It’s not an easy decision. You are taking it on face value that the child is right. I have seen many children afraid to tell their parents something that they think will upset them, only for the parents to be totally cool with it. It’s very common.

Now, if you truly believe that the child is right, I do think there’s still a moral difference between not telling the parents and actively lying to them if they ask.

If asked, I think that probably the correctest decision is probably to refuse to answer and tell the parents that’s a conversation they need to have with their child? Idk.

I’ve seen a scenario where the parents were actively beating their kid if he got good grades because they wanted their kid to fail out. Should the school have lied to the parents about what grades he was getting? CPS refused to remove the kid from the home. What should the school have done in that scenario?

Ultimately, I think navigating when and how the state intervenes in parenting is tricky. It’s very case by case, and in most scenarios there aren’t really good answers. What’s the line where kids are taken away? What’s the line where the courts mandate training or intervention in the home? What’s the line where the state starts just actively lying to the parents about their child to protect them? If you’ve crossed the lying line, why haven’t you crossed the removal line?

I don’t know that there’s a good answer to a lot of these questions. But in general, I think that the state hiding things is usually the wrong answer.

I think it’s probably more analogous than you are painting it as. The trans community suffers elevated levels of suicide risk, and parents who are in the dark about what their child is going through are less equipped to get them the help they need if they need it. Parents of trans kids often have to get them emergency mental health services due to them being bullied or ostracized. If the parents are kept in the dark about it, they may not see the problem until it is too late.

And I agree that children aren’t property, but they also aren’t fully independent agents. Children need guidance. Children need to be raised by parents who love them and are involved in steering them to be a successful and active participant in society. Children should not be allowed to make every decision for themselves without question. They need to be required by an authority figure to eat their vegetables and brush their teeth.

They have agency certainly, but not unlimited agency, and we need to figure out what the left and right bounds of that agency are. And that will change as they age and get older, and will be different from child to child even. But who decides that? My gut is that it’s the parents. I feel like every other option is unpalatable.

I agree that the parents should be better plugged in with their kid and know what’s going on with them.

The question is more “to what degree should the state enforce good parenting.” Should being a bad parent be allowed by the state? Should the state be allowed to lie to you to trick you into being a better parent?

The parents in this situation seem like they probably suck. We don’t disagree on that.

I think I would agree for, like, a school counselor for instance. That’s much more analogous to something like a therapist. Teachers aren’t mental health professionals though. They’re there to teach.

But I think we need to have a more meta conversation about the idealized roles of parents and schools.

In my mind, the parent has the ultimate responsibility for the raising of their child. It is their job to teach their child how to be a good and responsible member of society.

School is there as an institution of formalized learning to help build an educated society.

School is not a day care. School is not there to teach your child how to be a good person. School does not obviate your responsibility as a parent to raise your child right.

Obviously teachers should model good behavior to the children in their care, as should every adult in their life, but the ultimate responsibility for that falls on the parents.

When the school actively lies to the parents about their child, they are taking away the parents ability to fulfill that responsibility.

Now, the school may be doing it for good reason. Many parents are bad parents, and are doing a poor job of raising their children. Most even. People suck.

But the state saying, “you’re not raising your children poorly enough that we are going to take them away from you, but we disagree with how you’re doing it enough that we’re gonna actively lie to you,” feels like a weird middle ground to live in that doesn’t feel great to me.

A slippery slope is saying “if we allow thing 1, then later we will allow thing 2.” That’s not what I’m saying at all.

I’m saying the current thing makes me uneasy, and trying to clarify the left and right bounds of when that one thing is okay to do, if it ever is.

I think we can all come up with instances where it’s wrong for the school to lie to parents. If you catch a kid smoking for instance, it shouldn’t be acceptable for the school to not tell the parents. And it should be doubly unacceptable if the parents ask for the school to lie to them about it.

Schools aren’t perfect. What I’m about to say might actually be a slippery slope, but if schools are allowed to lie to parents about their children, I don’t think it’s a far leap to say they will lie to cover up bullying and abuse to prevent themselves from being sued or held accountable. Bad schools can be just as bad at being a safe place for kids as bad parents.

But aside from that, I think there’s an important meta conversation to be had about what a parent’s responsibility to their child is. I think in addition to the obvious of providing a safe and loving home, a parent is responsible for raising their child to be a good member of society. It concerns me when the state begins to take that responsibility away from parents and put it on itself.

Now, sometimes that is something the state needs to do. If a child is being actively abused, the parents should be sent to prison, and the state should (in absence of another parental figure that can take in the child and is willing to do so) assume custody of that child. In which case it is the states responsibility to raise that child into a good and responsible member of society.

But these weird half measures where the state says, “you’re not an abusive enough parent for us to take your children away from you, but we don’t like the way you’re raising them enough that we’re gonna actively lie to you about what your child is doing at school,” feel bad to me.

To what degree should the state be allowed to hide things from someone’s legal guardians?

Like, I totally understand the impulse here, but I don’t know that it’s actually a good one.

What if the state refused to tell a kids parents that they were struggling with depression, and then the kid self harms, and the parents weren’t given the opportunity to provide the support network necessary to get them the help they need.

I’m certain that there are a lot of bad parents out there who would not handle this information about their child well. This article proves it even. But parents being terrible parents isn’t limited to this issue. Should the state be empowered to step in and force them to be better parents? Should the state be allowed to lie to them about what their child is doing at school in order to prevent them from making certain decisions about their child?

I’m not saying that the state has to reinforce the parents viewpoints. Far from it. Schools should be free to set curriculum to what they want and enforce whatever code of conduct makes sense for the school, parents be damned. But I feel a lot weirder about it when the state starts actively lying to the parents about what’s going on with their child while in the state’s care.

I mean, that’s why people believe Newsmax too. It’s not that they’re particularly dumb. It’s that most people prefer confirmation bias to facts.

Not immediately realizing this is obviously false has the same energy as when my dad quotes Alex Jones at me.

Have you actually read anything about this truck? It hasn’t even got an entertainment console. No GPS tracker. Hell, it doesn’t have power windows in the base model. What spyware do you think it has?

Though the fact that you’re asking me this gives me cause for concern that you don’t have that now.

Not as much a dad joke, but a similar joke by Emo Phillips that always makes me chuckle:

I found a wallet on the street with $100 in it. I was going to keep it, rather than return it, but then I thought, “how would I feel?”

And then I realized. I would want… to be taught a lesson.

Raise them better.

Look, I get ACAB, but these guys don’t seem to have been accused of doing anything in particular.

It’s wild to make a movie clearly identifying real life people who haven’t been tied to any wrongdoing, and then present them as committing a ton of felonies to include arson and multiple homicides (of fellow cops no less).

Like, these are real people trying to quietly live their lives, and now they have people thinking they’re extremely crooked based on a self-admittedly fictional narrative. It’s irresponsible at best.

Aflack and Damon self admit that the entire narrative is fiction past the opening setup. The events in the film don’t purport to be true.

However, before having them burn down a building and murder a supervisor and a fed, the film sets up an establishing sequence based on real life events that clearly tie the two fictional characters to two real people.

I get ACAB, but like, it’s kinda wild to make a film where you’re clearly representing real-life normal people, and then have them do a bunch of heinous stuff that they’re not even remotely accused of doing.

I see no paywall, and I’ve loaded it a few time (though you do have to scroll past a huge ad to keep reading, which is annoying.) It’s way more than 5 paragraphs though.

From the article:

Although Smith and Santana aren’t named in the film and weren’t involved in its production, the lawsuit claims that Santana was serving as the lead detective assigned to the real case, and Smith was the sergeant who supervised the investigative team. The film’s inclusion of real details about the case gives the impression that the characters are based on the plaintiffs, the suit said.

This, the lawsuit claims, has given friends, family members and colleagues the impression that the plaintiffs committed the criminal acts that appear in the film, which include (SPOILER ALERT) conspiring to steal seized drug money, murdering a supervising officer, communicating with cartel members, committing arson in a residential neighborhood, endangering the lives of civilians, repeatedly violating core law-enforcement protocols and executing a federal agent rather than making an arrest.

And it’s clear you stopped reading right there.

The movie is based off a real event in which those two officers are identifiable. That event was a drug bust and a large amount of drugs were confiscated.

The film then diverges from reality (by its own admission) and has those two identified officers murder a supervisor under direction from the drug cartels.

The real officers are saying that they were clearly doxxed in the beginning of the film (using too many real life details), and then the film represents them doing horrible things they didn’t do.

So no, the “real life details” did not in fact make them look bad.

That’s not what the article is saying. Did you read it?

It’s in the article. Aflack and Damon are not just the actors. They co-own and run the studio producing the film. They hired a person from the police department in question to consult on the film.

And, to be clear, this isn’t the police department being mad because this paints them in a bad light. The film starts with events based off a real case, but moves into a fictionalized narrative where two cops murder a supervisor while working for the cartels. The cops the characters are based on are suing because people know that the characters are based on them and don’t realize the rest of the narrative is fictionalized.

Welcome to Lemmy.

Setting aside the fact that polygraphs are pseudoscience mumbo jumbo that don’t work in any meaningful capacity, and the results of which are really just the vibes of the person running it (with all of their bigotry/biases on full display.)

The bigger issue is that there are over thirteen thousand school districts in the US. If each school board is four people on average, that’s over fifty thousand people you’d have to do polygraphs for. And that’s if all you wanted to do was school boards.

Trying to get all of those people polygraphs would be an absolute logistical nightmare. There aren’t that many polygraphers out there.

And we shouldn’t be legitimizing polygraphs anyway. They have time and time again been shown to be absolute bunk, and to discriminate against people with issues like anxiety (or really, anyone who gets agitated when you accuse them of something). The only people who can reliably pass polygraphs are sociopaths, which feels like the opposite of what you want to be selecting for here.