Flash Mobs Prompt Curfews and Invoke Child Welfare

I remember the campaign when I was much younger, at 10 p.m. on television, "Parents, do you know where your children are?" In this child-centric society we don't even dare ask that, until it gets violent.

In a schizophrenic response to unsupervised children causing public mayhem at night, committing assaults and roaming the streets in flash mobs, Philadelphia has instituted a curfew for children under 18, complete with fines and penalties upon the parents and threats of putting the naughty kiddies into foster care.


This response is schizophrenic because parents are afraid to discipline their children for fear of child welfare agencies intruding into the privacy of the family after the brat hotlines his parents for exercising parental responsibility by daring to discipline or correct their child. Now, parents are going to be punished for doing as the child welfare agencies have demanded for decades, not spanking the brats.

Face it, far more children are placed in foster care for purported abuse allegedly arising out of discipline than for not being disciplined. Child welfare agencies have tied mommy and daddy's hands, and now the kids are running amok.

Contrary to popular, bleeding heart liberalism, this issue  is much less about poverty or lack of education than it is about the well-intentioned nanny state punishing parents for controlling their kiddies, for  instilling a sense of responsibility and a work ethic, for building character, and for punishing bad behavior. Kids are protected by child welfare agencies from having chores, family responsibilities, structure to guide them and are insured parents impose no consequences for wrongdoing.

Now, we are reaping what the child savers have sowed.

Flash mobs of kids who have no sense of right and wrong, only a sense of entitlement. Kids hooked in to social media to coordinate their violence. Kids who have been taught by the schools and the government that the world revolves around them and owes them a living, unfettered happiness and no consequences, complete with child welfare agencies to insure that none of these ideals are infringed by their parents.

This is not to say the all of the parents are blameless. Some of these parents are lousy parents. They don't supervise their kids because they don't want to, because their priorities place these kiddies lower than their own desires.

And haven't we as a society been conditioned to that? Schools are free day care for working parents. Having abdicated responsibility for the care of the kiddies during the day, it's only reasonable to extend that into the night. Or, parents have been convinced by the "experts" of the cop-out fallacy that by the teenage years, a child is going to do what he wants and there is nothing mommy and daddy can do to stop them, we may as well resign ourselves to that fact. As long as the law give parents permission to abdicate their parental duties under threat of a child welfare intervention, you will have kids running amok.

Before social media, it was pretty much one kid and a few friends who ran amok. Social media connected youths are now more powerful, much like collective bargaining, have become a force to be reckoned with. An undisciplined, narcissistic, immature, emotionally charged force, with raging hormones, unreasoned anger, and rebellious of authority. These are the predictable fruits of thirty years of child welfare laws.



Mr. Mayor, unless the legislature ties the hands of child welfare when they intrude into families who are at least trying to control their kiddies, your sanctions against the parents of bratty teens and threats of foster care are futile. Child welfare agencies are far scarier than your puny little sanctions. As for the threats of foster care, any attorney who represents responsible parents who get lassoed into this dragnet can simply argue that the parents are damned if they do discipline and damned if they don't.