.............................................................. >From the New Paradigms Project [Not Necessarily Endorsed]: From: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Subject: [newsucanuse] Interrogating 6 year olds Date: Saturday, June 03, 2000 3:10 PM Dan Walters: Interrogating 6-year-olds (Published June 2, 2000) Suppose a state law required that when a 6-year-old child was entering the first grade of school, the youngster and/or his parents had to answer a series of questions delving into: Whether the child's family had a history of mental illness, domestic violence or drug use. Whether there were "family stresses that could lead to violence," such as unemployment or divorce. Whether the family had adequate child care. Whether parents used spanking in discipline. Whether the child had been exposed to violence, either actual in the family or neighborhood or fictional via movies and television. Whether the family or neighbors owned any guns. Whether anyone in the family, the school or the neighborhood was involved with gangs. Whether the child had experienced physical assault or "sexual victimization from anyone." Whether the child had signs of poor self-esteem or depression. Sounds rather intrusive, doesn't it, as if a 6-year-old child or parents would be required, as a condition of entering school, to spill family secrets? There isn't any such law now, but Sacramento Assemblyman Darrell Steinberg wants one, contending that early screening is needed to find "red flags" to children's emotional problems that could later emerge as violence or crime. However, rather than simply write the legislation and take his chances on its passage, Steinberg is taking a circuitous path to his goal. State law already requires children to undergo, as a condition of entering the first grade, complete medical examinations. An earlier version of Steinberg's bill would have extended this to include a "social history" of each child, but didn't spell out what it would have included. Rather, the bill said that it was to reflect a 1999 policy statement by the American Academy of Pediatrics -- the items in previously cited list. Steinberg's back-door approach didn't survive the Assembly committee process, in part because the state would have to pay for the examinations. After several rewrites, an even more indirect version of the bill reached the Assembly floor, one requiring the American Academy of Pediatrics recommendations to be incorporated into children's health screening programs operated by county governments -- the programs that poor parents lacking health insurance are most likely to use to comply with the medical exam requirements for their first-grade children. No matter how you slice it, however, the essential thrust remains intact: 6-year-olds would be undergoing exams that would probe private aspects of their family lives. Anyone who has reared a child knows that the world of 6-year-olds is a delightful mixture of fact and fantasy in which "monsters" can be just as real as parents, in which water guns and bazookas are equally menacing, in which the line between gangs and pals is indistinguishable -- and in which questions from adults can often be regurgitated as fact. Interrogating them about family problems is pointless, intrusive and potentially damaging as official busybodies act on the "information" the kids impart. The Assembly may not have known what it was doing when it approved Steinberg's measure recently, but it certainly couldn't claim ignorance on Wednesday when Assemblyman Tom McClintock, R-Simi Valley, tried to persuade his colleagues to rethink what they were doing, quoting extensively from the American Academy of Pediatrics policy statement and terming it "some of the most frightening invasions of family privacy I have ever read." Nevertheless, the Assembly left its original approval intact, thus contributing to a triumph of good intentions over good sense. ===================================================== [EMAIL PROTECTED] is an unmoderated mail list to discuss general government topics. To join or leave this list send e-mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with either subscribe uwsa or unsubscribe uwsa at the start of the message. 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