Parents Calling The Police On Their Children
This Bismarck Tribune article highlights a pretty sad state of affairs in this country.
Stacey Leben has fielded calls from parents upset that their children haven’t cleaned their rooms by a certain time and once from a mom mad that one daughter used her sister’s suitcase.
During the 13 years Leben was a youthworker in the Police Youth Bureau at the Bismarck Police Department, some parents chose to call in law enforcement as a way to deal with their children.
Parents have called law enforcement when their children won’t go to bed, sit in a car seat and when siblings are arguing.
Lt. Dan Donlin, who heads the department’s Police Youth Bureau, agreed that parents calling police when their kids get into trouble at home is nothing new. The reports don’t come through every day, or even every week, but it is something officers and youthworkers continually have to handle, he said.
Though officers should be involved in situations involving violence or danger, authorities stress that parents should call in law enforcement only after they have exhausted all other options of coping with normal child misbehavior.
The idea of calling the police on children for them doing nothing else than being, well, children has always bothered me. We see it in schools more and more with the police being called in to settle fist fights or other sorts of rowdy behavior that, in bygone eras, would have warranted little more than detention and a “kids will be kids” sigh. Now, I guess, we’re seeing it with parents too.
But this sort of abdication of responsibility is dangerous. If we keep turning to government authorities – be it teachers or social workers or police officers – to control our children those bureaucrats are going to start thinking it’s their responsibility to raise our children. There may come a time when we’re no longer able to pick and choose when the government steps in to help with our children because some have kept inviting them in.
And I don’t think any of us wants that.
