I usually take a hard line on retribution and punishment for wrongdoing, and I rarely make excuses for people. But arresting and handcuffing a five-year-old child is beyond belief.
I tried to avoid this story, but it’s popping up everywhere now. I’m angry about it and hate what happened to this girl. I’ll admit my bias. I have a six-year-old niece, and the child in the video reminded me of her (the girl’s facial features, not her behavior). I almost started bawling when I saw her screaming and crying, “No!” as they pinned her arms behind her back. I blame her parents, overzealous lawyers, and our own unwillingness to say what is and isn’t acceptable behavior.
It’s almost sacrilegious to blame parents for their children’s behavior these days, but it’s the truth. The child’s father is likely absentee, and her mother probably works all day and rarely disciplines her, which is much more than whacking her on the behind. Discipline is also teaching, and it requires time and effort that many parents don’t bother to put in.
The child may have acted out this way before, and her mother and the school may have been aware of her behavioral problems. Keep in mind that she’s a child still learning right from wrong. All children need to experience the consequences of their actions, but hauling her off to jail should not have been an option. But it was. Why?
We live in a litigious society, and had the teacher done anything physical to restrain her, the parents would have sued the school. That must change. Schools should be allowed to administer a certain level of restraint, without civil liability, when children become a physical threat to others. I’m old enough to remember when principals paddled students. You had to be really bad to get sent to the principal’s office at the elementary school I attended, but if you were, you got paddled and sent home.
Those days are gone, thank goodness. The only people who should administer corporal punishment are the child’s parents. And believe me, my mother (and father a few times) administered plenty!
You can’t touch children that way anymore. But what do you do when they act out the way this child did? The teacher couldn’t let her run wild, knocking things over. She had to restrain her. This is what should have happened, in my opinion. Someone should have continued restraining the girl while her mother was called. NO COPS! If the mother couldn’t be reached or didn’t want to come, call the next number on the list. Good grief, call social services before you call the POLICE to arrest a child, for crying out loud!
People are just too afraid, too busy, too tired, too ignorant, too lazy or too slack to even try to raise decent human beings. And we wonder why America is going to hell in a handbasket.
Others blogging: lornkanaga, The Black Informant, Random and Politically Incorrect Thoughts…
Baldilocks makes MSNBC’s blog round-up with her post on the handcuffed kid. Related post.
I forgot to add this to the post earlier: Homeschool your kids!
Update (4/27): Samantha, who says she has a “special needs” kid, weighs in on the handcuffing. Also see the update.
Update II (10:46 a.m.): I’ll be on Jesse Peterson’s radio show at 11:30 a.m. to talk about this story.
