Ozzie and Harriet in Tears

...Another mother tells Mack that after the "stranger-danger" unit, her second-grade daughter "refused for weeks to walk from her classroom to the school music room for pickup...

...Politicians of both parties are in a bidding war to see who can shovel the most money into the old failed system, presumably because they believe that to do so is popular with voters...

...She cites numerous studies that show how the perverse incentives of federal child-welfare law and vague legal definitions of abuse and neglect have led to overre-porting of child abuse...

...She suggests that taking time off to have children and career "sequencing" are good ideas, but ultimately merely one option among many...

...We live in a culture as repressive as any caricature of the Victorians...

...Mack shows how relentlessly and callously the therapeutic and educational establishment robs children of their innocence...

...Not many, to judge from the response to the recent Kelly Flinn affair...

...And she wants the FCC to become even more involved in regulating and requiring uplifting "educational" programs for children...

...Mack's failure of nerve here is symptomatic of a more general tendency to let parents off the hook...

...Indeed, most parents tell pollsters that they are satisfied with their own children's schools and support (or at least do not actively oppose) sex- and drug-education programs, as Mack acknowledges...

...Mack argues that one reason for such failures is that the system is stretched thin with frivolous maltreatment investigations...

...She shows with torrents of data, anecdotes, and interviews that a cycle has been created involving the steady growth and intrusiveness of government, the erosion of traditional moral values, and family disintegration...

...She also appears to endorse "parental-rights" laws—as though giving judges and lawyers a whole new vague set of "rights" for a newly enfranchised victim class to litigate for the next several decades would be a solution...

...Professional elites—such as social workers, educators, and therapists— have systematically usurped many parental responsibilities and undermined parental authority...

...Mack Melinda Ledden Sidak is a lawyer and writer living near Washington, D.C...

...The new role for reinvented government is to support parents and children against the antifamily culture that government did so much to create in the first place...

...She argues that government's intrusion has usurped and undermined parental responsibility, but she speaks approvingly of particular government programs, often quite intrusive...

...President and Mrs...

...Children have been the principal casualties of the cultural and social revolution that has transformed America over the past 30 years...

...We may live in an "antifamily culture," but almost no one—conservatives included—is willing to adopt the moral code that forms the foundation of a genuinely profamily culture...

...Said one New Jersey mother, about the bombardment of 7-year-olds with luridly detailed AIDS lessons, "I don't think we've considered the burden of knowledge...

...It is with this delicate topic of women, work, and children that Mack hedges...

...Were the government half as judgmental and uncompromising about teen pregnancy as it is about cigarette smoking, the illegitimacy rate would plummet...

...But who is that parent likely to be—Mom or Dad...

...The result of these various depredations is what Mack terms the "antifamily culture...

...The list of culprits contributing to the antifamily culture includes other usual suspects—a mass-entertainment industry obsessed with sex and violence, the prevalence of material, as against spiritual, values, laws that encourage both easy divorce and messy child-custody battles, and financial and social pressures that encourage women with small children to work...

...After reading Dana Mack, you'll know just how right the secretary was...

...Readers are all too familiar with tragedies like that of Elisa Izquierdo, the 6-year-old New York child tortured and murdered by her mother...

...According to Mack, "Parents have been convicted of child abuse for spanking, for grounding, for home schooling, and even for no reason other than a suspicion on the part of a mandated reporter or social worker that while conditions in the home are at present stable, they may be conducive to neglect or abuse in the future...

...She lays out a convincing case that children are often harmed when institutions attempt to substitute for parents...

...How many would ostracize a man who leaves his wife and small children for a girlfriend...

...For although it is okay to be judgmental—even harshly judgmental—about behavior such as racism, sexism, homophobia, and, of course, smoking, the ultimate crime, it is definitely not okay to be censorious about what used to be regarded as sexual libertinism...

...She speaks admiringly of lavish but expensive Western European family-leave benefits...

...Mainly such classes involve the administration of personality tests and surveys that ask personal questions like, "How many of you ever wanted to beat up your parents?," and, "Tell something about a frightening sexual experience...

...A worksheet on "family systems" asks the students how much money their parents make and which candidate their parents voted for in the last presidential election...

...She shows that day care is no substitute for a mother at home...

...Many parents continue to make great sacrifices, financial and personal, in behalf of their children...

...What's it going to be...

...Sure, the schools are in terrible shape, but any teacher can tell stories of discipline meted out to a disruptive student that provoked howls of protest and threats of litigation by Junior's parents...

...She is even so bold as to state that "given the intense negative pressures on children from outside the home, at least one parent should devote the major portion of his or her energies to watching and raising the children...

...She criticizes the caprice and corruption of protective-service workers but suggests that social workers empowered to hand out welfare checks and supervise the family would somehow be less invasive...

...Among the horror stories recounted by Mack is a 1990 episode of ABC's 20/20 that "followed a public school field trip to a mortuary, where children were enjoined to touch the corpses...

...As it is, her hesitancy causes her to recommend policies that are likely to prove ineffectual...

...Whether it is incinerating Branch Davidians or renting out the Lincoln Bedroom to raise campaign funds, everything, now, is "for the children...

...And where should that supervision take place—at home or on the job...

...Clinton, and the Children's Defense Fund and its allies, already have perfected this stratagem...

...Mack's soft spot for government programs so long as they are "our" programs highlights another danger for the conservative offensive against the human fallout from liberalism...

...Oh hi, Peter...

...presents a parade of horrors that includes abused children, meddling social-service bureaucrats, and the metamorphosis of educational institutions into social-service and personal-therapy centers...

...Paradoxically, while some children like Elisa are returned repeatedly to the parents who torment them, in many other instances loving and conscientious parents have been subjected to hellish investigations by social workers—including the seizure of children and their placement in secret foster homes—and prosecution by politically or ideologically motivated district attorneys...

...She was afraid she would be kidnapped along the way...

...OzziE and Harriet in Tears Dana Mack Dissects the "Antifamily Culture" By Melinda Ledden Sidak Afew years ago, a friend of mine introduced her one-year-old son to the secretary of health and human services, Donna Shalala...

...The worst offenders by far are the schools and the child-welfare bureaucracy...

...And though she argues convincingly against forcing welfare mothers to work while their children are young, she shrinks from encouraging women of means to stay home with their children as the morally right and personally responsible thing to do...

...It's just that we have different moral crimes...

...Is there something you once did that you are ashamed of...

...How many would express open disapproval of a woman who shacks up with a lover in the presence of her children...

...She advocates measures like more telecommuting, on-site afterschool activities, more flex- and parental-leave time...

...This in turn has caused many parents to shirk their responsibilities, necessitating further interventions by the state...

...If the schools are a mess, the child-welfare system is a nightmare...

...Of movie stars and pop singers who have babies out of wedlock...

...Shalala exclaimed...

...It is encouraging that, in the face of all that Mack describes, many parents have fought back directly or devised alternatives such as home schooling and mission-oriented charter schools that attempt to protect children from the antifamily culture...

...I'm in charge of all the nation's children...

...At this point, Mack becomes Hillary Lite...

...The problem is that liberals have seized on these side effects as grounds for yet more government intervention...

...Mack advances many valid complaints about the harm imposed on children and adults by things like easy divorce and the refusal of schools and churches to reinforce traditional moral standards...

...What constitutes the "major portion of his or her energies...

...Even parents who struggle to raise their children to be productive citizens with strong moral values, the culture and the bureaucracy seem to thwart at every turn, often with the smug "We know best" attitude of Donna Shalala...

...But the restoration of a truly profamily culture will not occur until individual Americans—including and especially those who profess conservative social values—are willing to walk the walk and not just talk the talk...

...Conservatives have to be careful not to let "the culture" become to them what "society" is to liberals—an amorphous and depersonalized blob that can be blamed conveniently for all bad or irresponsible acts committed by individuals...

...Conservatives like Mack have succeeded in getting many elites in government and the media to admit reluctantly that government programs and the 1960s cultural revolution produced some unintended, negative side effects, particularly with respect to children...

...There is a lot of garbage on television, but maybe more parents should consider restricting television viewing to a few hours per week or forbidding it altogether...

...Schools today apparently have little time to teach such basic skills as reading, writing, and arithmetic...

...The fact is that most Americans today are unwilling to condemn— and thus discourage—behavior that was once deemed socially destructive or otherwise undesirable for fear of being labeled "judgmental" or "intolerant" or, worse, wanting to "turn back the clock...

...And she uncritically accepts the assertion that women work for financial reasons, not contemplating whether the economic explanation can be a mere excuse...

...She wants hiring preferences for parents returning to the workforce after time off to raise children...

...She tells of her own daughter's nightmares after seeing a graphic film on sexual molestation...

...The curricula are increasingly crowded with courses on sex education, drug education, death education, sexual-abuse prevention, and "life-skills" courses...

...Too many children are repeatedly returned to abusive biological parents by social workers who have an almost mystical faith in the ability of counseling and social-service supervision to reform even the most recalcitrant offenders...

...One perfectly good option that neither she nor apparently anyone else who writes about this issue considers is that women who want to pursue full-throttle careers perhaps should choose not to have children...

...But how many of the parents whom Mack interviewed would themselves be willing to express disapproval or even—imagine it—to stigmatize a man or woman who commits adultery...

...If Mack had not pulled back from exploring the full dimensions of her arguments, this important and passionate brief for a profamily culture might have been even more effective...