We have all heard the old adage, ‘It takes a village to raise a child’, but the government has taken the village to mean the state. Unfortunately we live in a world where there are people who seek out children to exploit children, but does it take the government raising our children in order to prevent it from ever happening? The government has now taken steps to ban parents from entering play areas, and in some cases even banned parents watching their own children play, unless they have been vetted.

It feels as if we elected nannies instead of public officials. First parents were banned from ferrying their children to sports activities and then two police women almost lost their jobs over sharing child minding duties. Now parents can’t even watch their own children play without submitting to criminal background checks. How long will it be before you have to submit to a background check before you allowed to have a child? I know it sounds outlandish now, but if you told my parents 15 years ago that they couldn’t watch me while I played in a playground they would have thought you were crazy.

We have already given up so many of our natural rights to government that we almost don’t notice when we lose another. The real danger is that we are allowing our children to grow up under government control. Children will grow up thinking that ‘government knows best’ if they continually see their own parents undermined by government regulation and intervention. The government is practically teaching children that they need to be protected from their parents. If public-run institutions are any indication of how well things turn out under government control, then I’m afraid families don’t stand a chance.

Spencer Aland blogs regularly here.