time or not sending them at all is a bad situation. That being said, when we debate issues like this I think we need to ask ourselves one question: Do we parents want to raise our children, or do we want the government to raise them for us?
By criminalizing what amounts to simple bad parenting we open the door to some places we don’t want to go. What happens if they want to criminalize, say, children being too fat? Or certain types of disciplinary techniques like spanking? Other states, in fact, have looked at criminalizing spanking. That particular policy hasn’t met with a lot of success to date, but clearly the direction we’re headed is a situation where the government dictates appropriate parenting policy and the parents themselves are simply in-the-home surrogates tasked with carrying that policy out under threat of criminal charges.
A couple of decades ago people would have laughed at the idea that smoking in front of their own children in their own vehicles would be illegal. Today, however, that’s fast becoming a reality.
Now, I know there are bad parents in the world. I myself am not a perfect parent (though I assure you that my kid gets to school on time), and I often hear of parenting horror stories that make me cringe and feel empathy toward the children. But I firmly believe that most parents are good parents, and I think it would be folly to undermine and even subjugate parents in a misguided attempt to fix the small minority of parents who aren’t good parents.
It’s hard to oppose laws like this because in doing so the proponents of them accuse you of not caring about the children, or being in favor of things like truancy. Or being in favor of exposing children to second hand smoke. But what we’ve got to realize is that the world is an imperfect place. There are always going to be bad parents who make bad decisions no matter what the government does about it. Remember, the government shouldn’t try to do good. The government should simply refrain from doing evil.
I am not sure there is any freedom more basic than our freedom to start families and raise our children as we see fit. How would we still be able to call this a “free country” if we aren’t even in charge of raising our own children?
