From: bh@anarres.CS.Berkeley.EDU (Brian Harvey)
Newsgroups: alt.child-support,alt.dads-rights,alt.parents-teens,misc.kids
Subject: Re: Hillary Clinton - Family Values?
Date: 23 Jul 1992 12:36:29 GMT
Organization: University of California at Berkeley
NNTP-Posting-Host: anarres.cs.berkeley.edu

Wow, this sure pushed everyone's button.  Here's my 2 cents.

First of all, the fundamental problem is an appalling lack of resources
for the support of kids, of families, of everybody.  Several people have
said things along the lines of "we already have a system to protect kids"
but the system is overcrowded and I would hate to grow up under its
supervision -- not because I think the bureaucrats are evil, but because
there's no money and the kids lead drab lives.  When I was studying
clinical psychology I took the required course on child abuse reporting,
and they told us that CPS just files most reports without responding
to them, for lack of staff.  They'll respond if they get several reports
about the same child, or if a report is really lurid maybe.  I think it's
great if Ms. Clinton wants to allocate more resources to kids -- but that's
not exactly what she said, is it?  (Instead it sounds as if she wants to
"privatize" child protection.  The Democrats are as bad as the Republicans
these days.  Vote for Ron Daniels.)

Second, everyone is talking as if the maturity of children is a yes-or-no
question.  I believe that kids grow in maturity *as they get the chance
to exercise it*!  For example, 16-year-old drivers are notoriously
accident-prone, but if you raised the driving age to 21 then 21-year-olds
would be the accident-prone ones.  I'm not saying that experience is the
only relevant factor; I'm not suggesting that 3-year-olds should drive.
But it's only a few hundred years ago that societies had the age of
legal adulthood at 13, or even at 8 in some places.  Instead of holding to
extremes in which either we put kids in sole charge of their lives or we
coddle them and allow them no room for decision-making at all, we should
be looking for ways to give kids more and more control as they get older.
In principle I like the idea of letting kids go to court on their own
behalf.  I recognize the practical problems.  Ideally, the system would
make the legal process difficult enough so that nobody would go to court
frivolously, but the difficulties shouldn't include great expense.  (Maybe
just filling out a lot of complicated forms and a cooling-off period, just
like buying a gun.)  Maybe the court system is the wrong arena for this
sort of thing and there should be some less formal mechanism.  But the
underlying idea that there should be a way for kids to insist on being
taken seriously appeals to me.

Third, I completely agree that Americans sue each other too much.  It's
a big problem -- although nowhere near the top 10 in my list -- of our
society.  Still, I am suspicious when people accept the right of everyone
else to sue, but draw the line at kids.  Adults file plenty of frivolous
suits, and adults also file lots more evil-intent, manipulative suits
than kids ever would.  (I'm thinking about SLAPP suits by rich businesses
against social reformers, for example.)  We should work at finding better
ways to resolve our differences among adults!  And then those same better
ways should be available to kids, too.

Fourth, I think it's misleading to talk about this proposal primarily
in terms of child abuse cases.  Think about divorce among adults.  There
are plenty of cases in which two people just aren't right for each other,
without one of them criminally abusing the other.  What about the case
where a kid's parents just aren't very good parents, but Uncle Fred
or Aunt Sally would be happy to take him on?  I'm not sure that I'd
want that kid to go to court about it, but I'm also not sure that
everyone's best interest wouldn't be served if there were some less
traumatic way for the kid to choose where to live.