The idiotarian nanny state

Anonymous poster (is that you, Watcher?), you clearly did not read my post with any comprehension. I meet too many parents who let their emotions rule their decision making. I'm done.

It dawned on me later yesterday that this whole scenario was the result of a father who couldn't manage to make an apparently normal 11 year old child behave properly in a restaurant, without allowing the situation to reach a point where he lost his temper. I see Jeff Culbreath beat me to the point, but what is up with THAT? Then, his reaction to his regret over having handled the situation badly but not actually expose the child to any real harm, is to call up a parenting expert and flog himself in the newspaper, instead of simply apologizing to his kid and learning to discipline him? This guy is obviously completely incompetent as a father. I don't believe that the situation was inherently dangerous or harmful to the child, but it was a bad way to handle the inability to make a child live up the behavioral expectations appropriate to half his age. Really, this problem should have been solved at least seven years ago.

The arguments that he was placing his child in some kind of danger or acted abusively, still do not address the fact that requiring/allowing an eleven year old to walk a few blocks is not abandonment. He wasn't charged with abuse or endangerment. He was charged with abandonment. The only conclusion that can logically be drawn from that is that the authorities choose to regard a child who is three blocks from home unattended as "abandoned" when they choose to use the situation to prosecute the parent. That is just plain disturbing.

And I'll just join the chorus of those chiding Alicia for calling him "lucky" that his child was not kidnapped. He's "lucky" for that in the same sense that I'm "lucky" not to be hit by a meteorite when I go to my mailbox. Believe it or not, I'm still going to go get the mail, and believe it or not, my ten year old is still going to be allowed to ride her bike in a six by two block area in my neighborhood. In order for there to be any degree of real risk to a child old enough to know not to get into a car with a stranger in an incident like that, potential abductors who were willing to bodily snatch a child in broad daylight, would have to be cruising the streets in hopes of finding a random child at a time and place where there was no necessary expectation of a child being out walking. You'd probably need one per square mile to get that kind of coverage. (The overwhelming majority of these incidents are perpetrated by people known to the child; most of the rest of attempts or successful abductions happen in situations where large numbers of children can be found, such as school-leaving time. This was apparently a non-school morning.)

Don't know if anyone is still reading this, in the light of all the recent excitement, but my brain was idling away on the subject of "appropriate anger and physical discipline." The average 8 year old is 45 inches tall and weighs close to 60 pounds--rounding off for convenience. Let's say you, the irate father, are an average, perhaps slightly overweight guy, 5 feet 10, 180 pounds. Assuming I can still do simple arithmetic in my head, that makes you 2/3 again as tall as your child, and 4 times as heavy. You get angry, you grab the child by the arm in a tight grip that probably hurts, yank him to his feet and hit him a few times. Hopefully on the buttocks, but with a squirmy kid, you may end up with a couple of random blows landing elsewhere. Or you might lose your temper a couple of degrees more and hit him across the face or head. You are probably glaring at him and raising your voice in denunciation. I think this is a pretty fair description of what a "simple spanking" looks like most of the time.

Now let's imagine that you are out in public with your wife, and you are "acting like a jerk"--something that is surely not beyond the bounds of possibility. If he were in the same proportion to you that you are to your child, he'd be over 9 feet tall and weight over 700 pounds. That isn't possible . . . so let's just say he's 7 feet tall and weighs 400 pounds. He grabs you with his ham-sized hand, yanks you out of your seat and hits you a few times while your wife stares. In a bellowing voice, his face, distorted with anger, just inches from your face, he denounces you.

So, would that be "appropriate"? Why or why not? And do you now feel great respect for this man, and consider him a model of what every man should aspire to be? Why or why not?