Kid-Free Zones: Marginalizing Working Parents

So, I just read this article on kid-free zones: http://shine.yahoo.com/channel/parenting/the-no-kids-allowed-movement-is-spreading-2516110/

Wow, am I stunned. I think it is enlightening to see the trends in business and how it reflects the growing demographic, as they put it, of high-income couples with no children. That is what this demographic amounts to, I think. I cannot imagine anyone who has raised and certainly no one who is raising a child ever contributing to the predominance of bans on children at places like grocery stores.

Upscale restaurants I understand. We were blessed with a daughter who was usually mellow in restaurants, but when a child isn’t, there isn’t much that can be done except leave. And if patrons spend a lot of money for a nice evening at a place they saved up for, that usually doesn’t include someone else’s screaming child.

But banning people from grocery stores? Seriously? It is claimed by some of these stores that childcare services will be provided, however, I anticipate, and hopefully I am wrong, that these services will not be free. They also say that certain hours will be allotted when children will be allowed, and this also is frankly bullshit. Most people who are middle-to-lower income parents don’t have jobs that provide them with flexibility to shop during proscribed child-allowed hours. They shop when they can, however they can, and spend as little as possible.

Again, we have a system that will wind up penalizing lower income families. If this trend continues, businesses will become less and less oriented toward community in any meaningful way, and more and more purely capitalist ventures without scruple or civic concern.

Upscale resturants banning kids I expect. But if any grocery store or retail store bans kids in Denver I will boycott them. And my comment to people who pushed for kid-banning in grocery stores would be this: Kids are not second-hand smoke. Kids are not pets. You won’t get cancer from being exposed to kids. You won’t have an allergy attack from kid dander. And if your nerves are such that being exposed to a temper tantrum in the local supermarket damages you, then you have bigger problems than that kid’s temper tantrum. Because you have forgotten that at some point in the past few decades, your neighbors, and certainly your mama, probably had to listen to you scream your head off, and still shlep you through the store, and go home and make your dinner.

Childhood Obesity and the Government

State intervention in removing obese children from their homes seems to me to completely miss the point of the problem of childhood obesity. http://tinyurl.com/5rfkdxp

What is it with the ’experts’ in this country comprised of people completely incapable of looking past the symptoms, to the cause of the symptoms? Much of this obesity, as noted by the numerous comments from struggling parents, is that they were working so hard to make a living that they either hadn’t the time to make healthy dinner, or hadn’t the money to buy healthy food, or both. So they were forced by urban desertification and working multiple jobs to rely on fast food as a staple.

Where is the responsibility of the businesses in these neighborhoods which often sport a plethora of liquor, cigarette, and fast food joints, and not a single grocery store? Where is the responsibility of the government to provide programs that will allow these families alternatives to working unrealistic hours and feeding their families with garbage?

I am not Republican, but there are ways in which I agree with the original tenet of Republicans in terms of laissez fair government. In my opinion, removal of kids from their families will effectively punish them all for being poor, and in this I believe the government has no business. This would be a completely inappropriate use of government regulation, targeting the weakest link: the struggling families, when the cause of their struggle is higher up the power chain and therefore more difficult to challenge. If the health experts and the government wants to help these kids, give their parents back their unemployment, or help them get decent jobs that realistically support an average family, or help them get a grocery store on the corner walking distance from their homes, instead of a McDonalds!

There seems to be a shift in our consciousness, a decline following the New Deal in which symptoms like obesity, unemployment, poverty, and homelessness are seen as wholly the responsibility of individual citizens and indeed, the more powerless and vulnerable of those citizens. There is no longer any responsibility taken at all for the factors contributed by poor government policy decisions and requirements laid on these individuals, or a nation’s collective failing to act with shared responsibility for the poor and sick, and for finding solutions that cause the least harm to all involved. Instead, the solution put forth here, removing children from their homes because their parents can’t keep the childens’ weight down, respresents an expedient and immediately visible political decision that will cause great harm to the people whose wallets aren’t as loud. Decisions like putting obese kids in foster care seems to me to be grandstanding to appear to solve a problem, to ‘show progress’ on an issue rather than actually solving the ‘lifestyle’ problem for real, by connecting the frequent and also well-documented link between poverty and obesity.

National Anger at Casey Anthony

 Casey Anthony’s murder trial and the case surrounding that have garnered staggering media attention and inspired dramatic responses, most of all from other parents. This has occurred against a backdrop of the failing economy, environmental concerns, and a state of nationwide unrest, all things that are equally worrying.

 So what is it about this case that has engendered such as response? The simple answer I heard on the radio today was that we, as humans, and certainly we, as parents, are appalled by the very idea of a parent harming a child. This theory tracks with me even more in our current state because amidst chaos, the one thing we have always been conditioned to believe was that the bond between a mother and child is sacred and unshakeable, the one thing that could be relied upon when the rest of the world was going to hell. What do many of us do when everything falls apart? Call Mom. We’ve been conditioned by our religions, every single one that I can think of, including the religion of television in the sitcoms and dramas and commercials that bleed constantly from the satellite or cable. We’ve been conditioned by our own family and every culture I have encountered. ‘Mind your Mama!’ ‘Maaaaaaa! He pushed me and called me a dummy!’ ‘Call your mother! She’s worried about you!’ Or in the experience with my own Jewish culture, ‘Oh, don’t worry about me, I’m just your mother.’

 In every instance and at every turn, we are trained to think of mother as safety, as home, as the one bastion of calm where a crappy day at school can be soothed away with a kiss and a hug and a bowl of ice cream. Of course, the glaring instances in which this is not true, painfully visible in every social services agency, is pointedly ignored. Perhaps this dichotomy between what we wish and need, and what is real, is the very reason social services are so egregiously underfunded. Much like avoiding the eyes of all homeless people, we can’t deal with the possibility that things in regular people’s lives can go horribly wrong, and that if we look too closely, we might see ourselves in the person who’s fallen on calamity. Our ability to empathize dissolves in our fear. I know one thing I grasp at with damn near obsessiveness is this erroneous concept of ‘financial security’. I know it doesn’t exist. I don’t care, I still chase it with all the other workers every day.

 And it seems to me that the lower the morale and the worse the depression around us, the greater our ‘national insecurity’ (not referring to the state of terrorists or law enforcement), then the greater our need is to find unattainably-specific ‘perfection’ in family. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that our most time-consuming debates have surrounded what marriage is, or at what point a collection of embryonic cells is considered a person with rights.

 I am filled with sadness when I look at a case in which an adorable little girl is killed, even more horrified at the idea that it could have been the mother, because that is always a possibility. I was not on the jury and I don’t and never will know Casey Anthony’s story. I will never know if she killed her child or not. What I do feel when I look at this case as a mother, is the compulsion to take a sidelong glance at my own daughter and to listen in the middle of the night to the dreadful whispers that say, ‘You yelled at her when you shouldn’t have. You were impatient with her today and made her cry. If she gets cancer, it’s going to be your fault. If she becomes schizophrenic, it’s because you hollered at her for leaving her toys all over the place. You’re a horrible mother. You have everything you need, but if you didn’t, how quickly would you become Casey Anthony?’ Assuming that is what happened. And I think we do assume, whatever evidence the prosecution does or doesn’t have, because in the wee hours of morning when we can’t sleep, and we’re worried about how the world is changing around us and we can’t control it for our kids, and our own mothers can’t solve our problems anymore, those of us who are parents are terrified that under the worst circumstances, it could be us.

Caylee’s Law and the Legal System

On Facebook, I’ve been seeing floods of posts from my friends who are mothers to sign the petition for Caylee’s Law, which would make failure to report a missing child or death of a child within a certain number of hours a crime. All news articles on this law have been accompanied by heart-rending pictures of the murdered girl. I am the mother of a wonderful almost-six year old who reminds us every day of her almost-status. Have I signed this petition? No. Does that seem cold and careless and anti-child, or pro-murderer? I’m sure that lots of people might think so, but here are my reasons, not in order of importance:

1. People are reacting viscerally to their belief that Casey Anthony murdered her little girl. That is a horror story that this entire nation has become swept up in. And while the presented facts do seem to indicate guilt, the fact is, that a jury found her innocent. Add to this that without question, we have not heard all the facts, and never will. What gets admitted into a court of law is bound by so many restrictions as to give one brain damage if it were contemplated too hard. But these restrictions on what is allowed to be heard goes both ways, against the defense as well as prosecution. So there is no question in my mind that we do not know Casey Anthony’s whole story either, things that might otherwise have acquitted her before this. I am not trying to defend a murderer of a child. I shouldn’t have to anyway. Because this particular suspect has been found innocent. Whatever any of us thinks about the efficacy of the court system, her peers had reasonable doubt, and no number of adorable pictures of her daughter is going to change that. Nor does it make the statement that her death was not a tragedy, just that no one really knows what happened to her.

2. And just as flashing her daughter’s picture at every possible opportunity doesn’t make Casey Anthony guilty, it also does not make enacting more restrictive laws a useful way to solve the problems that led to little Caylee’s death. The big questions on everyone’s minds were ‘Why didn’t she report her child missing, why didn’t she report her death?’ Those are great questions. For the purposes of this case, we will never know. For the purposes of future cases, why doesn’t anyone report anything? In future cases, there are some key reasons, other than guilt, that I can think of why someone wouldn’t report a child missing. The world is dangerous. Yes, we have freedoms. But ADT security systems do not do the business that they do in this country or any other because we live in a warm and fuzzy community full of always-well-behaved people. It seems to me that skittish kidnappers may instruct their parent victims to keep authorities out if they want to see their child again. The numerous crime drama shows that depict this scenario got this idea from a real situation at some point in time, and so it seems a valid fear. And to make parents’ lives in this possible scenario even more difficult by prosecution doesn’t seem to be solving any problems.

If you do not think this particular example valid, there is a different example that shouldn’t come as a surprise since it has been around since the founding of the nation, the very reason we split from England and became our own country: What about parents who have had negative interactions with abusive civil authorities, and understandably do not believe that they will receive help, only further abuse? Whether those interactions are on the scale of minority interaction with police, or colonists’ interaction with Red Coats, the mechanism is the same: mutual ambivalence or even hostility, and lack of trust. I know whole communities that are wary of the police, not because they are not ‘law-abiding citizens’ but because they have had either prior bad interactions with police here, or were themselves victims of political/civil abuse in their own countries by the people supposed to protect them. This problem will not be solved by creating more opportunities for prosecution or abuse of power that led to the desire to avoid the law. Ultimately, trust between law enforcement and community cannot be legislated or forced. That only destroys any trust left, and fosters a more pathological relationship between civil authority and disenfranchised populations, and widens the disparities that create civil problems. Trust must be built with repeated positive interactions, which prosecutory measures completely eliminate as a possibility. Which brings me to the third and most important point.

3. This country has become so litigious already that prosecuting actual criminals and preventing making criminals out of regular citizens has become almost impossible. The legal system is broken, this is not news. I simply do not believe that creating two more laws that can be used at the whims of politicos as a pundit and career-climbers as a case win is going to solve the root of the problem. We cannot legislate our way out of human misery. We cannot legislate our way out of the problems that caused whoever killed Caylee to commit this atrocity in the first place. I have seen again and again that more legislation creates more victims. If we assume that this mother killed her own child, why are we not addressing the very question of how it came to pass? This is not bleeding heart liberalism but simple behavioral logic. Why are we shutting down social programs that provide emotional or physical or family support? Why are we cutting the education that allows the average number of people in the population to go on to be productive adults in society? There is no excuse for killing a kid, but in public health, prevention is more effective than reaction. Spreading pamphlets around doesn’t reduce the burden of any disease, mental or otherwise. Going into communities and making them strong prevents disease because it creates the day-to-day resilience that keeps  the average population of people from turning into monsters in the first place.

Nothing is going to bring Caylee Anthony back. Creating laws that produce more bureaucracy and more top-heavy legal squabbling wastes money that would be better spent in addressing the reasons people murder in the first place. In my opinion, this is the difference between designing the future and reacting pathologically to the past.

‘Justice’ Gone Bonkers

I just read about a high school kid, Tyell Morton, who has been charged with a felony ‘institutional criminal mischief’ for leaving a sex blow up doll in the bathroom. http://tinyurl.com/3uz8nla I’m sorry, but at what point do we get to start charging overzealous career-climbing prosecutors with bringing the country down and wasting our tax money on the complete absence of common sense and turning criminal courts into a theater of the ridiculous!

Yes, the way Morton did it, in this day and age led security to react to what they perceived was a bomb threat, (he was dressed like a cat burglar, because he was leaving something one doesn’t usually leave in public bathrooms) true. And given the rise in school attacks, a bomb squad was an understandable response. However, at what point do we recognize that overreacting with crushing litigious persecution for something ultimately designed to make people laugh, might lead to creating the very situation we fear? People who play pranks like that, while possibly annoying, are usually well-adjusted kids with a healthy sense of humor, however inconvenient for the authorities or for the rest of us straight-laced people who take ourselves too seriously. But after being charged with a felony in a system willing to destroy this boy’s entire future without any consideration or inkling of perspective, I myself would turn into a bitter angry person with much less respect for or trust of law enforcement or certainly the legal system in which we are supposed to place our cooperation. Hopefully, this boy can get past this prosecutor’s posturing not only with his future intact, but with his sense of humor and resilience. I think that prosecutor should be disbarred.