Overview
- Bad parenting strongly correlates with crime.
- We must address parenting to heal our world. Without proper guidance, children will unlikely grow into adults that have the essential values to live a happy, productive, meaningful and peaceful life.
- We should all teach our children the 3L Philosophy. In fact, it would be ideal to reclaim the responsibility of educating our children from the one-size-fits-all government approach. Model and embrace the teachings yourself.
- While the 3L Philosophy is presented as a path to achieving world peace, it is also a practical philosophy for raising children
- It provides a blueprint for how we should interact with each other, setting out legal rules detailing how we must not act and moral rules detailing how we should act.
- Bad parenting is not a defence to any criminal charge, but is can be a mitigating factor in a sentencing decision.
Fiduciary duty
- The legal minimum parenting standards are set by the fiduciary duty to provide minimally sufficient food, shelter, healthcare, and access to some form of education. Failure to do so should be subject to a formal legal consequence for breaching fiduciary duty.
- Physically beating a child resulting in objective injuries is also obviously a breach.
- Reasonable minds disagree on precisely where formal intervention in the parent-child relationship is legally justified. In such cases, as with all grey areas, local communities should decide.
- A free society should tolerate a wide range of parenting styles.
- We should also be mindful that minimum standards reflect economic realities in the relevant community, which differ widely in different places.
- Still, there is a difference between inadequate and legally insufficient parenting – the former calls for our compassion and offers of voluntary assistance. The latter violates the Legal Principle and is correctly subject to formal consequences to remedy the insufficiency.
- In many cases, the remedy could be mandated education, counselling, or monitoring to ensure minimum parental duties are discharged. In the most severe cases where severing parental rights is at issue, the heightened standard of proof referred to as “clear and convincing” correctly applies to prove assertions of gross neglect and abuse. Criminal prosecution may also be appropriate.
