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How Low-Trust Societies Start
There’s a dentist’s office in Pennsylvania that will report you to Child Protective Services if they think you’re not keeping up with your appointments. I am not making this up.
Mom Trey Hoyumpa did not like the treatment she and her kids got at the Smiles 4 Keeps location in Bartonsville, Pennsylvania. In a Facebook post she claims that the practice wouldn’t let her go into the patient area with her children, wouldn’t let her meet with the dentist, and diagnosed but wouldn’t treat more than one of her children on her visit. She decided not to go back. A few months letter she received this letter:
The letter says that neglecting a child’s dental care can be considered child abuse in Pennsylvania and that dental providers are required to report it to the state. It notes that the dental office has not yet reported the parent, but she should schedule an appointment to have her children seen ASAP or else.
The letter concludes: “To keep your child as healthy as possible and to avoid a report to state authorities, please call Smiles 4 Keeps immediately to schedule an appointment.” This is obviously going to be perceived as a threat.
This trend actually started under Obama, when the regime “suggested” that doctors start asking patients about gun ownership. (If your doctor asks you about gun ownership, I suggest lying.) But it is also a defining characteristic of communist regimes where neighbors are encouraged to spy on neighbors and children are encouraged to spy on parents.
This how societies become transformed from functional, high-trust societies into dysfunctional low-trust societies. Glenn Reynolds explains the difference:
In high-trust societies, people extend trust to strangers and follow rules for the most part even when nobody is watching. In low-trust societies, trust seldom extends beyond close family, and everybody cheats if they can get away with it.
It is hard to have trust and social cohesion when the state rewards people for snitching on their neighbors about things that are none of their business.
First thing I’d do is call the dentist office and threaten them right back.
Tell them you went to a different dentist, and Medical Privacy laws prevent you from telling them which one.
That’s the correct response. But it’s not nearly as satisfying as giving those moral busybodies a good tongue-lashing.
I realize that my solution is not really responsive to the point that the OP is trying to make, which is the [redacted] busybodies are taking over and lawyering every last little bit of life.
That’s a problem with a much bigger (and probably bloodier) solution.
If only that were true. I’d be totally down with telling them I went to a different dentist and it’s none of their gosh darn business which one, though.
I like that response too. If you call and give them a ration of caca, they’ll tell Child Protective Services you’re violent because you threatened them. Then they will come and take the kids away . . .
This dental office may want to consider whether it is committing the crime of extortion.
Extortion is generally extracting money from someone by the use of threats.
The dentist is trying to extract money (the fees from repeat business) from the recipient of the letter.
A threat to report the parent to Child Protective Services may be enough of a threat to establish the crime. In most states, a threat of criminal proceedings is one of the threats that forms the basis for the crime of extortion. I would think a threat to report to CPS is close enough to threatening criminal proceedings for the principle to apply.
Yes. I like the way you think. Clever, calculated, and conniving.
Also straightforward and to the point.
We need to see if this happens. I hope some of the lawyers reading about this case in Pennsylvania get in touch with the parents.
In Massachusetts, we have an overly aggressive protective services department. One lawyer who often represented parents started up a website to give parents information against these actions. The first thing he said was to not let the social workers into the home in the first place. He told parents that they had the right to refuse to let them in.
Our social workers go on fishing expeditions. It’s atrocious, and it the very reason our warrant protections exist.
The letter was poorly done–exceptionally poorly done. But having read the statute, I can get where the dentist is generally coming from. The law requires reporting of child abuse and, in part, defines child abuse as:
I actually fault the legislature more for failing to cover this situation expressly in the law. The dentist should have contacted the bureaucracy and received some kind of interpretation here before concocting that letter. I’m surprised the dentist’s association–whatever it is–isn’t on this also.
Reason’s point that this is what you get when investing reporting authority in private actors is really the main issue, however.
Moderator Note:
Code of conduct redactionPersonally, I would reply that the child reported to the parent that the dentist touched her/him in an inappropriate manner and the family will not file a report with the state if the dental office [redacted].
I believe that’s known as the nuclear option.
I like it.
So what would we think of a law requiring knowledge or reasonable suspicion of welfare cheats to be reported. This would include corporate welfare cheats, of course.
Smart thing is not to take your child to the dentist at all and avoid the CPS reporting system.
But the poor bureaucrats have to justify their jobs. It’s an unfortunate consequence if a few lives are ruined in the process. /s
This case and others like it provide, in a nutshell, indisputable proof that Rousseau was delusional at best, and to his ideological heirs (Barack Obama included) of practical value as a fig-leaf of high-mindedness and nothing more.
The idea of dental neglect being child abuse didn’t come from the legislature but from a private professional body, the American Academy of Pediatric Dentistry.
Yay for the politicization of dental care! Thanks, private professionals.
This is related to the CDC’s fascination with guns. All professional associations are full of left wing busybodies. Years ago, a friend of mine was sued by his ex-wife asking for half of his lifetime income because she had worked while he was in medical school. She had gone to law school after he graduated and I think he had supported her during that period. Anyway, this became a cause celebre for feminists of the time. Eventually, it went to the US Supreme Court and she lost.
At the California Medical Association convention the next year, a group of young female physicians tried to get the CMA to pass a resolution supporting the woman’s lawsuit. In the debate, I suggested that, if any of those young women was married during her medical education or training, an ex-husband would have the same claim on her earnings. Several of my female medical students were married to men with far less earning potential.
They digested this point and we heard no more about the resolution.
I have often wondered how often social workers create problems in a family. I do know of a person who reported her daughter in law because she didn’t like her. I think most families are dysfunctional or have problems. If you look, you will find them in any family. I realize beating and abusing kids is over a line, but it still happens. And will happen.
I was just reading a little bit of Lasch’s “Culture of Narcissism” and his lament that we lost our authority to be parents due in good measure to the rise of experts that tell us how to raise our kids. What he is getting at is the loss of a child judging himself and his mastery by the adults who have ultimate authority (different than responsibility) for him.
A business teacher told us once to never accept responsibility if you are not given authority to go along with it. That is what is happening, we are still, in the end, responsible for our children, but the state has been taking away our authority. When all the experts get done giving advice and pontificating, if our kids are messed up, it is us who have to bear the costs and work of helping them.
It makes me appreciate Utah’s effort to allow people to let their kids take risks in order to grow up.
I bet the dentist’s kids aren’t perfect either.
Buy the kid a quip toothbrush. Won a Nobel or Pulitzer prize or something, didn’t it?
When a Dr. asks me about guns, that Dr. gets an earful. Then I refuse to see him again.
No better in New York State. A good friend was haled before the Nassau County CPS on suspicion of child sexual abuse reported by his daughter’s substitute kindergarten teacher. A one-day wonder social worker had visited the class a day earlier with her sex abuse dolls (a fitting reincarnation for a few men I know). When she started touching the doll’s chest, the sex abuse wonder worker asked “Does anyone ever touch you here?” My buddy’s daughter, an unsuspecting innocent young lady, answered “Yes. My daddy does every night.”
Well, the substitute and one-day wonder reported him immediately. Armed officers were dispatched to his office that day.
And my friend did “touch” his daughter’s chest every night. He actually struck her repeatedly. The young girl (now in her teens) suffers from cystic fibrosis and her dad percussed her chest every night for 45 minutes (there’s now a vest which does a comparable job).
Case closed? Of course not. A file had been opened. It took three months of investigation, including 8 sessions of mandated psychiatric evaluation, to clear my buddy of the charges leveled by the substitute teacher and the one-day wonder.
Par for the course in the People’s Republic of Nassau County.
If the above quoted statute is the sole authority for the dentist’s letter, blame the dentist. The statute says nothing about dental care. I’d complain to the state dental society.
This is what happens when you make laws mandating that certain categories of people are mandated to report suspected crimes/abuse.
It’s very communist.
If you are looking for confirmation of what you believe, you will find it. If you think every white person is racist, you will find it.
Absolutely correct. I don’t know Massachusetts law, but it should be the same. Because it is a civil case, CPS is not required to inform you of your rights, such as the right to remain silent, the right to have an attorney, etc. It’s also very important to remember that just like with the police, they are perfectly free to lie to you.
Termination of parental rights was called the “death penalty of civil law” by the Supreme Court, but it’s not treated that way.
There’s a danger that if you don’t cooperate with CPS investigators that they will remove the children based on the allegations of anyone. You might be innocent, and you might even win in court after the kids are removed (extremely rare) but your kids will still be terrorized by the experience.
My advice is to cooperate slightly. That is, sometimes they will allow the child to move to a friend or relative briefly until they sort things out, but you’d need a deadline on the agreement. Otherwise, I recommend immediately moving to another state. The states are terrible at cooperating with each other.
As for the dentist, well, this type of publicity will probably be enough to ruin his business. More is even better.
Or go to the hospital.
Sure we can completely forgo all modern medicine and the monetary system. But that would put us back with the stone aged people who lived to the ripe old age of 35.
Sometimes the dentist doesn’t know what he is talking about. My oldest daughter was born with a mouthful of tiny teeth buds. They were in the roof of her mouth, sides, under her tongue, etc. She had x-rays so we could determine which were supposed to be there and the ones that were extras. At about 2 months the dentist started removing the extra buds. At about 15 months she was diagnosed as Celiac. This was late 1959 and very little was known about Celiac. One of the problems later determined, because of the damage to the intestines, they do not absorb the nutrition needed to grow strong teeth. Our dentist fluoridated her teeth every 6 months, she was on a special diet, special vitamins, no junk food ever, but caries kept showing up. She was in our dentist office at least once a month, sometimes twice.
When she was 5 years old, we moved from Hollywood to San Fernando Valley, so we found a “specialist in children’s dentistry.” The dentist would not let me stay with her on our first visit, which was a mistake. Then he suddenly shows up in the waiting room and starts scolding me! “What kind of mother was I to let my child eat candy and crap, why, her teeth were rotting out, etc, etc. etc.” Needless to say, I came unglued! I called him a stupid a**, told him she was Celiac, and if he had let me in with her it would have been explained. For him to come down on me, in public because he didn’t know his a** from a hole in the ground was unforgivable. I went into the treatment room, snatched my child out of the chair, and stomped out, exclaiming I would never be back. Took me hours to calm my daughter, as she had been strapped down in the chair. After that we drove the long distance to our family dentist.
Parents, don’t let a dentist intimidate you, you have rights and you can threaten them with a law suit if they become deranged.