Betty Freauf -- Would More Woodsheds Reduce Juvenile Delinquency?

Does it feel to you like it does me that ever since most American homes now have central heating and we no longer have woodsheds out back that juvenile delinquency has increased?

Of course, when the woodsheds disappeared, so did the chore of packing the wood into the house by junior so that the family could be kept warm. Other silly child-labor laws followed preventing young people from learning a responsible work ethic.

Electric dishwashers replaced the "bonding" done between mothers and daughters after the meals as they washed and dried dishes together. Many young girls today don't know how to cook nutritional meals or even change a baby's diaper before their babies are born.

Spankings have been replaced by time outs and professional school counselors with Ph. Ds (in the blue collar man's vocabulary, that means "piled higher and deeper.)

A May 15, 1966 article appeared in the FAMILY WEEKLY by a Judge Gardner who told "Why Good Parents Often Rear Bad Children." He said allowing children to grow up in an environment without firm standards of discipline that are consistently enforced -- sometimes across a mother's knee -- is important. In 1966 all this New Age, feel-good malarkey was not on the radar. Good parents were still applying the board of education in many homes and then along came the "psychosis" (impaired contact with reality) money-making industry which said violence only begets violence.

The judge said in his juvenile courts, he administered, by court action, figurative spankings that doting parents failed to administer years before. The tragedy was that the youngster wouldn't be in his court if the parents had done it themselves sometime in the past.

We can blame Dr. Benjamin Spock for lack of parenting skills. His book sold nearly 50 million copies since its appearance in 1946 second only to the Holy Bible in total sales. He was eulogized at his funeral in March 1998 as "revolutionizing parenting for the baby boom generation." Dr. Spock said we shouldn't spank our children when they misbehave because their little personalities would be warped and we might damage their self-esteem. Dr. Spock's grandson committed suicide. By contrast, Judge Gardner said a good spanking for an antisocial act results in more than a rosy posterior, it creates character.

Few people realized Dr. Spock was an apostle of Freudian psychology, socialism and world government. During the 1960s, Spock became one of the most famous activists in well-known communist front groups such as the National Committee to Abolish the House Un-American Activities Committee. Spock and his Red Diapered Doper Babies (as talk show host Michael Savage calls them) eventually were successful in getting this Un-American Committee defanged and communist infiltration into our government agencies continued unabated.

So the next time you hear the media or some other liberal refer to "McCarthyism" in a negative way, you'll remember McCarthy, among the most vilified elected leaders in America, was right and if the media had simply written the truth instead of lies, we would not be facing the possibilities of World War III and Armageddon today.

Due to government increasingly getting larger requiring more of the husband's income being devoured to support these unconstitutional United Nations administrative agencies, many women were forced to leave their young children in day care and go to work. And feeling guilty, many then became overindulgent parents.

A federally funded study a few years ago on academically oriented day-care centers by the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development concluded that children, who attended a center, which was to improve their IQ's, were more likely to kick, hit, threaten push and argue with others. They were more aggressive than other children of the same age with stay-at-home mothers who still believed in an old-fashioned spanking for anti-social behaviors.

Working mothers felt that if their children were in an environment with adult supervision there would be less potential for delinquency but that likewise proved not always to be the case.

Florida Circuit Judge Frank A. Orlando, who headed a juvenile court for four years, stated that the public school systems "are the heaviest contributors to delinquency." And according to Ira Schwartz who was administrator of the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention of the Law Enforcement Assistance Administration, a part of the Justice Department, said "People think that if kids are in school all the time there would be no delinquency. It's a myth. The rate of referrals to juvenile courts -- and this is fairly consistent nationally -- shows that delinquency is low in summer when kids are out of school. In September, it goes up. This was reported in PARADE, Oct. 12, 1980. And today the "educrats" want the children and THEIR families to avail themselves of the Family Resource Centers located at the school. [www.newswithviews.com/Betty/Freauf12.htm]

When we have an increase in juvenile delinquency, we always have those tax-paid and/or subsidized professionals with all their sterling qualifications and impressive worldly initials behind their names who can be called upon for their "expert" advice to help the kids through their troubled stages oftentimes caused by overindulgent, overprotective and overdefensive parents who depend on the system to do their job of parenting for them.

However, a Drexel University sociologist did a 30-year follow-up of the classic "Cambridge Somerville Youth Study" on Juvenile Delinquency. In the original study, first reported in 1948, an experimental group of 253 high-risk problem boys was extensively counseled. A matching (behavior history and family background) control group received no counseling.

In 1975, Professor McCord contacted the original participants and found that the experimental subjects were "more likely to commit criminal acts, be alcoholics, suffer from mental illness, die younger and have less prestigious jobs than the control group.

Stunned by her findings, Professor McCord re-analyzed her data, but still concluded, "Those who had more frequent contacts with their counselors were more likely to be a failure." This was reported in the March 1978 AMERICAN PSYCHOLOGIST.

And now fast forward to the year 2003. If some boy today does not toe the politically correct line and has a streak of rebellion, the professionals may immediately claim the child is "at risk" (See At Risk article) due to the " bad influence" of his parents, the child is immediately mislabeled with Attention Deficit Disorder or some other "disease" totally unheard of a few decades ago and is immediately put on some mood-altering drug such as Ritalin, taking away all the natural spontaneity of the child. Teachers should NOT BE ALLOWED to see the previous record of a child. Each child should be judged individually by teachers as the child progresses through the system. In some cases, the child may be acting out because the teacher has not been trained how to handle these types of mischievous young men (usually its the boys!) and then these labels follow the child all through his school years causing even more irreparable harm.

And it's getting worse. The JOURNAL OF THE AMERICAN MEDICAL ASSOCIATION published an article in 2000 showing that the use of these mood-altering drugs for preschoolers jumped in the early 1990s. Among children under five, the investigators found that the use of drugs like Ritalin and Prozac doubled or tripled from 1991 to 1995. These young children are literally being given chemical lobotomies and their parents stand in line for the prescription drugs.

And then we wonder why kids who seem normal, get good grades and seem to be socially well adjusted will take a gun to school and start killing people. All of the children involved in the school shootings were on mood-altering drugs -- usually Ritalin.

Our local October 2002 paper said a school psychologist was honored. "Her value to area schools grows as violence increases." According to the Cambridge-Somerville Youth Study, she's the cause not the cure but dumbed down school board members and administrators just don't get it! She says her career started in 1986 but today instead of waiting until high school, some children now show disrespect in the first grade or even kindergarten so now it's early childhood intervention that messes with a kid's mind at an even earlier age.

I also see another very disturbing trend that may be adding fuel to the fire of juvenile delinquency. More and more women are not only heading households as single mothers, serving as judges handling juvenile cases (Single mother "Judging Amy" on TV) but are heading the schools as principals and superintendents. The radical feminist movement has been a success. Men are no longer needed to help raise children and we are seeing the dismal results. The psychologist above said children are now showing disrespect in the first grade or even kindergarten. Could it be because the women are in charge? Is there some type of correlation here? God intended for men to be stronger, tougher and less intimidated by the littlest folks in order to throw a little fear into them at an early age. Once children lose respect for their superiors, gain the upper hand and begin challenging authority, we have chaos. There must be a chain of command in a civil society or bedlam will be the result.

Perhaps what we need is a return to the woodsheds and MORE GRANDPAS and fewer child protective workers. Let the sheriff investigate the truly legitimate child abuse cases and an informed jury decide the innocence or guilt of the person allegedly perpetrating terrible acts upon our children.

WE NEED MORE GRANDPAS

Junior bit the meter man Junior hit the cook Junior's anti-social now (According to the book)

Junior smashed the clock and lamp Junior hacked the tree (Destructive trends are treated in chapter two and three)

Junior threw his milk at Mom Junior screamed for more (Notes of self-assertiveness are found in chapter four)

Junior tossed shoes and socks Out into the rain (Negative, that is normal - disregard the stain)

Junior sat dad's shirt on fire Whittled grandpa's pine (That's to gain attention see page eighty-nine)

Grandpa seized his slipper and yanked Junior 'cross his knee (He's read nothing but the Bible since 1893)

This poem and an article entitled "What's Happening To The Kids" was published in THE FLORIDA FORUM in the spring of 1989 as the Florida Legislators were debating eliminating the law which prohibited school boards from banning spanking of children in the classroom.

The article ended by saying, "In the days when a woodshed stood behind the American home, a great deal of what passes as juvenile delinquency was settled out of court." And I'm betting many readers will say a hearty AMEN!!

Related Article:
Is Your Family At Risk?

Betty is a former Oregon Republican Party activist having served as state party secretary, county chairman, 5th congressional vice chairman and then elected chairman, a precinct worker for many years and twice ran unsuccessfully for the Oregon State Legislature. The Republican tradition is to stay neutral in Primary races but in Betty's case. They supported her opponent. E-Mail: bettyfreauf@webtv.com

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