Friday, February 22, 2008

The Commissioner speaks

On the matter of the petition that today exceeded 300,000 signatures and asks that New Zealanders have a say in parenting their children, Cindy Kiro says,

"If the petition backers truly cared about good parenting, they would, like all the reputable national and international child welfare organisations, be encouraging positive parenting. They would acknowledge that we know more about parenting and child health and development now than we did in our parents’, grandparents’ and great grandparents’ times."

We must all be profoundly grateful for the existence of such a wise and all-knowing Children's Commissioner. She recognises there is nothing to be learned from the past (unless it's tikanga passed through her whakapapa). She knows traditions serve no purpose. What came before should be spurned and replaced with the new knowledge.

Because latter generations have increasingly turned out well-adjusted, healthy, law-abiding, independent citizens, while our parents, their parents and grandparents failed to, embracing what Sue Bradford now calls "the forces of ignorance and bigotry".

What a wonderful new age of enlightenment we now live in. Free from youth crime, tagging, gangs, murder and mayhem. None of our children would dream of leaving such a paradise.

Posterity will be forever indebted to you Commissioner.

4 comments:

scrubone said...

Not to mention the brats Sweden raised now have children of their own.

Anonymous said...

Cindy Kiro approaches child abuse in the same way that Sue Bradford has done, being heavy handed on the good end of the parenting scale rather than the bad.

Where is the campaign to "sort out" the abusive situations in our communities, isolating the shocking treatment meted out to children in too many homes, as we read of almost daily?

Instead Kiro and Bradford, by directing their vitriol at the well meaning parents amongst us, alienate the very people who would support them most in any clean-up operation of bad parenting.

The politics, that Kiro derides, is not of the making of those she criticises.

Until she is able to recognise the real villains of the piece, her role and office will continue to be an irrelevance.

mojo said...

... and these positive parenting programmes are nowhere near as effective as is touted by their proponents ... furthermore the effectiveness of them is enhanced by incorporating punishment procedures. Cindy and Sue are not addressing child abuse, they are simply pushing an ideology under the guise of reducing child abuse ... this is quite, quite different ... and they are prepared to pursue this agenda quite independently of the view of the majority of those on which it will and has impacted. Police in ten schools is just the beginning.

Scotty said...

Well said.