By Susan Brinkmann, OCDS
Staff Writer
One of the many little-known programs included in the Obama Administration’s health care reform package are “home visitation programs” for families with young children or who are expecting children to “educate” them on child behavior and parenting skills.
Syndicated Chuck Norris found the program buried in the House bill on page 838 under the heading: “Home visitation programs for families with young children and families expecting children,” which would provide (via grants to states) for home visitation programs to educate parents on child behavior and parenting skills.
The bill says that the government agents, the “well-trained and competent staff,” will “provide parents with knowledge of age-appropriate child development in cognitive language, social, emotional and motor domains … modeling, consulting, and coaching on parenting practices, skills to interact with their child to enhance age-appropriate development.”
Notwithstanding the fact that there are already programs such as Child Protective Services designed to protect children from abusive parents and all kinds of local and state agencies that help families in need of parenting services, why else might we need such a program?
“Are we to assume the State’s mediators will understand every parent’s social or religious core values on parenting?” Norris writes. “Or will they teach some secular-progressive and religiously neutered version of parental values and wisdom? And when they ‘consult and coach’ those who are expecting babies, will they ever decide circumstances are not beneficial for the child and encourage abortion?”
Although this program is supposedly “voluntary,” Norris isn’t buying it.
“Does that infer that this agency will just sit back passively until some parent says, ‘I need parenting skills. I don’t think I’ll call my parents, priest or friends, or read a plethora of books, but I’ll go down to the local government offices’? Not according to the specific targeted groups and problems, as identified on page 840 of the bill: the State ‘shall identify and prioritize serving communities that are in high need of such services, especially communities with a high proportion of low-income families. …’”
Norris asks: “(I)s all this what you want or expected in a universal health care bill being rushed through Congress: government agents coming into your home and telling you how to parent your children? When did government health care turn into government child care?”
He concludes: “Government needs less of a role in running our children’s lives and more of a role in supporting parents’ decisions for their children. Children belong to their parents, not the government. And the parents ought to have the right, and government support, to parent them without the fed’s mandates, education or intervention in our homes.”
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