I keep waiting for us to hit bottom when it comes to ludicrous, absurd, ridiculous and irrational ideas in our culture.
Just when I think we possibly have, I read something like this:
Members of the [British] royal family aren’t often told what they can and can’t do. But just a few days into his first year of school, 4-year-old Prince George already faces a mandate: No best friends allowed.
Thomas’s Battersea, the school George attends, bans kids from having best friends, Marie Claire reports. Instead, teachers encourage all students to form bonds with one another to avoid creating feelings of exclusions among those without best friends.
The trend of banning best friends has been growing for several years, and it’s spread beyond European borders to American schools as well. Some psychologists and parents argue kids become more well-adjusted when they have larger friend groups and can avoid negative feelings associated with feeling left out.
Critics, however, say the approach robs kids of the chance to form valuable coping skills. By grappling with mild social exclusion when they’re young, kids will emerge as more capable, resilient adults, these advocates argue.
Banning children from having best friends is not just silly, misguided or irrational. It’s downright evil.
It’s more than best friends these schools ban. It’s the idea of standards. It’s the sense of objectivity and hierarchy required for human survival, let alone functioning in the personal and professional worlds of everyday adult life.
When a teacher or parent tells a child he or she cannot have his or her special friend, they’re telling the child, “Nobody is better than anyone else. And who are you to make such judgments?” In one fell swoop, the two cornerstones of self-esteem are wiped out: a sense of being able to engage in intelligent decisions and a feeling of worthiness in doing so.
All the while, these same caricatures of social scientists peddling political correctness will develop fifteen more “self-esteem” programs designed to make children feel good about themselves – after having destroyed their most basic capability for doing so.
Refusing to let children have best friends is the equivalent, for adults, of not letting people have spouses or any special one-on-one associations, including friendships, of their choosing. Since most schools in America and abroad are funded and run by their national governments, it’s quite literally the equivalent of state-mandated Communism or totalitarianism.
Granted, children cannot choose everything adults can. But it’s the job of parents to guide them – not teachers preaching the line of political correctness adopted by batty psychologists and other social engineers all operating under orders of the government’s nationalized education establishment.
People who support kids having larger friend groups in place of best friends tend to view these larger groups as healthier for nurturing a sense of belonging. “We try to talk to kids and work with them to get them to have big groups of friends and not be so possessive about friends,” Christine Laycob, director of counseling at Mary Institute in St. Louis, told the New York Times.
This so-called expert implies that it’s unkind to have best friends. She basically says: “When you have a best friend and someone else doesn’t, you’re elevating one person above another.” Well of course you are. That’s why people – young or old – have best friends! That’s why adults get married and have romantic relationships. Some people are better than others. And we all like or love some individuals more than others. That’s normal, natural and the way it should be! The unearned guilt these social engineering educator “intellectuals” are feeding us is the most toxic crap yet. And they’re exploiting children to impose it. Sick!
They’re trying to prepare children for a world where individualism and objective standards are gone, and everything is about huddling with the group or the tribe. Dictators like that mentality, by the way. It’s easier to rule people who lack reason or standards.
The great danger here isn’t in the irrationality of this policy. It’s in the low self-esteem of the parents who will conclude, “Well, if the psychologists and other experts think it’s not healthy to have best friends, then who am I to judge?” In the words of the late comedian George Carlin: B.S.! And it’s bad for you.
Different kinds of social interactions are all valuable. Of course it’s healthy to have some experiences with groups of people as well as the closer connection of a one-on-one friendship. Best friendships, while not always present in a child’s life and not something every single child will experience, represent the natural order of things in that some people rise higher in the hierarchy of one’s values than others. “My best friend” is not a choice so much as recognition of this basic, almost intuitive or self-evident fact. This is true for children no less than adults, even though children are less sophisticated or advanced in their conceptual and psychological development than adults (usually) are.
I find such a policy to be nothing less than psychological child abuse. It’s a war on individualism and reason, two of the most important things human beings need for self-esteem and survival, a capacity requiring development starting in childhood.
Parents have got to fight this with everything they’ve got. Even if we reach a point where the command-and-control apparatus in Washington D.C. mandates best friendships as against the law, parents should encourage the fostering and development of one of life’s greatest experiences for their children in defiance of the authorities.
Ignore the insane and immoral creeps who come up with these policies. These include the sort of mental health professionals who generally go to work in the federal government education establishment.
Believe me: Your children are not safe with them!
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