Lincolnite

Funny how both of your posts this morning can be reduced to government enabling crappy parenting.

Dave-How is it enabling crappy parenting if it removes the child from the environment that probably is contributing to their issues? If Id had an option to get some sort of programming rather than move out on my own when I was 16, it would have been really helpful. Instead, I was too old, not messed up enough, wasn’t a felon yet, hadn’t physically injured someone, wasn’t abusing drugs or alcohol, and though I attempted suicide I didn’t succeed, so I wasn’t mental enough. What exactly do YOU propose to remove these hurdles?

Dave-How is it enabling crappy parenting if it removes the child from the environment that probably is contributing to their issues?

Because you’re absolving the parent of their responsibility to their child. Since the most basic tenet of parenting is responsibility for your child, anything that accepts dissolving that responsibility is enabling bad parenting.

The premise of your argument seems to be that problem children should be the State’s responsibility.  That premise is the root of this problem specifically, and many other social problems that government injects itself into.

In the case of the 15 year old, his mother died a few years ago.  That’s tough on a kid. Don’t know about the father.

I am surprised that this law extends to 17 or 18 year old kids though.  Infants I can understand but a kid with a driver’s license?

So taking a kid to get help, via the law enabling access to assistance that normally is not easily available, is the government injecting itself into things? By removing many of the roadblocks that are usually in place? What then, do you propose? You are assuming that 2 kids being subject to this is some sort of opening of the flood gates and that little Tommy not getting the lawn mowed is going to result in him being dropped off. That’s a bit of a knee jerk reaction-problem children should be the parent’s responsibility up to the point where they become ineffective in that role. That line is different places for different people.

Are you equating abandoning a kid at a hospital with taking him to get help?  Besides, the parents are the ones getting help by giving them a legal means to abandon their kids.

But hey, that kid might take his car and drive it off a cliff, so allowing his parents to abandon him will clearly help him.

and the personnel of the hospital or fire station just leave the kid hanging. Would I like to see a provision to this lowering the age? Absolutely, but the law stands as it is, and you, nor I are in a position to judge someone else’s decision-especially this one, that could have turned out worse. She could have always just let him run the streets like I did, or others, and get into worse trouble, or cause more-and then he would end up in jail or prison, still in the care of the State, but now a convict with a record making their ability to do much afterward questionable.