Maybe by volume, but certainly not proportionately. The percentage of content on Lemmy that is just straight conspiracy nonsense is ridiculous. There was a post not a day or two ago where people seriously believed that Japanese TV was blurring Trump's neck because it looked like a vagina. It's literally Newsmax in here, and it's constant. On Reddit at least there was enough other content to drown it out so if doesn't hit my feed every single day.

I left reddit however many years ago now because I disagree with their business practices. I've been exclusively Lemmy for years at this point. But the community writ large kinda sucks.

Mitch McConnell fell down and is a billion years old. He's not dead. They did a photoshoot. He looks good in a staged photoshoot because it's not a candid on capital hill when he's at a press conference or something. Of course he looks better/younger in a staged photoshoot than some random political candid. They may have even put some makeup on him to cover up some bruising. They're not weekend at Bernies-ing his corpse around for kicks and giggles. It doesn't even pass a smell test.

I find the amount of conspiracy mongering on Lemmy seriously disheartening, and it genuinely makes me consider leaving the platform and going back to Reddit.

It's not an easy decision. You are taking it on face value that the child is right. I have seen many children afraid to tell their parents something that they think will upset them, only for the parents to be totally cool with it. It's very common.

Now, if you truly believe that the child is right, I do think there's still a moral difference between not telling the parents and actively lying to them if they ask.

If asked, I think that probably the correctest decision is probably to refuse to answer and tell the parents that's a conversation they need to have with their child? Idk.

I've seen a scenario where the parents were actively beating their kid if he got good grades because they wanted their kid to fail out. Should the school have lied to the parents about what grades he was getting? CPS refused to remove the kid from the home. What should the school have done in that scenario?

Ultimately, I think navigating when and how the state intervenes in parenting is tricky. It's very case by case, and in most scenarios there aren't really good answers. What's the line where kids are taken away? What's the line where the courts mandate training or intervention in the home? What's the line where the state starts just actively lying to the parents about their child to protect them? If you've crossed the lying line, why haven't you crossed the removal line?

I don't know that there's a good answer to a lot of these questions. But in general, I think that the state hiding things is usually the wrong answer.

I think it's probably more analogous than you are painting it as. The trans community suffers elevated levels of suicide risk, and parents who are in the dark about what their child is going through are less equipped to get them the help they need if they need it. Parents of trans kids often have to get them emergency mental health services due to them being bullied or ostracized. If the parents are kept in the dark about it, they may not see the problem until it is too late.

And I agree that children aren't property, but they also aren't fully independent agents. Children need guidance. Children need to be raised by parents who love them and are involved in steering them to be a successful and active participant in society. Children should not be allowed to make every decision for themselves without question. They need to be required by an authority figure to eat their vegetables and brush their teeth.

They have agency certainly, but not unlimited agency, and we need to figure out what the left and right bounds of that agency are. And that will change as they age and get older, and will be different from child to child even. But who decides that? My gut is that it's the parents. I feel like every other option is unpalatable.

I think I would agree for, like, a school counselor for instance. That's much more analogous to something like a therapist. Teachers aren't mental health professionals though. They're there to teach.

But I think we need to have a more meta conversation about the idealized roles of parents and schools.

In my mind, the parent has the ultimate responsibility for the raising of their child. It is their job to teach their child how to be a good and responsible member of society.

School is there as an institution of formalized learning to help build an educated society.

School is not a day care. School is not there to teach your child how to be a good person. School does not obviate your responsibility as a parent to raise your child right.

Obviously teachers should model good behavior to the children in their care, as should every adult in their life, but the ultimate responsibility for that falls on the parents.

When the school actively lies to the parents about their child, they are taking away the parents ability to fulfill that responsibility.

Now, the school may be doing it for good reason. Many parents are bad parents, and are doing a poor job of raising their children. Most even. People suck.

But the state saying, "you're not raising your children poorly enough that we are going to take them away from you, but we disagree with how you're doing it enough that we're gonna actively lie to you," feels like a weird middle ground to live in that doesn't feel great to me.

A slippery slope is saying "if we allow thing 1, then later we will allow thing 2." That's not what I'm saying at all.

I'm saying the current thing makes me uneasy, and trying to clarify the left and right bounds of when that one thing is okay to do, if it ever is.

I think we can all come up with instances where it's wrong for the school to lie to parents. If you catch a kid smoking for instance, it shouldn't be acceptable for the school to not tell the parents. And it should be doubly unacceptable if the parents ask for the school to lie to them about it.

Schools aren't perfect. What I'm about to say might actually be a slippery slope, but if schools are allowed to lie to parents about their children, I don't think it's a far leap to say they will lie to cover up bullying and abuse to prevent themselves from being sued or held accountable. Bad schools can be just as bad at being a safe place for kids as bad parents.

But aside from that, I think there's an important meta conversation to be had about what a parent's responsibility to their child is. I think in addition to the obvious of providing a safe and loving home, a parent is responsible for raising their child to be a good member of society. It concerns me when the state begins to take that responsibility away from parents and put it on itself.

Now, sometimes that is something the state needs to do. If a child is being actively abused, the parents should be sent to prison, and the state should (in absence of another parental figure that can take in the child and is willing to do so) assume custody of that child. In which case it is the states responsibility to raise that child into a good and responsible member of society.

But these weird half measures where the state says, "you're not an abusive enough parent for us to take your children away from you, but we don't like the way you're raising them enough that we're gonna actively lie to you about what your child is doing at school," feel bad to me.