Mollycoddling can be a form of child abuse

Wednesday, Jan. 05, 2011
Sun-Herald

Mississippi- Harrison County Youth Court Judge Michael Ward retired this week after more than 30 years of dealing with the darkest aspects of childhood: abuse and neglect.

But after reading Monday’s front page profile of Ward, it’s fair to say that parents also abuse their children by neglecting to prepare them to live in a civil society.

“Many children have no respect for themselves or their parents,” said Ward. “I used to go five years without having to deal with some type of an assault on a parent. Now, I’m in shock if I don’t have four or five a day in crimes perpetrated by 10- to 17-year-olds against their mothers.

“A lot of children have been mollycoddled by their parents. They haven’t been appropriately reared. They’ve been indulged. Mama gets them out of this and that. When they’re brought into court, they’re completely out of control. A month doesn’t go by that a bailiff’s not on the floor with some child who doesn’t like a ruling because they haven’t gotten their way.  FULL STORY
 
A comment there beats about anything I could come up with-

GreenCorniche- 

So which is it judge? Are Children "mollycoddled" into anti-authoritarian monsters by spineless, permissive parents? Or are parents sexually predatory and abusive to their children? Or are parents both feckless and predatory? The problem of damaged, tattered children simply cannot be examined strictly in the context of parent/child relations or "permissive" parenting styles. What's happening to our children is happening because of the extinction of two parent households brought about by the ongoing collapse of the American middle class. Globalization has not only lowered labor costs it's also cheapened the value of human life, including the value of healthy, protected childhoods. And shaping all values is a predatory corporate advertising and marketing machine that reduces human emotions to a marketplace and destroys all genuine human values by aiming at kids as soon as they're old enough to sit up and watch TV. Yet, Judge Ward, who's spent his career looking into the human wreckage of corporatism can't muster anything more insightful than 19th-century cliches about "mollycoddled" kids, invasive gov't and feckless (non)adults. Such lack of depth and insight in one so experienced should give one pause. It really should. What kind of judicial culture do we have in this country?