Unwitting little brownshirts

One of Hitler’s most evilly inspired ideas was to go after the young people, and turn them into spies in their own parents’ homes.  It’s so much easier to grab children’s minds, and parents never assume that, not only are their children watching them, they can be co-opted, innocently, into ratting them out to people with a political agenda that has nothing to do with good parenting, or privacy, or freedom.

Why am I going on about this?  Because I finally caught up with Michael Graham’s post from October about the spies among us, and we’re not talking about little Al Qaeda-philes following us in the park.  Instead, he’s talking about the Massachusett’s pediatricians’ official policy of interrogating children about their parents’ lives.  After describing the grilling his daughter underwent during a routine visit to the pediatrician (“I send my daughter to the pediatrician to find out if she’s fit to play lacrosse, and the doctor spends her time trying to find out if her mom and I are drunk, drug-addicted sex criminals.”), Graham sums up the bigger issue:

Thanks to guidelines issued by the American Academy of Pediatrics and supported by the commonwealth, doctors across Massachusetts are interrogating our kids about mom and dad’s “bad” behavior.

We used to be proud parents. Now, thanks to the AAP, we’re “persons of interest.”

The paranoia over parents is so strong that the AAP encourages doctors to ignore “legal barriers and deference to parental involvement” and shake the children down for all the inside information they can get.

Of course, it makes perfect sense in a Nanny state.  Since the State views itself as ultimately responsible for the children, parents get marginalized as breeding machines and full time babysitters, who must prove themselves to the State as appropriate employers.

One woman Graham spoke to, who switched pediatricians after being offended by the questions asked of her daughter, tried to explain away the pediatrician’s conduct, but Graham would have no truck with excuses:

“I still like my previous pediatrician,” Debbie told me. “She seemed embarrassed to ask the gun questions and apologized afterward. But she didn’t seem to have a choice.”

Of course doctors have a choice.

They could choose, for example, to ask me about my drunken revels, and not my children.

They could choose not to put my children in this terrible position.

They could choose, even here in Massachusetts, to leave their politics out of the office.

But the doctors aren’t asking us parents.

They’re asking our kids.

Worst of all, they’re asking all kids about sexual abuse without any provocation or probable cause.

The American Academy of Pediatrics has declared all parents guilty until proven innocent.

And then they wonder why we drink.