For the Sake of the Children

I like kids. After all, I was once one myself and I have two wonderful children. Also, sometimes I feel that I tend to see things too much from a kid’s viewpoint and not enough as an adult. That all being said, there is, I believe, an ominously progressive phenomenon pervading our society.

Back during the late 1980s, when Tipper Gore was on her crusade “for the sake of the children” against suggestive or explicit rock lyrics, I got my first inkling of what was to develop. During Janet Reno’s reign as Attorney General under Bill Clinton, she decided to violently storm looney-tune David Koresh’s Waco compound because children were reportedly being abused inside. The result of this rash action was that they were all killed by Koresh, who burned the whole compound down with him. Then, for the sake of little Elian Gonzales (the Cuban refugee whose father wanted him back in Cuba with him), she had a SWAT team descend like the secret police in the early morning hours into the Miami home where he had been living with relatives, the defining moment captured by a photo of a terrified Elian being grabbed by a hulking agent pointing a powerful gun in his direction. Although Reno, in my opinion, went way overboard with her “child protection”, the Clinton Administration did well by pushing through and signing v-chip legislation giving parents (and not the state) the choice of which television channels they wanted to block from their children’s eyes.

Today’s Internet world, though, has largely supplanted television as the biggest threat, in the eyes of many, to children. And although there are supposedly safeguards built into the system to help block children from “bad” sites, they are woefully inadequate. One of the problems is with sites such as MySpace that children often use to describe themselves, write about their lives, and communicate with their friends. Parents should be careful to restrict access from others to these sites (or just prohibit their kids from having any) to those “safe”, known persons who can give the correct login information.

It’s important to protect children from harmful elements in our society. I just hope that those in authority will balance their concerns with the fact that these children, when they grow up to be adults, will want to enjoy the same constitutionally-protected rights that they themselves currently enjoy. After all, from time to time we hear of libraries removing this book or that book because some local “moral” element feared that it might fall into a child’s hands.

I’m also wary of government and government-authorized bodies pushing laws and making recommendations while using the idea of “protecting the children” as a gimmick to persuade others to accept their agendas. The latest example of this trend that I’ve picked up was last year’s Mitchell Report on some baseball players’ abuse of steroids and human growth hormone. According to George Mitchell, one of the main motivating factors driving him in his investigation was his desire to protect children from following the bad examples that the adult players named in the report had set. And I suppose then that everybody is supposed to just stand back and say, well, if it’s for the children, then go ahead and do and say what you want! But if you think about it, one can use the “save the children” tactic to promote (or oppose) virtually anything! Protecting children is a prime responsibility properly exercised within the family unit. Government needs to get out of the habit of bypassing parents with their often holier-than-thou zeal to further agendas ostensibly “for the sake of the children”. But parents need to then “pick up the ball” and take an interested and engaged role in seeing to it that their children are not exposed to danger, whether that be in the cyber world or the “real” world.