By Eric Brodin, professor

There is a clear threat facing the natural or nuclear family. TV entertainment and other media as well, are reinterpreting what is a family. Whether in the Swedish parliament or North Carolina State Legislature there are proposals to expand the states' roles in parental and family issues. One of these is "Early Childhood Education" which is a catch-phrase which is increasingly, finding itself a subject of discussion in the state legislative. Legislation is being proposed which would extend the state's purview of education to preschoolers as young as three or four years old. On the Federal level the phrase and proposals were inserted in the extensive packages of educational reforms discussed by the U. S. Congress in HR 1001.

There have been a number of studies since that time, both by those who would advocate this additional intrusion by the state and the educational apparatus into an area hitherto the reserve of the family or privately run kindergartens and by those who fear the consequences of this extension of state authority. Allan C. Carlson of the Rockford Institute and editor of The Family in America; Gordon Jones, head of United Families Foundation; John W. Whitehead of the Rutherford Institute; Phyllis Schlafly of the Eagle Forum; and numerous other parental, educational, religious and family related groups have researched and written extensively about the possible consequence of this type of legislation.

Phyllis Schlafly in her report of February 1986, for example, points out that "absolutely no replicable evidence shows that putting children in school at an earlier age makes them brighter, or better able to achieve academically, or better able to socialize positively with their peers as they move along in school. The evidence indicates that it saddles tots with burnout, stress, and frustrations which inhibit later learning."

And conversely Mrs. Schlafly reports: "Enormous evidence shows that children who spend more time with their peers than with their parents prior to the 5th or 6th grade will become peer dependent. They learn to knuckle under to the rivalry, ridicule, habits, manners and values of their classmates rather than their parents. They are negatively socialized and become captives of social and moral trends.

The North Carolina State Legislature is discussing Senate Bill 312. "Early Education Program." The purpose," as stated in the bill, is "to enhance and expand the existing community based delivery system of child development services to accommodate four year olds in full or part day early educational programs chosen by their parents, and to provide for and encourage parental involvement in the design and provision of early educational program service." These provisions sound` innocent enough. After all, who would be opposed to a greater involvement by parents? But the details of the bill also give evidence of the establishment of a professional child care class which would in no time supersede "parental guidance" as has been done in so many countries.

The requirements of the teachers, for example, are "a four year higher education degree in child development or a four year higher educational degree in a related field. With two years' experience working with four year olds." Already, by these provisions, we see the suggestion that parents or teachers in private or denominational child care centers for these age levels who do not fulfill such requirements are really considered disqualified.

This author's experience with such legislation in the Swedish Welfare State may be instructive for the course it may take in the U. S. In Sweden such legislation was proposed a long time ago and has long been in effect, and the evidence is clear for anyone to see.

One of the early advocates for the compulsory preschool care program by government agencies in Sweden was very clear in his intentions. Pehr Gahrton said: "The parental monopoly cannot be broken solely by indirect measures - the State must intervene directly by, for example, taking the children from the parents part of their growing-up period, perhaps a few hours each day so that the balance of power is clearly expressed.... It is for the best of the children and society that a universal and compulsory pre-school program be clearly indoctrinating in its formation enabling the society to more directly intervene when it comes to the socialization of the children's values and attitudes.

In 1980 a mother and a professional social worker, in Sweden, Anna Wahlgren, reported the result of the institutionalization of pre-school care: "Children are drugged. Infants are given nerve medicines. Healthy, normal, ordinary children are given tranquilizers so that they will sleep. There are four-year-olds who have developed dependency symptoms. There are child day-care centers where half of the children are given sleeping pills and others where prewritten ready-made prescriptions are readily available without a doctor giving as much as five minutes of his time to either child, or parent."

Finally, one of Sweden's foremost medical doctors and a sociologist, Nils Bejerot, reported on the effects of this collectivized care on the youth of Sweden's "womb-to-tomb" welfare society: 'We must seek for the causes of the destructive behavior of the young in the basic foundations of the welfare state. During a long period of time there have accumulated so many and so serious disturbances in the system that we now find ourselves in a deepening crisis of the system, where the welfare state itself, through its mechanisms, produces young analphabets, juvenile delinquents, alcoholics, narcotics addicts, physically and psychologically ill, tranquilized and rejected people at an accelerating speed."

This is not what we want for America, but it will be if we do not take strong counter-measures in defense of the family.

Destroying the Family: Swedish style 

Lawless Sweden

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