Two Items

I'm not much of a newsie kind of person, but these two incidents are coming up a lot in the circles I frequent.

Zachary Creighton was a missing 14 year old, he's been found and he's fine. But he refused to go home because he said his parents would beat him. So CPS went and removed 5 other children from the Creighton home. Now the Creighton's, instead of rejoicing over the safety of the missing child, are having to fight to get their children back. I read a bit from this blog, found by accident. There's a link to a video of the social workers taking the crying children for reasons they would not divulge, and a link to a newsletter by Jonathan Lindvall where he gives some details about what's going on. Apparently he knows the family.

And, some homeschoolers are moving their blogs from www.homeschoolblogger over a child abuse case. The mother was following the advice of Michael and Debi Pearl (No Greater Joy/To Train Up a Child) and beat her child to death. Related to that, many are calling for a ban of anyone who recommends or distributes their resources, and homeschoolblogger is an active supporter of the Pearls methods. Here's one blog that's gone. You can read more here or here. I'm not a Pearl supporter, but I'm not sure how I feel about a ban, either. For those looking for alternative blogging places, ATypicalHomeschool.net is offering free blogs for homeschoolers. (Gena Suarez of homeschoolblogger has posted and received comments on her own blog here.)

Hmmm. I'm doing a little research and it strikes me as odd that the cases I've read of recently about this kind of child abuse seem to be dealing with children who were adopted. Even Haleigh Poutre was adopted by her aunt. Due to attachment disorder and unknown emotional baggage carried into the relationship from the child's background, corporal punishment seems to be a bad idea with these children. But the problem seems to go way beyond a discipline issue.