Some readers may well wonder why I am persisting in blogging about child development issues in spite of personal attacks, which I must at least glance at for fear of missing legitimate comments. Do I just like to fight? Do I say "ain't" when other people say "is"? Do I have a method or treatment that I want to push for commercial reasons? Why do I care enough to continue?
When parents are misled by poorly trained or misguided professionals, their children suffer, and in the long run the parents suffer too. I care about the unnecessary misery resulting from advice that may be well-intentioned but is so far out of line as to be harmful rather than helpful.
Hard to imagine that any child-rearing advice would have that kind of impact? I'll tell you about an example, which you can read about at www.independent.com/news/2007/may/11/judge-brings-hammer-down-caged-kids-case. As an expert witness in this trial, I had access to a good deal of information which must be kept confidential, but this newspaper account and earlier ones gave a fairly complete description of the case.
Sylvia Jovanna Vasquez, a well-educated, well-to-do resident of Santa Barbara, California, adopted four children who had been in foster care and who were preschool age or older. She homeschooled them and also ran a day care center in her home. After the children had been with her for several years, a day care staff member revealed to the authorities a number of aspects of their living situation.
The eldest child, a girl approaching her teens, was well-treated, had a pleasant room, plenty of treats, and special lessons in an area of her interest (I don't want to reveal anything that might help identify her). However, Ms. Vasquez had decided that she was growing too fast and coming to puberty too quickly, so despite a pediatrician's statement that the girl was growing normally, Ms. Vasquez took her to Mexico and obtained a drug which she administered to the child. This drug, Lupron, is used to diminish libido in sex offenders and also to delay precocious puberty in children with that problem.
The other three children were treated in ways that Ms. Vasquez attributed to a book by the self-designated parent educator Nancy Thomas. These practices included limiting the children's diets to items like peanut butter sandwiches and oatmeal. More disturbingly, they also included confining the children for much of the day to enclosures which were nothing more nor less than cages, as the court saw when one of the devices was brought in on a truck for inspection. Of course, these cages did not have built-in toilet facilities, so the children were provided with buckets for urination and defecation. (They tried to avoid using these, for obvious reasons, and would attempt to wait for relief until released from the cage after many hours.)
Ms. Vasquez testified that she had received the book she relied on from her adoption caseworker, an employee of the state of California. Although she testified that she was alarmed by some of the children's behaviors, she did not follow advice she received about professional care for either physical or mental problems. She considered the book to provide all the guidance she needed.
The material by Nancy Thomas which guided Ms. Vasquez does not literally advise keeping children in cages, but it does state that confinement to a bare, dark room may be an appropriate way to handle adopted children. Ms.Thomas, like similar authors, believes that children adopted at any age suffer from disorders of emotional attachment, and that part of the treatment for this condition is convincing the child of the adoptive parent's absolute authority. Close confinement, refusal of normal facilities for hygiene, limitation of diet, and limitation of schooling were all suggested as ways to establish parental authority over the children.
Ms. Vasquez was persuaded by the Thomas material, especially as it had come to her from the hands of her caseworker. As a result of her acceptance of this misleading material, she seriously mistreated her adopted children for years, earned her own punishment in the form of a jail sentence, and caused the disruption of the adoptions of children who had already been through more than one custody situation. Misery for the children and for the adoptive mother herself resulted from the circulation of misinformation contradicting well-established principles of early development. The caseworker, and Thomas herself, received no punishment.
This is why I care, and why I persist in defying efforts to argue that these problems do not exist.
