Nanny state oversteps its bounds – again

Headlines are meant to draw viewers into stories, and they often do, but the headline '12-year-old sues father, wins,' over a Gatineau dad's refusal to allow his daughter to go on a school trip as punishment for various misdeeds – such as posting photos of herself on an adult dating site and fighting with her stepmother.

Most websites and publications are happy to let readers believe that the girl, struck by the need to protect her childhood freedoms, marched straight to a lawyer and had her father's punishment struck down in Quebec Superior Court.

That's the Cliffs Notes version.

The reality is that the father and the girl's mother are divorced, and have been fighting over custody of the girl. The girl, 12, as kids are known to do, took the news of her punishment badly, and went crying to her mother. Her mother -- who is not the custodial parent, by the way – agreed with her daughter that the punishment was too harsh, and because the father had custody, the matter had to be settled in front of a judge.

The girl's mother clearly approved of the trip – she had signed up to be a supervisory parent aide -- but the father's word should have held sway. That is, until Superior Court justice Suzanne Tessier ruled the camping trip represented an important event in the child's life and allowed her to go.

The problem here becomes that the girl's mother pushed her to take the matter to the girl's court-appointed lawyer, Lucie Fortin, (so appointed because of the parents' decade-long custody battle) and when lawyers get involved, all h-e-double-hockey-sticks tends to break loose.

""This was something that would never happen again in the child's life. And for me that was really important, because it was the end of elementary school, it was the end of a stage in her life," Fortin said.

Huh?

This is a case where adults and the court system all conspired to stick their noses in where it doesn't belong. Keeping the child home from a privilege such as a camping trip with classmates is an appropriate punishment for systematic defiance of her father. Coming, as this news did, on the heels of a Supreme Court ruling that spanking children no longer fell under the realm of acceptable punishment for kids, this Gatineau father should be held up as a good example of a parent who is teaching their child right from wrong, even if that message is a bitter pill to swallow.

The father's lawyer, Kim Beaudoin is planning on appealing the verdict, and many observers are concerned

The court has no business intervening in this case, and even if custody was involved, the matter could have been settled quietly if everyone involved could have acted like an adult. At least the 12-year-old girl has an excuse: she's a 12-year-old girl. The fact many adults around her acted like adolescents is the reason this case is in the spotlight.