Child Welfare – Page 7 – Family Council

School Districts Should Never Keep Parents, the Ultimate Decisionmakers, In the Dark

Sep 11, 2024Jerry CoxTransgenderChild Welfare, Transgender

The following is from our friends at Alliance Defending Freedom:

A Colorado school district assigned a 5th-grade girl to share a room – and even a bed – with a boy who identified as a girl during an overnight trip.

Joe and Serena Wailes said their daughter had been greatly looking forward to the school-sponsored trip to Philadelphia and Washington, D.C. But when she got to her hotel room, the student with whom she was supposed to share a bed informed her that he was a boy who identified as a girl.

The Waileses’ daughter was then put in multiple uncomfortable situations before school chaperones finally changed her room assignment. Even then, chaperones on the trip told her to lie about the reason for the switch.

The Waileses were not informed about the District Policy that rooms children by gender identity rather than sex prior to the trip, so they had no way to request an accommodation so their daughter did not share a bed with a boy. School districts should be allowing parents to make the best decisions for their children and providing the information required to make informed decisions. Instead, the district jeopardized the privacy of the Waileses’ daughter and deprived the parents of their right to make important decisions for their child.

Watch the video below from our friends at Alliance Defending Freedom to learn more.

Federal Government Sues TikTok Over Alleged Child Privacy Violations

Aug 5, 2024Jerry CoxSocial MediaChild Welfare, Privacy, Social Media, TikTok

On Friday the United States Department of Justice filed a lawsuit against social media giant TikTok and its parent company for allegedly violating federal laws intended to protect children online.

TikTok boasts approximately one billion users worldwide — including 135 million or more in the U.S. — making it one of the most popular social media platforms on earth.

However, TikTok and its Chinese-based parent company, ByteDance, have come under fire for serving kids a steady “diet of darkness” online and struggling to protect private user data from entities in China, such as the Chinese Communist Party.

In a lawsuit filed Friday in the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California, the U.S. Department of Justice alleged that TikTok and ByteDance violated the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act of 1998 — a federal law that helps protect children from being tracked online.

The lawsuit accuses TikTok of “unlawful massive-scale invasions of children’s privacy,” saying,

TikTok collects, stores, and processes vast amounts of data from its users, who include millions of American children younger than 13. . . . For years, Defendants [TikTok and ByteDance] have knowingly allowed children under 13 to create and use TikTok accounts without their parents’ knowledge or consent, have collected extensive data from those children, and have failed to comply with parents’ requests to delete their children’s accounts and personal information.

This is not the first lawsuit TikTok has faced for failing to protect children on its platform.

Last year Arkansas Attorney General Tim Griffin filed two lawsuits against the tech giant — one in Cleburne County and another in Union County — for violating the Arkansas Deceptive Trade Practices Act and failing to protect children.

The lawsuits allege that TikTok and ByteDance failed to fully disclose that the company is subject to Chinese laws that mandate cooperation with intelligence activities of the People’s Republic of China, and that TikTok’s algorithm deliberately promotes “intensely sexualized” content — including content that sexualizes children. The A.G.’s legal team has pointed out that objectionable content is even available to users who enable TikTok’s content filtering in the app, and that TikTok aggressively collects sensitive user data.

Social media platforms are more than just websites or phone apps. These are multimillion dollar businesses owned and operated by investors and other interests. The adults who own these companies have a responsibility to follow state and federal laws and to protect children on their platforms.

As we have said before, there’s more and more evidence that social media platforms like TikTok put users’ personal information at risk and are actually designed to push objectionable content to users.

With that in mind, it’s good to see the Department of Justice taking legal action to fight back against these tech companies and protect our children online.

Articles appearing on this website are written with the aid of Family Council’s researchers and writers.

Dads Can’t Be Moms: Guest Column

Jun 17, 2024John StonestreetLGBTChild Welfare, LGBT, Transgender

Recently, The Washington Post released an article with this headline: “Our daughter wanted a mommy, so she picked one of her dads.” In it, the author praised his same-sex partner for taking a “motherly role” as assigned by their three-year-old adopted daughter. He argued that the term should be broadened, as if anyone can be a motherly figure.

This is another iteration of a fundamentally bad idea of the sexual revolution, that men and women are interchangeable. Still, the story betrays itself. Why did this three-year-old girl sense something was wrong in the first place? She somehow knew she needed a mother.

In fact, throughout the article, the author expressed concern that his daughter was “bending the reality” of having two dads. And that’s the very point: “two dads” is not a reality, it’s a social construction. Moms and dads? Those are baked into the human condition.

Dads can’t mom. And moms can’t dad.