child abuse.....

I just read a Denver news article about a woman who, in what they call a "road rage" incident, was charged with "child abuse" because she threw a cup of water at the other vehicle and some of the water hit a toddler in the back seat. Child abuse. I no longer understand the term "child abuse."

I began my non-understanding of the term in 2004 with a low-level criminal case against a mom who required her teenager to sleep out on the deck at their home during the Colorado summer on the front range (with sleeping bag and a lot of camping equipment) because he continually kept stealing from family members when they all slept and had been caught yet again after making all kinds of contracts and promises not to do it. She was charged with child abuse.

Shortly thereafter, I learned that if a driver is cited with a DUI (Drinking Under the Influence), and the driver has a child or children in the car, then the driver will also receive a charge of "child abuse" for each of the children in the car. I think of my dad all those years ago, requiring us to get in that huge brown Chevy sedan to go get ice cream while he was so drunk that he passed out at the wheel while driving. The house was on a hill above a park, with no walls to stop a drop down the hill. Sometimes my drunk stepmother was there to correct things....and sometimes we had to do it from the back seat. I am fairly certain this was the beginning of my ulcers forming. As we kids got older, we developed all sorts of coping skills, including learning to drive at absurdly young ages, to endure the ice cream adventures from the hill house driveway and still love dad. Was he a "child abuser" in my mind? No. Was he stupid? Probably. Was I stupid for getting in the car? Yep. But him a "child abuser"? I'm not there yet.

The jury eventually came back with a not guilty verdict in the case of the mom, but not before a LOT of confusing testimony that painted this mother as a religious nut and terrorist parent. This 15 year old boy had a long history of increasingly serious missteps with authority and the law, but of course most of that information is not generally allowed into evidence in a trial for various important reasons. Certainly the prosecution did not want that information to be let in because then the jury would also get to hear all of the measures this mom (and her subsequent new husband) had gone to help the son.

Nonetheless, this mom agonized through this trial, suffering all kinds of what I would call systemic bullying..... and all because she was desperate to find a solution to her son's bad behaviors. Various expensive therapists had not helped. Threats of jail to the son had not helped. Various programs in the community had not helped. The mom had been cited for allowing her son to be truant from school. Family and intervention therapies had not helped. She had gone the next step when no community resources could help....she acted in what I was taught in the 80's was called "tough love." You act badly, you get the consequences of those bad actions. In this case, he kept stealing inside the house. He was not allowed in the house. Pay no mind that there was nowhere left for him to go. No community programs wanted him. He was incorrigible. Look that $10 word up.

And so somewhere along the line, our civil, proscriptive society decided she was a child abuser and she had to go on trial for it.

Yeah, so that is why I am confused about that term. Apparently bad parenting or failed parenting or desperate parenting is child abuse. Apparently parenting and guiding a strong-willed child who ends up making bad decisions in his teen development necessarily means YOU the parent are an abuser of children. Watch out for how you raise your children.

Balance people; we need a little balance.