As I mull over the CEDU train wreck (and the many family, private train wrecks that fuel the therapeutic boarding school / residential treatment industry) I'm impressed again and again how there's not a switch that goes from healthy to dysfunctional. It is a long arc, a gradation --
Laura at Apt. 11D is getting school district help for her son. The process of getting the help is -- well, here are two well-educated, articulate professionals, and they find it intrusive and degrading. Imagine being a single mom with limited education, just trying to get help for your kid.
Russel Arben Fox comments:
I feel bad for social workers, on a certain level; they're put in a terrible bind by the conflicting demands of their daily work. But if I think there's any kind of integrity at all to how Melissa and I raise and educate our children, I also have to challenge the way social work invariably treats the messy details of life with distant, antiseptic suspicion. Towards the end of his life, Christopher Lasch was writing a lot about this; how the "caring professions" often express (or are ultimately obliged to express, through the homogenizing force of the bureaucracy) an antipathy towards ordinary family life.
(RAF in his blog is also saying to the liberals, wake up, you have to take the social conservatives' parenting concerns seriously!)
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