Connaught “Connie” Marshner was a young staffer at Young Americans for Freedom in the early 1970s when she successfully launched a grassroots letter-writing campaign that helped spur President Richard Nixon to veto the only bill for a national childcare system ever to pass Congress. The language of this anti-daycare campaign presaged that of the “pro-family movement” (Marshner’s coinage) that took shape later in the decade, led by the Rev. Jerry Falwell and the Moral Majority, which helped Ronald Reagan get elected. Sending children off to state-sponsored institutions, at ever younger ages, intoned Nixon in his 1971 veto message, would subvert “the family in its rightful position as a keystone of our civilization,” committing “the vast moral authority of the national government to the side of communal approaches to child rearing over against the family-centered approach.” Seven years later, Marshner-now a staffer at the Heritage Foundation-published her first book, whose first chapter included the following passage: "Mothers have long observed that after the child starts school, the rest of the family starts catching more colds and flus. But other forms of disease are not so evident. What about the personality traits that start developing? What about the dissatisfaction with family rules and routines? What about boredom with learning loss of curiosity about ideas and the world at large? Why do children suddenly begin to complain about responsibilities toward little brothers or sisters? Why do they resent doing accustomed chores? Why does off-color language or unfamiliar slang suddenly crop up in a child’s conversation? As childhood yields to preadolescence and adolescence, and the condition gets worse, parents are told that these symptoms indicate normal stages of maturation. But when a mother is told by her high schooler, ‘You don’t know what’s right and wrong for me’ or ‘You don’t really care about me,’ she knows in her heart that it is something more than youthful Sturm und Drang that is causing the anguish. It is not biologically mandated for human offspring to turn against their parents. But all the kids on the block are acting that same way, so Mrs. Middle America figures she must be oversensitive . . . until something provokes her to take a closer look at her children’s public schools." https://forummag.com/2022/07/22/they-want-your-child/
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Connaught “Connie” Marshner was a young staffer at Young Americans for Freedom in the early 1970s when she successfully launched a grassroots letter-writing campaign that helped spur President Richard Nixon to veto the only bill for a national childcare system ever to pass Congress. The language of this anti-daycare campaign presaged that of the “pro-family movement” (Marshner’s coinage) that took shape later in the decade, led by the Rev. Jerry Falwell and the Moral Majority, which helped Ronald Reagan get elected. Sending children off to state-sponsored institutions, at ever younger ages, intoned Nixon in his 1971 veto message, would subvert “the family in its rightful position as a keystone of our civilization,” committing “the vast moral authority of the national government to the side of communal approaches to child rearing over against the family-centered approach.” Seven years later, Marshner-now a staffer at the Heritage Foundation-published her first book, whose first chapter included the following passage:
"Mothers have long observed that after the child starts school, the rest of the family starts catching more colds and flus. But other forms of disease are not so evident.
What about the personality traits that start developing? What about the dissatisfaction with family rules and routines? What about boredom with learning loss of curiosity about ideas and the world at large? Why do children suddenly begin to complain about responsibilities toward little brothers or sisters? Why do they resent doing accustomed chores? Why does off-color language or unfamiliar slang suddenly crop up in a child’s conversation?
As childhood yields to preadolescence and adolescence, and the condition gets worse, parents are told that these symptoms indicate normal stages of maturation. But when a mother is told by her high schooler, ‘You don’t know what’s right and wrong for me’ or ‘You don’t really care about me,’ she knows in her heart that it is something more than youthful Sturm und Drang that is causing the anguish. It is not biologically mandated for human offspring to turn against their parents. But all the kids on the block are acting that same way, so Mrs. Middle America figures she must be oversensitive . . . until something provokes her to take a closer look at her children’s public schools."
https://forummag.com/2022/07/22/they-want-your-child/
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