Happy Thanksgiving – and hang in there!

Happy Thanksgiving to all my American readers! This weekend, I’ll be getting this blog caught up on new research and developments, but I wanted to take a moment to share something with parents who may be struggling and worrying about their children’s future:

This week, as my family and I prepared for Thanksgiving, I knew I could count on my children to help. My daughter did the food-shopping and some cooking and baking. My son cleaned most of the house and helped with whatever I needed.

Sounds idyllic, right? You may even envy me, right? But had you asked me 15-20 years ago whether they’d ever turn out the way they did, I would have said a fervent “I hope so!” but knowing how dysfunctional they were from their neurological challenges, at times, I was very fearful for their future.

If your child is young – in elementary school or even high school – what you see now is not what you will see in 10 years or so. The symptoms like tics that may plague your child now will likely be either gone or seriously reduced. With your support, they can and will learn to live with – and cope with – their challenges, and they may become more resilient adults because of their early experiences. Whether it’s OCD, Bipolar, ADHD, TS, or any other condition, they can learn to cope and thrive. Some kids may need the help of doctors and therapists, but there is hope. Lots of it.

So yes, you may be dreading today, but it does get better. Hang in there and remember to schedule some “downtime” for your child – and for yourself. And remember to quit while you’re ahead: if your child cannot handle a long day at Grandma’s with lots of family, make your excuses and leave while things are still enjoyable. Better that than trying to handle a meltdown or behavior problems from overarousal or fatigue.

“See” you on the weekend!

Zero Tolerance Policies: Are the Schools Becoming Police States?

Constitutional attorney and author John W. Whitehead has written a commentary on zero tolerance policies that echoes many of the points I’ve made on this blog in my own posts:

What we are witnessing, thanks in large part to zero tolerance policies that were intended to make schools safer by discouraging the use of actual drugs and weapons by students, is the inhumane treatment of young people and the criminalization of childish behavior.

[...]

Things have gotten so bad that it doesn’t even take a toy gun to raise the ire of school officials. A high school sophomore was suspended for violating the school’s no-cell-phone policy after he took a call from his father, a master sergeant in the U.S. Army who was serving in Iraq at the time. A 12-year-old New York student was hauled out of school in handcuffs for doodling on her desk with an erasable marker. In Houston, an 8th grader was suspended for wearing rosary beads to school in memory of her grandmother (the school has a zero tolerance policy against the rosary, which the school insists can be interpreted as a sign of gang involvement). Six-year-old Cub Scout Zachary Christie was sentenced to 45 days in reform school after bringing a camping utensil to school that can serve as a fork, knife or spoon. And in Oklahoma, school officials suspended a first grader simply for using his hand to simulate a gun.

[...]

There’s an old axiom that what children learn in school today will be the philosophy of government tomorrow. As surveillance cameras, metal detectors, police patrols, zero tolerance policies, lock downs, drug sniffing dogs and strip searches become the norm in elementary, middle and high schools across the nation, America is on a fast track to raising up an Orwellian generation – one populated by compliant citizens accustomed to living in a police state and who march in lockstep to the dictates of the government. In other words, the schools are teaching our young people how to be obedient subjects in a totalitarian society.

Read his commentary on LewRockwell.com.

TSA statement on Tourette’s Syndrome and criminal behavior

I’ve occasionally blogged about the use of neuropsychiatric diagnoses as defenses in criminal proceedings. In particular, I’ve been especially critical of cases in which Tourette’s Syndrome was used as a defense. In such cases, I have often communicated with the national Tourette Syndrome Association to alert them to a situation that can cause public confusion or misunderstanding about Tourette’s.

In checking TSA’s web site today, I discovered that at some point they added a statement to their site that I endorse completely:

Tourette Syndrome and Criminal Behavior

The Medical Advisory Board of the Tourette Syndrome Association is deeply concerned about media reports that attribute violent criminal behavior by individuals to the fact that they have Tourette Syndrome.

In truth, the diagnosis of Tourette Syndrome in a legal offender is no more the reason for, or an excuse for such offense than other medical diagnoses — such as asthma or rheumatism. Scientifically, there is no evidence of a causal relationship between having Tourette Syndrome and criminal behavior.

The Tourette Syndrome Association and its medical advisers oppose such misrepresentations which serve to stigmatize hundreds of thousands of children, teenagers and adults with this neurological condition.

Could Tourette’s occasionally run someone afoul of the law? Sure, and I can think of an example where a person who has a spitting tic may accidentally violate an ordinance against spitting by not grabbing a tissue in time or spitting into their hand. I can also think of examples where individuals who have coprolalia may violate some ordinance involving obscenities. But violent behavior? No.

Maybe criminal defense attorneys will ignore my advice, but if the national TSA has come out with this statement, attorneys will hopefully think twice about stigmatizing people with Tourette’s in their attempt to vigorously defend their client.

Privacy for Children

Respecting your children’s privacy, teaching your children to both respect and protect their own privacy, and teaching them to respect their peers’ privacy are daunting tasks for parents these days.  The challenges seem magnified if you are parenting a child who might be engaging in unsafe or risky behavior – whether due to symptoms of their neurological disorders or no.  Do you need to intrude on their privacy? And if so, when might it be both acceptable and necessary?

From conversations with parents, I know that some parents have no compunction about snooping in their children’s email or online activities – or going through their dresser or desk drawers to see if there are any drugs or indications of trouble. Indeed, many organizations seemingly support parental snooping as part of keeping children safe online. But children are entitled to some privacy, aren’t they? So where have you drawn your line? If your child posts a “keep out” notice on their tree house or bedroom door, do you respect that? If your child is enough to bathe safely, you probably give them some privacy in the bathroom, but there is so much more than just bathroom privacy. What is your approach to your child’s privacy?

A new law review article attempts to address the issue of privacy for children. The authors are Benjamin Shmueli and Ayelet Blecher and it was published in Columbia Human Rights Law Review, Vol. 42, 2011. Here’s the abstract, as posted on SSRN:

There is growing concern over childrens privacy in today’s technological world. However, most of the research on children’s privacy focuses on third party threats, such as commercial websites. Little work has been done on children’s privacy in their relationship with their parents, and specifically, privacy from their parents. This article attempts to instigate a discussion on this timely issue.

For most adults, the place where our privacy is most protected is the home. For children, however, having privacy in their home is far from a certainty, and it is becoming ever less so. While it is true that parents have always been able to invade their children’s privacy by going through their schoolbags, reading their personal diaries and the like, nowadays children and youth are seen as at risk from online predators, pedophiles, cyberbullies and other online dangers. Whereas “good parents” may have traditionally been encouraged to trust their children, today they are encouraged to safeguard their children, including by invading their privacy. Monitoring has become associated with good parenting, and the surveillance of children has been framed in a language of safety, protection, and care. Today’s children are the most watched over generation in memory. Children express concern about their parents’ snooping and see it as an invasion of their intimate and social lives. Nonetheless, children’s privacy is overlooked and given scant consideration, if any.

In this article we identify and address the difficulties in recognizing children’s privacy within the family unit. The first difficulty is that the privacy discourse has so far been developed almost exclusively in reference to adults and is applied only awkwardly to the rights of children. Where children are concerned, privacy is considered to be dangerous and inherently associated with risk. We demonstrate that theories of privacy can be adapted to include children and point to the value and significance of privacy for children. The other difficulty in recognizing a “privacy problem” for children in their homes and family relationships concerns the nature of the parent-child relationship, as well as the general tension between the privacy of the family as a relational entity and the privacy of its individual members.

Looking critically at the prevailing legal situation in both American jurisprudence and in international documents in which privacy is dominant for adults but less so for children, and even less so for children vis-à-vis their parents, this Article suggests a balanced individual children’s right for privacy from their parents, which offers solutions to parent-child privacy conflicts both in the traditional “offline” world and the digital online world. We call for a clear recognition of children’s individual right to privacy that is separate from, and may even operate against their parents. At the same time, however, we acknowledge that this right should be qualified to some extent according to the child’s age and evolving capacities.

Unfortunately, the full article does not appear to be available online at this time, but  I would encourage you to think about the issue of your children’s privacy, discuss  it with your spouse, and if your children are old enough, discuss it with your children.  Ask your children how they view their own privacy in the home and what their expectations are.  If you are snooping or intend to snoop or might snoop in the future, have you been clear with them about that?   This really could be one of the most important conversations you have as a family.

In your self-reflection on this issue or in conversations with your children, I’d also encourage you to consider how what you do in your home in terms of allowing your children privacy and respecting it will also have implications for how they respond in school to what may be an invasion of their privacy there.   If you teach your children that they should have no expectation of privacy in the home if you suspect that they may be breaking the rules, then are you also teaching them that if their teacher confiscates their cell phone and starts searching it, that’s acceptable?   If you teach your children that to keep them safe, you may go through their dresser drawers and closed spaces in their room, are you teaching them to passively accept that school personnel can just search their bookbags even if they have no real evidence of contraband or wrongdoing?  Be careful: if you encourage your child to accept privacy intrusions in the home, will they be more likely to accept privacy intrusions outside of the home?  What we do as parents in the home will not only affect our children’s perspectives on their privacy within a family setting, but will have ramifications outside the home.

Is it time for you to start a conversation about this issue in your own family?

Carousel image credit:  © Ewa Walicka | Dreamstime.com

It is time for a moratorium on zero-tolerance policies

Two more cases in the news – one from Virginia and one in New Jersey –  should serve as wake-up calls that it is time to call for a nationwide moratorium on zero tolerance policies that may not make our schools safer, that criminalize normal child misbehavior, and that may ruin young lives.

Kevin Sieff reports:

Andrew Mikel II admits it was a stupid thing to do. In December, bored and craving attention, the 14-year-old used a plastic tube to blow small plastic pellets at fellow students in Spotsylvania High School. In one lunch period, he scored three hits.

“They flinched. They looked annoyed,” Mikel said.

The school district saw it as more than a childish prank. School officials expelled him for possession and use of a weapon, and they called a deputy sheriff to the scene, said Mikel and his father, Andrew Mikel Sr.

The younger Mikel, a freshman, said he was charged with three counts of misdemeanor assault.

[...]

The federal Gun-Free Schools Act mandates that schools expel students who take weapons, including hand guns, explosive devices and projectile weapons, to school. E-mail traffic among school officials showed they ruled that Mikel’s plastic tube, which was fashioned from a pen casing, met the definition of a projectile weapon because it was “used to intimidate, threaten or harm others.”

[...]

The Rutherford Institute, a Charlottesville civil liberties organization, is appealing the case in state Circuit Court.

Read more about this case in the Washington Post.

Meanwhile, in the New Jersey case, Teresa Masterson and David Chang report:

A 7-year-old child allegedly shot a Nerf-style toy gun in his Hammonton, N.J., school Jan. 18. No one was hurt, but the pint-size softshooter now faces misdemeanor criminal charges.

Hammonton Police began an investigation into the “suspicious activity” at the Hammonton Early Childhood Education Center Jan. 18 after school officials alerted them to the incident.

The “gun” the child brought to school was a $5 toy gun, similar to a Nerf gun, that shoots soft ping pong type balls, according to the school’s superintendent.

Officials also say that there was no evidence of anyone being threatened. The child’s mother told school officials that she didn’t know her son brought the toy to school.

Dr. Dan Blachford, the Hammonton Board of Education superintendent, said the school has a zero tolerance policy.

[...]

Police charged the 7-year-old with possessing an imitation firearm in or on an education institution – a misdemeanor and a minor juvenile offense in New Jersey.

Read more about this case on NBC Philadelphia.

I have long called for the return of some common sense and abolition of zero-tolerance policies that have not accomplished their intended purpose and that create other problems, including possibly discriminatory application to disabled and minority students.

Zero-tolerance policies were enacted after the tragedy at Columbine. We now have more than ten years’ of experience with them. Where are the data showing that they have made schools safer? What is the evidence that they may have done harm?

It is time for a moratorium on enforcing zero-tolerance policies for offenses that are often normal child misbehavior until experts can all come together to review available data and ensure that we are not treating children like criminals for normal misbehavior and that such policies are not disenfranchising disabled and minority students from their right to a free appropriate public education.

Carousel image courtesy of freeimages.co.uk

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