American Academy of Pediatrics Wants Kids to Spy on their Parents
This is just plain outrageous:
They’re watching you right now.
They counted every beer you drank during last night’s Red Sox [team stats] game.
They see you sneaking out to the garage for a smoke.
They know if you’ve got a gun, and where you keep it.
They’re your kids, and they’re the National Security Agency of the Nanny State.
I found this out after my 13-year-old daughter’s annual checkup. Her pediatrician grilled her about alcohol and drug abuse.
Not my daughter’s boozing. Mine.
“The doctor wanted to know how much you and mom drink, and if I think it’s too much,” my daughter told us afterward, rolling her eyes in that exasperated 13-year-old way. “She asked if you two did drugs, or if there are drugs in the house.”
“What!” I yelped. “Who told her about my stasher, I mean, ‘It’s an outrage!’ ”
I turned to my wife. “You took her to the doctor. Why didn’t you say something?”
She couldn’t, she told me, because she knew nothing about it. All these questions were asked in private, without my wife’s knowledge or consent.
“The doctor wanted to know how we get along,” my daughter continued. Then she paused. “And if, well, Daddy, if you made me feel uncomfortable.”
Great. I send my daughter to the pediatrician to find out if she’s fit to play lacrosse, and the doctor spends her time trying to find out if her mom and I are drunk, drug-addicted sex criminals.
We’re not alone, either. Thanks to guidelines issued by the American Academy of Pediatrics and supported by the commonwealth, doctors across Massachusetts are interrogating our kids about mom and dad’s “bad” behavior.
The idea that the AAP has any business routinely interfering in the relationship between parents and their kids, much less suggesting that doctors should put kids in the position of reporting on their parents perfectly legal behavior is breathtakingly arrogant. Unless there's some evidence of abuse or problematic behavior reported by the child, a doctor simply has no business asking such questions.
Any doctor who showed such a blatant disregard for proper boundaries would no longer be mine, or my child's. It's one thing to make an effort to protect children where there's some evidence of a threat. It's quite another to treat parents as though they are criminal threats until proven otherwise.