Picking On and Picking Off Parents

Who's got your child's back?

Is it the certificated class, the malignantly multiplying army of school administrators, lawyers and agency-registered wonks who claim to know best what's in your child's interest?

Or is it you?

The Cleveland Bar Association is threatening to fine the parents of an
autistic boy $10,000 for not hiring a lawyer when they brought, and largely won, a court case on their son's behalf four years ago. . . Brian and Susan Woods settled their case with the Akron school district in 2002 when the district agreed to send Daniel, now 11, to a private school.

Michael Harvey, the Rocky River lawyer handling the charges for the bar association, said the goal is to protect the rights of children. Harvey said special education laws are so complex that children need experts, not untrained parents, looking out for their rights.

"You hope parents will do the right job for the child, but that's not always the case," Harvey said.

Maybe I can make sense of this -- we support the certificated class so it can exercise a sort of prior restraint over all parenting, to interpose legalisms between even successful parents and well-served children, at every opportunity they can claim by law?

"If the law supposes that," said Mr. Bumble..."the law is a ass — a idiot.''

And if the law indeed has been made too complex for garden variety parents to act effectively in their own child's best interest, then not only is the law "a ass" but so are all the lawyers and schoolfolk who mistakenly suppose we're dumb enough to deserve being displaced as our children's primary decision-makers and protectors.

Grown children will leave both home and school behind, but we parents have their backs 'til death do us part (and beyond, if we can manage it.)

NYT's Anna Nahney also wrote recently about parental support:

Nationally, 34 percent of those between 18 and 34 receive cash from their parents annually . . .
Dr. Bob Schoeni said his study suggests that extended education, the exploration of career options and delayed marriage are the causes of the long transition to self-sufficiency. Parental support "is not the driver of a delayed transition, it is a response to it," he said. . .
Parental support allows adult children to explore careers with low earning potential, to make career shifts or to maintain a quality of life.

At 27, Ms. Press has just completed eight years of college, four at Sarah Lawrence and four more at the Manhattan School of Music. Mr. and Mrs. Press said they believe their daughter's energy and thoughts should be on her education, and now that she is pursuing a music career they want her to have the best chance possible in an unforgiving field.

Gosh, I hope the certificated class doesn't disagree with her parents, and see this as ripe for their certificated social engineering too, maybe try to tax what her parents give her as income, or handicap her auditions by claiming some peer injustice they should be well-paid to parse and police evermore?

I meant that to sound sarcastic, but it's hardly possible to parody legal excess these days, since we've been brought to a boil in the Death of Common Sense pot.

My parents always told me my education was the one thing nobody could take from me, echoing that movie moment where a silhouetted Papa O'Hara presses the red clay of Georgia into his willful daughter's hand and intones, "Land, Katie Scarlett! It's the only thing that matters, the only thing that lasts."

My mother's father inherited mountain properties for which my parents in turn were good stewards, but land was not their true passion. They believed in education, and in me. I believed in education, and in them. They continued to pay for the graduate studies I otherwise would have dropped once I was out of the house and working full-time.

"It may mean that they don't have to take the first job available," said Jeffrey Jensen Arnett, a developmental psychologist and the author of "Emerging Adulthood: The Winding Road from the Late Teens Through the Twenties."

Through graduation ceremonies awarding the diplomas no one could take from me, what really mattered was that my mom and dad had my back -- I counted on them to have my best interest at heart, not the schools and certainly not the lawyers.

In fact, I never had need of lawyers until my frugal, modest parents died, and I discovered too late they had trusted too much in the enduring value of both education and land -- and of the law as sensible and just, much less frugal and modest like my folks.

They had deeds and diplomas galore but not much cash, there never had been much money. So lawyers took the legacy lands on mountain lakes they'd left us as inheritance, quickly sold it off for taxes (like Tara?) and pocketed most of the rest as management fees. Through one apparently legal device or another, four of every five dollars vanished into the hands of the governing class.

I listened to Warren Zevon a lot at first, willing my dad to somehow send enough lawyers, guns and money, get me out from in front of that spewing fan, maybe into a hot bath. I had thought my parents remained at my back, had worked hard enough and planned well enough to always be there for us, that our best interest was a legacy our law would respect. I was wrong.

So I wound up where my folks had started, with ample education credentials no one could take away, lands that HAD been taken away, a bad taste in my mouth for probate, tax and real estate lawyers, and my own little ones at home.

I was beginning to understand that my parents had a more serene and complex, a more, um - educated? - sense of what mattered in life than Gerald O'Hara. Public success isn't decided by the diplomas and deeds you have on file, any more than success at home is having the right marriage and birth certificates on file, or money in the bank.

If success is defined not by law or riches, rule or school, but by who you become, and how you pass THAT on to your children -- then how could any lawyer or bureaucrat possibly belong between you and your child in that process?

My parents believed in public schools and sent us unfailingly even during the desegregation zoning wars and bus riots of the 70s, I suppose because the public schools hadn't yet stopped believing in parents.

The whole social contract was different then. I believe my parents would never have believed this self-serving school superintendent pontificating about "the interests of the children" in May 1 as a day without immigrants:

"Our kids have learned very much that they can become victims, that they can be used" for political ends, Nelson said. "Our student body is better able to understand the issues and what the ramifications are for missing school. That's the safest, most secure area for them to be ---- and certainly in their best interest."

I believe that would have enraged my parents, perhaps motivated them to action against any institution that would tell children such half-truths in the name of serving their best interest.

Kids can become victims and be used for political ends, all right, even by School itself.

So.
Who's got your child's back?

You, or the certificated cl-asses?

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