The struggle to turn America’s children into confused, neurotic fraidy-cats has reached a new plateau.
This time the assault on individuality and the right of children to be children is unrelated to toy guns or such crimes against humanity as a mother packing cookies in her child’s lunchbox. Rather, Thomas’s Battersea Day School in London has banned having a “best” friend.
The school, which is under the microscope because 4-year-old Prince George will just started attending this year, is frowning on children with like interests and temperament forming a bond of close friendship because others who fail to establish such bonds will feel excluded.
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Thomas’s Battersea is not alone. According to Business Insider:
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.
But there are critics (thank God!), who argue that “the approach robs kids of the chance to form valuable coping skills. By grappling with mild social exclusion when they’re young,” they add, “kids will emerge as more capable, resilient adults.”
There’s more on this, but I’m going to pull the plug on this topic here because of my deeply held conviction that this doesn’t need to be a debate in the first place. Children, for the most part, have grown and developed into healthy, well-rounded individuals for millennia, and they done so without the well-intentioned intervention of liberal educators who obsess over imagined adversities.
Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go phone my best friend from childhood and shoot the breeze.
