Hugging is good!

I've ranted about hype, now for some ranting about hysteria.

There was a news story this morning about a girl who was disciplined at school for hugging a classmate. She was forced to write a letter explaining how she "touched" the other girl, how the girl didn't like it, and how she shouldn't hug classmates.

This "bad touch, good touch" thing is going too far. There are "bad touches," but since when did hugging become one of them? I think it happened when teachers and anyone else who ever comes close to a child started being afraid that self-righteous busybodies or over-zealous parents might think they were doing inappropriate things to children. The whole stranger-danger, child-sex-abuse thing has become an hysteria of fear. The backlash is that everyone has to become androids around children and avoid any contact with them as if they were plagued. Hugs are good! They make kids feel appreciated! Good touch is good, but now every touch is becoming bad touch.

Now it used to be that we were trying to protect children from exploitative adults who lure children knowing full well what they're doing is wrong. But it seems the fear and paranoia has seeped down a generation, and we're protecting children from other children, worried that other children are also monsters. There are sexual harassment cases and even molestation cases involving very young children. Can they really be exploitative angler-fish if they're just doing what comes naturally to children? They might do "bad" things as children, but that's still normal and they still don't know any better. A conviction at the ripe old age of 5 is more likely to scar them psychologically and tarnish the rest of their lives. It's like we're trying to protect childrens' childhood from immoral adults, yet stripping away their childhood at the same time.

We're supposed to be protecting children from "harm" (whatever that is and however you actually protect children from it), but I say the psychological harm of dragging unknowing children into adult-scope consequences for relatively innocent misadventures, and even punishing them for hugging, outweighs these supposed means of protecting them from said harm. So in protecting them, we're sometimes harming them. Doesn't make much sense. In fact, it's absurd.

The hsyteria goes further in the adult world. Parents have been arrested on child porn charges for picking up innocent pictures of their two-year-old in the bathtub and pats on the butt make national news. Meanwhile, there is some really nasty stuff going on out there that really does obviously harm children. We're wasting our time, energy, and money on the trivial stuff and creating problems where they don't exist.

Now that is stupid.

I quite like hugs and always did as a child.