Katherine Mangu-Ward, editor of Reason nthtdfbare
Magazine (where I am a contributor) interviewed the Fox Business Network host Kennedy. I’ve been on Kennedy’s show, she is fantastic and funny and Free-Range, but I never knew this had happened to her:
REASON: What keeps you awake at night? Obviously you have a chance to talk about that on your Fox Business show every day, but the bad news of today doesn’t necessarily reflect the kind of macro stuff that makes me either happy or unhappy about where we are in the world right now.
KENNEDY: My thing is slow-burning statist mission creep and seeing all forms of government move at a glacial pace towards the full extinction of our rights and civil liberties.
When my youngest daughter was 6 months old, we went to dinner at a neighbor’s house, and when we came back she was crying. She was with two good friends of ours who had a 5-month-old. One was a former cop and one was a former medic in the Army so we knew that the girls were well taken care of. But they had let her roll off the couch and she broke her clavicle. I didn’t know that because they didn’t tell me.
So I had to take her to the E.R. the next morning because she had been crying all night long. And the doctor looked at me with such disdain. He pinched her shoulder and realized that that’s where her injury was and they X-rayed her and realized that it was broken. And the doctor told me that they were going to X-ray every bone in her body and if any other bones were broken they were going to call a social worker, and they were going to take her from us and that it would be at least a month before we got her back. Fortunately none of her other bones were broken, but I realized how quickly and how easily, even though I had done nothing wrong, the state would not allow me to establish my innocence to keep my child if something else had, God forbid, been wrong. This is a child who had only been breastfed up to that point. The thought of them taking her away from us was beyond comprehension.
They called a social worker down to meet with us and then we went home, and about an hour later, [the Los Angeles Police Department] showed up at our door and wanted to inspect our house to make sure that we weren’t abusing our children. One of the worst feelings on Earth is being accused of something that you haven’t done wrong. And that is such a common thing for parents nowadays. The inability to establish your innocence and the presumption of guilt, especially with parents, is so overwhelming and so terrifying and so pervasive, whether it’s in the pediatrician’s office or at school.
I think that’s why free-range parenting resonates with me so much. Parenting styles for the last 15 to 20 years have really gravitated towards this hyper-controlling, authoritarian helicopter parenting which is doing such a great disservice, not only to families but to individualism as a whole in society. Some of the hardest things you can go through as a parent are interfacing with oppressive institutions, whether it’s school or law enforcement or the medical community or cliquish parents.
Read the rest of the interview here.
I am appalled that Kennedy had to go through that, and have heard several stories from the Family Defense Center in Chicago, where the kids WERE taken away. (See, for example, this story.)
That’s in addition to the hundreds of other parents and caregivers have even been thrown in prison for what sounds like an increasingly, well, shaky diagnosis, Shaken Baby Syndrome. (For a chilling documentary about this, I highly recommend The Syndrome.)
We all want safe kids. We all want abuse to stop. But when our culture’s first assumption is that any parent with a kid in any kind of distress is an abuser until proven otherwise, our kids are NOT safe. They are in grave danger from over-zealous authorities. – L
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Her baby broke her clavicle. The doctor assumed it was abuse.
.
That sounds awful.
So, if I’m following. The Dr told them the outcome from CPS even though he’s a Dr and not a CPS official?
And the POLICE came to her home to inspect it after the went home from the hospital? Is that what LAPD is trained to do?
It sounds like Kennedy went thru a scary ordeal (and has some shitty friends), but I also think this narrative is not 100% accurate, which never helps.
The problem lies with the MD’s response to the situation. Instead of threatening the parents, s/he should just have said, “protocol requires us to X-ray your child to see if there are other broken bones.” Because a 6-month old pretty much cannot break her clavicle unless an adult has been violent or possibly negligent.
“Because a 6-month old pretty much cannot break her clavicle unless an adult has been violent or possibly negligent.”
Or if there has been a completely unremarkable accident (baby rolls off couch while caretaker blinks; baby is in a car accident; baby is dropped by caretaker, because caretakers are human beings who trip or drop stuff and it doesn’t make them negligent).
K, but it sounds like she couldn’t provide a reasonable explanation for the break, because she didn’t know what had happened. Certainly young children get injured, but one of the things examiners look for is whether the report of the non-abusive cause is consistent with the injury. Here, there was apparently no explanation provided by the parent.
Richard: That’s true. I was responding less to the situation in the article than to the comment implying that there can’t be an innocent explanation for a 6-month-old with a broken clavicle.
I definitely agree with the “shitty friends” comment. How could they not have told her what happened to the baby? Obviously, it’s a hard thing to tell a parent but considering what the consequences could have been if CPS had become involved, it was their duty to do so. Also, I’m sure there are a lot of good paediatricians out there, but there also seem to be a lot of idiotic ones who, directly or indirectly, seem to promote helicopter parenting.
“One of the worst feelings on Earth is being accused of something that you haven’t done wrong.”
This is especially true when children, or minors, are involved. What gets me is if you, as an adult, have any type of online communication with a minor such as via YouTube or Facebook or whatever, even if it involves innocent small talk such as “That was a really cool video, do you play any sports?” or “Congratulations on winning your wrestling match! Looks like your hard work paid off!” etc., etc. you are branded a “predator”. People will assume the worst from a simple comment. Americans have become so over reactive and paranoid of children and the internet that before you know it, there will be laws criminalizing ANY online communication between an adult and a minor! Even if the adult gives sound advice to the kid such as “Work hard in school and cherish the love and support you get from your parents.” Because obviously the adult has nefarious intentions in buttering up the kid with that comment so he must be a predator…….sigh.
Well that was slightly off-topic from the article posted but I had to get it off my chest!
“But having one person who isn’t even IN the government tell you that the government is going to take your baby away from you if you are abusing it? That’s not ‘almost Had Her Baby Taken Away by the State’â€
If a Pediatrician, who has experience and insight into child abuse cases and not to mention, lots of input into the fate of the child, told me that, I’d certainly be worried!
I’m with James on this – isn’t her fear of “THE GOVERNMENT” (Dunh – dun – dunnnn…) nearly as bad as people’s unsubstantiated fear of “baby snatchers” and other bogeymen?
Government institutions and formal policies certainly can be dehumanizing and impede our ability to exercise individual judgment, but they grow and creep when communities fail to engage respectfully with our neighbors and self-govern in ways that allow us to be nuanced in our understanding and thoughtful of individual differences. The government is the product of us “outsourcing” our management of ourselves in community.
And individuals then begin to use the threat of government intervention as a hammer for a variety of reasons, but primarily to duck responsibility of just being human and authentically engaged with our neighbors.
speech over.
This sounds horrendous. My family has been a victim of the busybody behaviors of the Los Angeles DCFS. Twice when I was in 5th grade, police showed up at my family’s home and conducted a full search. I had to be interviewed not only by several police officers, but also had to go down to the DCFS building and be interviewed by a social worker. It will be on my parents’ record forever. We were told after the interviews and searches that I would have been taken away if another report were to come through for whatever reason.
The offense? I wrote two stories for creative writing class that contained elements of sexual activity and drug use that I had learned about by disabling the safe search on the school computer provided to me and reading about stuff on the internet that was considered taboo, out of sheer curiosity.
The first report was found to be made by my creative writing teacher who didn’t even talk to me or my parents about what his concerns were beforehand.
The second was made by a playground supervisor who read a few sentences of my notebook while I used the bathroom one day and had left the notebook in plain view. I came back from the bathroom to catch her snooping. She left without comment, and the next day police were at our house again.
Aside from all this, my parents have had busybodies accuse them ( without a report thank goodness !) of: beating me as a baby when I had some skin discoloration, buying my sister alchohol because my dad looks much different from her, neglecting my dental hygiene because I had some decay on baby teeth, and the list goes on.
My parents were traumatized for quite some time by these incidents.
I hope this woman has no future run ins with CPS.
While it may not be true that she “almost” had her baby taken away, I can tell you from personal experience that getting even as close as she got, is absolutely terrifying. Our daughter is ten now. When she was a baby, she was rather thin, consistently in the bottom 10 percentile for weight while being about in the middle for height. Her doctor called her a “banana baby” and told us to feed her high fat foods like yogurt or mix butter into her solid foods. This was when we were supplementing breast feeding with solid food, so it would have been around the 6 month mark. She ate like a horse, but she still didn’t gain weight, but was happy and healthy, and under the regular care of a doctor the same as most other babies from middle class families. Her doctor was not terribly concerned.
One day, the supervisor at her day care approached my wife and told her that our practices of breastfeeding were harming our child and that we needed to stop doing that, start feeding her solid food more often, and get her weight up. There was no direct threat, but we definitely felt an implied threat to call CPS on us for ‘failure to thrive’. I actually worked then (and continue to work) in the child welfare system, but not for CPS. I knew that if a call was made and we got the wrong investigator who thought “babies are supposed to be fat you must be neglecting her”, we could get subject to a petition on ‘failure to thrive’, our child taken away, and that it would be weeks or even months before we’d get our child back because CPS doesn’t actually have to prove its case for a long time after the child is taken away.
Even without a direct threat, it was terrifying. Kennedy got a direct threat from a person with even greater authority than we got. It must have been a nightmare.
Our situation, FWIW, never got beyond what I described. We pulled our child out of that daycare immediately. She’s ten years old, a gifted student, happy, healthy, and still rail thin.
I think I have to agree with Mr. Pollock here. She uses “the State” as a blanket term which equivocates so much of our society into a simplistic view of some sort of machine ready to take kids away from innocent parents.
Also, the “disdain” in the “look” of the doctor is a bit subjective, eh? So is the doctors (probably) paraphrased response. Maybe it is true that was said in not so many (or in more) words, but if so I would bet that doctor has seen more instances of actual abuse and neglect rather than an honest misunderstanding or accident – which leads to that doctor’s bias for there actually being abuse and neglect rather than just a one-off event (the definitions of which are nebulous depending on the crowd you are addressing). Is that the problem of the doctor alone? Or a larger one because the medical staff see SO MUCH abuse and neglect that is widespread in certain demographics and areas?
There are social protections of individuals and groups put in place by our society for good reasons. The goal of these protections are supposed to provide at least a modicum of protection for portions of the population that are vulnerable, in this case – children who suffer form abuse and neglect – and yes, there are no perfect systems and it can end badly for innocent people. That is what the fight is – to make sure those incidents are decreased as realistically as possible by improving information, better decision making processes (not just better decision makers), better review of real cases vs one-off’s, and better responses to real transgressions.
The flip side of it is this – no protections for abused and neglected kids. No CPS. No investigations into potential abuse or neglect. Doctors just treating the kids and sending them back home to their own hells and eventually becoming sources of more of the same.
As Kennedy puts it – these protections are just “statism” eroding our freedoms as parents. If we removed these protections, would any one of us “free-rangers” do anything when faced with an actual situation of abuse or neglect? Let’s live in Kennedy’s dream world of “no statism” for a moment – you see your neighbor beating a 5 year old senseless. According to the parent – they are “disciplining” the child. They tell the police (if called) that they were in a fight at school. What are your options? Well, hopefully you get it on camera (in which case you are now a statist Big Brother surveilling your neighbors without permission) and barring that, it is your word against the parent(s) if you call the police, at which piont you will have to answer – why are you snooping on what is none of your business? Perhaps you could organize an old fashioned mob and go after the abusive parent. What are you going to do? String them up to the tree outside of their own house? OR perhaps, as what it sounds like the “No Statist” rhetoricians endorse, is simply to do nothing.
Like it or not, the “state” is there to provide (at least ideally) a neutral, third party structure as enforcer of consensus-generated laws and protections- which includes the upholding of individual rights, especially of those who otherwise are powerless to do so. Removing “the state” in these cases just means that if someone sees a child actually being abused – the only option you have if you want to do anything is to get an armed mob to apply some gang justice – which will only deal with the parent and not the child, if “deal with” is anything that can be defined by the likes of Kennedy.
I am “free range” in the parts of the debate where kids can’t explore the world on their own, where we are forced to buy things like expensive car seats that show no decrease in vehicle fatalities for children (and other such “free market” ideologies become “public law”), and other overreaches…but please don’t mix these issues of our children as individuals and as society in with partisan politics. I realize that is not easy in some instances, but this smacks more of a Fox News PR spin rather than a “free range” issue. Good clickbait though, I replied to it….
One more note – and this is a bit partisan – that part mentioning schools as “oppressive”. If anyone is a free-ranger AND a teacher may attest, the bulk of parents seem to prefer letting the school raise their children (teaching manners, responsibility, morals, etc). That has been the fact since at least the late 60’s to early 70’s. So if the bulk of the population doing so creates school environments that seem oppressive to a minority that raise their own kids rather than relying on “the state” to do so – then perhaps the problem is not with the schools but with the conditions of the parents who pass it off to create the environment we find ourselves in now. We now need 2 wage earners rather than one – so who is left to “raise” the kids? Schools. Sports teams. TV. Smartphones. Kim Kardashian.
So, don’t crucify “statist, oppressive schools” without realizing that our parents, as much as us (you, me, Kennedy – our society), are the ones that made the bed we are now collectively lying in. Give teachers and these schools the benefit of the doubt as much as one would ask from them. All teachers I know, whether you agree with methods or not, want the children they teach to do well and be happy and healthy members of society. Grouping them as some sort of oppression is ridiculous. I wonder, how oppressive is the shool her kids go to? Being a media elite(ish), I would bet she has a nice private school she can afford while battling the perceived oppression of public schools being inflicted on other people’s kids. I have a suggestion for her, if what I said is anything close to true – mind your own business.
Kennedy got off easy. She talks about her “innocence”, but she did leave her baby in the care of someone who turned out to be negligent. The friends were negligent in allowing the fall, and in not telling the honest story to the parents.
CPS can and does take kids away from parents for leaving a baby with a negligent caretaker.
George, yes, CPS takes children away from parents when they leave a child with an inappropriate babysitter, but this should not happen unless the decision to leave the child with that babysitter was itself negligent. In other words, you need to have known or the circumstances should have led you to know that the child was not safe in the hands of the babysitter you left it with. If the babysitter is visibly intoxicated when you drop the child off, that’s a negligent decision. If the babysitter is, to your knowledge, a responsible and caring babysitter who seems to have it together, but gets drunk AFTER you drop the child off, that’s not a negligent decision. If you couldn’t have known there was a problem, how can you be held responsible for it?
Another way to think of it is this. What would have been the use of taking the child away from Kennedy? How would it have benefited the child? Or would the purpose have been to punish Kennedy?
Sbs was never meant to be a real diagnosis but somehow despite it was supposed to be a theory. I would love to get rid of these so called abuse experts. I swear they wouldn’t know abuse if it hit them.
When society USUALLY ASSUMES THE WORSE, the society is going down a dark hole.
It would be interesting to keep score by State.
How many of these heavy-handed “Government Knows Best” events happen in Blue states, and how many happen in Red?
I suggest this only because one party tends to like “big government” and one tends not to.
Richard 2, answering those questions requires a CPS investigation similar to what happened.
I wonder about how this policy creates a deterrent to getting medical care. Another mom might have decided to forgo medical treatment because she cannot give the authorities a good explanation of how the injury happened.
My daughter rolled off the sofa when she was 6 WEEKS old, and I was literally two feet away from her. I rushed her to the pediatrician, and he didn’t believe me. He said “A 6 week old baby cannot roll over.” I made him examine her anyway, and he said “She’s fine. A bump on the head won’t affect her SAT scores..” and sent me home. He probably thought I was either hysterical or attention seeking.
Oh what a difference 14 years can make! Today, I’d probably get thrown in jail.
I can relate to pediatricians making threats. Either ours in Alabama was too damn stupid to live, or it was a racket. Low weight to height ratio is not enough, in and of itself, for a failure to thrive diagnosis. Only a complete, incompetent, moron of a doctor would rely on a single data point. An actual diagnosis requires some combination of low head circumference, failure to meet milestones, and/or failure to interact along with weight.
The shit for brains we were dealing with suggested more deep fried foods, and tried to require weekly weigh-ins (80th percentile length, 10th percentile weight, but crawling early, engaged, vocal, etc. Absolutely no co-indicator.). Our theory was he was looking to pad his profits by charging for check-ups with just a weight check. I pointed out the actual diagnosis requirements weren’t met, that his growth chart was nearly identical to mine (my mother had kept it), and threatened him with a malpractice suit.
And they had an explanation. He was staying with an approved babysitter, and while he was upset, there were no obvious injuries.
And it’s amazing how many times they ignore abuse that’s plain as the nose on your face. I get abuse isn’t always easy to see but it would help if non-experts would quit yelling abuse. Parents have a car that acting up and the kid due to see the doctor but can’t get there because of the bad car time to scream abuse. I sorry but you never get involved in any job you know nothing about. That how we got Trump get rid of Obama Legacy. I wouldn’t go make remarks on a Construction site because I know nothing about it. And nobody should involve themselves in a field in with they know very little. After all talk is cheap hard work actually cost something.
James, the social workers vote Democrat. The Democrats are big believers in the nanny state. Hillary Clinton even wrote a book on how it takes a village to raise a child.
Kennedy has a legitimate point and I believe her story unlike a few others who have responded. Any mother would feel threatened if a doctor said what this one said. He ethically has to check for other broken bones, but he went too far with accusing words. A trip to her home by a social worker and a policeman was over reach. The friends may not have known about the broken clavicle. One of my baby sisters broke her collar bone and we did not know until it showed up on x rays. At 6 months, babies certainly can’t tell anyone they broke something or where it hurts.
It would not be uncommon for a baby to wiggle and roll around and off. Parents do their best to prevent this from happening, but it still does. We have no idea how my baby sister got her injury. Our home was a safe and normal place to grow up.
Real abuse does happen, so a keen eye is needed in the medical profession not accusations.
I admit that sometimes the whole it takes a village to raise a kid is good but sometimes it just a pain in the neck. A kid get hurt and parents don’t know how it happened. What are they supposed to watch the kid every minute so if they should get hurt they will know? Plus there are diseases which mimic abuse but you have to testing to tell the difference.
“When society USUALLY ASSUMES THE WORSE, the society is going down a dark hole.â€
I’m an engineer. When I design something such as a bridge, I assume the worst. I design it to withstand a heavier load than it will encounter. I do this to ‘Cover You A$$’. However, when this is applied to people it’s highly insulting! Assuming the worst mentality has been growing for decades! However, Assume the worst is fantastic for Tv rating! These two feed each other. The dark hole that we’re in is getting very dark
“The Democrats are big believers in the nanny state.â€
I don’t agree. I’m not Democrat or Republican but I can find terrible faults in both extreme views. I also know about mudslinging and propaganda. It’s not only in politics but has infested a large percentage of the world.
The real enemy is to believe that things only black and white. You are either one of US or you are one of THEM. We hate all of THEM with all the venom that we can muster. If you agree with anything on their side then you must be a them!
SteveD,
The “big government” party you’re talking about… is that the party that likes to legislate on who can use which bathroom, and what a woman can do with her body, and which couples are allowed to get married and which couples can’t?
Both parties have their fair share of ridiculous ideology and their own style of government overreach
Donald–
Very well said! It always seems to boil down to exactly that– US vs. THEM mentality.
It’s a big part of what’s wrong with politics, policing, mass incarceration, the child welfare system/family court, and we could go on and on…
Could not agree more, the state has entirely too much power over our children and not enough accountability to WE THE PEOPLE.
If you had any questionable history at all, you might decide not to go to the doctor for many things vs. risk them taking your kid away. Is that better for the kid?
I mean, I’m glad that doctors (and teachers etc.) are mandatory reporters, but it seems “the state” is often not very good at determining who is being abused and who isn’t. We need to fix that.
How very odd.
Yesterday I commented that this headline is a full-on lie, and today, it’s gone.
You can see where other people responded to it, but the original? poof! Nope! No one ever pointed out that “Almost Had Her Baby Taken Away by the State” is total bullshit. Can’t have that!
Yeah — the headline is misleading.
And it’s not that I don’t believe that Kennedy didn’t have a traumatic thing happen to her family, but details do matter. I’m still unclear as to why LAPD was charged with evaluating her home.
For the purposes of the article (which is her political viewpoint) it’s enough, but for the purposes of evaluating if the hospital or CPS mishandled it? Definitely not enough.
As others have pointed out, if they cannot explain how the child ended up with a broken clavicle, it certainly is an unusual situation for a Dr to be presented with. She doesn’t say when she learned of the fall and when that was conveyed to the Drs and social worker. Of course, the article isn’t just about the incident.
” is that the party that likes to legislate on who can use which bathroom,”
Most of the bathroom legislation has been retaliatory against city ordinances which dictate who can use which bathroom, just in a different direction from the proposed legislation.
“and what a woman can do with her body,”
Oh you mean what a woman can do with the body of another living person living inside of her?
and which couples are allowed to get married and which couples can’t?”
We’ve already given the state the power to decide the parameters of what it will recognize as a valid marriage. The debate isn’t about giving the state more or less authority, but over what definitions it should use.
Nice try. But fail.
“Most of the bathroom legislation has been retaliatory against city ordinances which dictate who can use which bathroom, just in a different direction from the proposed legislation.”
Which is fine. Unless you argument is “they want to regulate and we want to not regulate. So here’s OUR regulations…”
Pro Tip: You can’t argue “they do it and we don’t” at the same time you argue “they do it, so it’s OK that we do it, too.” No matter what “it” is in those two sentences. Pick one or the other, and stay with it.
Second Pro Tip: Your mama should have taught you by the time you were about ten that “but they were doing it,too!” is not an excuse for wrongdoing.
“Oh you mean what a woman can do with the body of another living person living inside of her?”
No. What a woman can do with cells which may or may not eventually develop into another living person.
“We’ve already given the state the power to decide the parameters of what it will recognize as a valid marriage. The debate isn’t about giving the state more or less authority, but over what definitions it should use.”
Correct. The debate is “Should they use the more inclusive definition, or the less-inclusinve one?”
Here’s a similar argument to yours. Can you see the flaw in it?
States already have to power to determine who is, and who is not allowed to vote in elections. So our proposal to strip voting rights from our political opponents isn’t any kind of power grab. It’s just a debate of what the definition of “voter” is…
“Nice try. But fail.”
Excellent self-analysis.
For a big picture view, google Senator Nancy Schaefer. Look at the work she was doing.
She should be suing the doctor for malpractice. X-raying a baby’s entire body?! How much carcinogenic radiation did they put into that poor child? That’s child abuse, not a concerned mother bringing a hurt baby to the hospital!
This is a complete non-story.
The lady’s baby was absolutely not almost taken by CPS. CPS conducted a very brief investigation that ruled out abuse after an infant was brought into the emergency room with an unexplained broken bone. Sounds like the ER doctor, like many others, needs a much better bedside manner, but otherwise nothing objectionable happened here.
What is it you think should happen when an infant comes into the ER with an injury that cannot happen during the normal course of being 6mo old and nobody can explain how it did happen? Assume nothing untoward happened and not ask any further questions? Should all parents be given this benefit of the doubt or just white, upper class mother’s who breastfeed?
No idea why my phone decided to throw a random apostrophe into mothers.
I agree with Shelley that the CPS and police getting involved was overreach, and the doctor was out of line making accusations… I understand that from his perspective it was suspicious that they didn’t have an explanation, on the other hand, they’d had babysitters the previous evening (so there was a reason they didn’t know everything) and it was the first time baby had such an injury, so indeed, why suspect the worst right away? Accidents happen, and getting the authorities involved is a huge ordeal for a family.
“being accused of something that you haven’t done wrong”
‘I killed my husband successfully but now they still accuse me!’
@Donna: Sounds like your phone is a backstabber.