New Zealand Conservative

An important quote by Pope Francis: "Families are the home Church where Jesus grows. He grows in the spouses' love and in the children's lives. For this reason, the enemy attacks the family so much. The devil does not want it. He tries to destroy it, to prevent love from becoming free. Families are the home church. But married people are sinners like everyone else, they do not want to go in faith, in its fertility, in children and the faith of their children. May the Lord bless the family, and make it strong in the face of the crisis by which the devil wants to destroy it." When I think of the laws passed in recent years in New Zealand that don't strengthen the family here, but instead chip away at undermining it, I can see the influence of the devil on our politicians. Recently, it was the redefinition of marriage, which destroyed the understanding of marriage by the state; and then previously, the anti-smacking law which allowed interference in the family by...

From the Herald today, there is an article on a researcher who looked into intelligence and desire for children by women when they were young. The more intelligent the girl, the less children she wanted, apparently. Women lose a quarter of their maternal urges for every 15 extra IQ points they have, according to international research. ... Using data from Britain's National Child Development Study, Mr Kanazawa studied the links between intelligence and maternal urges in women. He found more of the former meant less of the latter. Even after adding controls for economics and education, the results remained the same - the more intelligent the woman, the less likely she was to have children. Mr Kanazawa published his findings in his book, The Intelligence Paradox, and the research into the number of children compared with IQ was in the chapter titled "Why intelligent people are the ultimate losers in life". He found that the more intelligent both men and women w...

A book that should be brown paper-bagged and left there to rot has netted writer Ted Dawe a $7500 prize. Ted Dawe’s Into the River claimed top prize in the annual New Zealand Post Children’s Book Awards. The author makes no apology for the provocative content , saying the story needs to be told, even at the risk of upsetting parents and booksellers. One scene describes, in extensive detail, two adolescents having fumbling sex in shallow water. Award organisers have sent “explicit content” stickers to all booksellers to warn potential buyers. The 2013 Kiwi Kids’ Good Book Guide lists the book’s target age as 13 years and over but Masterton Paper Plus says the book is only suitable for those over 15. The Conservative has an excerpt of the "fumbling sex", and has suggested a more appropriate title for the book. I won't post the excerpt here, as I don't even want to look at it, yet alone have to put blockquote tags around it and have it on the blog. Su...

Last week, an outfit called Safekids called for the Government to enact legislation that would make it mandatory for scooter riders of all ages to wear helmets. A ten-fold increase in the number of children seriously injuring themselves on push scooters has sparked a call for a law change that would see youngsters made to wear helmets while riding. Push scooters have become increasingly popular with school-age children over the past two years but the rise has seen a corresponding increase in the number of scooter-related injury claims for children up to 14 years old. ACC figures show the number of claims has risen from 697 in 2008 to 6474 last year . The increase has alarmed child safety group Safekids, which is campaigning for the introduction of a compulsory helmet law for scooter users. Safekids director Ann Weaver said requiring children to wear a helmet would reduce the risk of serious head injuries . Wearing a helmet all the time would reduce the risk of serious head ...

Robert R. Reilly, author of The Closing of the Muslim Mind , has written an article on the goals of activists to normalise homosexuality through the education of children. June 10, 2013 (Mercatornet.com) - The logic works like this: If homosexual acts are moral, as so many now insist, then they should be normative. If they are normative, they should be taught in our schools as a standard. If they are a standard, they should be enforced. And so it has come, and is coming, to be. Education is an essential part of the drive to universalize the rationalization for homosexual behavior; so it must become a mandatory part of the curriculum. The infiltration of higher education by LGBT studies is well known. However, less attention seems to have been paid to the effort to spread LGBT propaganda in elementary schools and high schools. Because of the young ages of students K through 12, the introduction of pro-homosexual materials has required a special sensitivity from those who are trying...

There was a very disturbing story in the Dominion Post earlier this week that I noticed elicited very little comment online and on talk-back radio this week, even though it was mentioned on talk-back at least. That was the story of a young woman being banned from and childcare centre for "inappropriately restraining a child" . Her crime? She stopped a child from hitting another child, and this lead to her being banned from the centre. A woman has been banned from a Wellington childcare centre after a Ministry of Education staff member saw her "inappropriately restraining" a child . Even though the woman, in her 20s, was neither a parent nor a staff member at Miramar's A'oga Amata Childcare Centre, the ministry is continuing to monitor the Samoan community centre. A ministry spokeswoman said a staff member saw someone "inappropriately restraining" a child during a visit to the centre on April 23. The child was not hit or hurt, but the minis...

It doesn't take much to trigger vocal, full-on hatred of children and mothers given the right subject matter. In this case, it was directed against a woman who is the mother of six children with two on the way (expecting twins), who lives in a state house with her husband, and who would like a bigger state house for her expanding family. Que outrage that any woman who has a state house would dare to have give birth to any more children. Except, what is she supposed to do with the buns in the oven - abort them? Should she be like this mother , who decided to write a letter to the editor justifying her abortion of her third child because he or she didn't suit their lifestyle? We certainly have a problem in New Zealand, and it's not women having children. The problem is our much too generous welfare system, the lack of jobs for low skilled men, and the high cost of living that means that if a family wants to have a better living that mere subsistence, both parents ne...

The indoctrination of the young continues in America, as children in a girls school in New York were told to ask each other for a lesbian kiss and to pretend they were on a lesbian date, all as part of a "anti-bullying presentation". Parents of children attending a Red Hook, New York, middle school are outraged after a recent anti-bullying presentation at Linden Avenue Middle School. The workshop for 13 and 14-year-old girls focused on homosexuality and gender identity. They were also taught words such as "pansexual" and "genderqueer." Parents say their daughters were told to ask one another for a kiss and they say two girls were told to stand in front of the class and pretend they were lesbians on a date. "She told me, 'Mom we all get teased and picked on enough. Now I'm going to be called a lesbian because I had to ask another girl if I could kiss her,'" parent, Mandy Coon, told reporters. Coon says parents were given no...

I saw an article in the Sunday Star Times (SST) yesterday that, among other things, mentioned that PHARMAC had recorded a 140% increase in antidepressant drug taking in children under 4 years of age over the last few years. Talk about a horrifying statistic - and at face glance - an abuse of medicine. I recall an earlier article on the increasing use of TV as a child-minding device and children not learning key skills on how to play and interact. An alterantive form of medication, destructive also. And in some other article, I noted that pre-school survey forms parents were completing turned out to be used to assess children for a myriad of "mental health" issues. Some parents did not realise ticking the box for "Johnny has had a temper tantrum" either made them bad parents or necessitated Johnny being drugged up and ready to glide through the stressful world of playgroup. And articles continue to hit the papers where child abuse is conflated with child disc...

Wow, the results of this study are explosive, especially since there is a worldwide push for gay marriage and adoption. Children raised in a lesbian household are 50% more likely to later describe themselves as homosexual, bisexual or asexual, than children raised by heterosexual couples. In a stunning new study, reported in the Washington Post newspaper, long-accepted assumptions that there were no differences between gay and straight parenting have been overturned with long term data. Among the other revelations, children raised in lesbian homes are more than twice as likely to be contemplating suicide, at a rate of 12% against 5% for heterosexual families. On the issue of child sexual abuse , the differences are horrific. While two percent of children in heterosexual households report being touched sexually by a parent or other adult, a stunning 23% of children in lesbian family units report sexual abuse by a parent or other adult – almost 12 times higher than the rate of ...

OK, so now schools in the UK are banning children from making best friends , because they might get upset if they have a fight. Society is getting just...just.... I don't have words for it. TEACHERS are banning schoolkids from having best pals — so they don't get upset by fall-outs. Instead, the primary pupils are being encouraged to play in large groups. Educational psychologist Gaynor Sbuttoni said the policy has been used at schools in Kingston, South West London, and Surrey. She added: "I have noticed that teachers tell children they shouldn't have a best friend and that everyone should play together. "They are doing it because they want to save the child the pain of splitting up from their best friend. But it is natural for some children to want a best friend. If they break up, they have to feel the pain because they're learning to deal with it." Russell Hobby, of the National Association of Head Teachers, confirmed some schools were ad...

The Post below this shows in its last picture a highly educated credentialed Greek without a future. I took my girl to school this morning and I asked, as is my custom, " what have you got first "? " Photography " she replied. " And after that "? " Drama " Yesterday she wasn't even dressed for school when we went and the reason why? They were going to the beach for the day - I kid you not. And I wonder, I truly do, why the hell is she still at school? Her older sisters barely went from the time they hit fifteen and that's a fact. It was hair pulling problem at the time but they have done ok - got degrees and good jobs as they are supposed to do. They were so over school by the time they left - I hate to admit it but one was actually asked to leave. And you can see why - they were young women already but trapped in childhood by the Education system. But you know what the school system did not teach them? How to form ...

David Farrar over at Kiwiblog has a post about an upcoming seminar on The Green Paper For Vunerable Children. While I am not against such seminars at all (it is good to talk), I fear that any solution will involve Nanny State government intervention, such as the Smacking Law, which did nothing. Below is my comment on Kiwiblog - As usual, they will address this problem from the wrong end. They’ll try to look at the symptoms and find a cure through possible government programmes and interventions, without actually looking at the source of the problem – the breakdown of families and the pushing of marriage off to one side as being irrelevant. Much of modern secular society has a mindset now that sees children as a bad thing. We have the pill, condoms, and other contraception so we can have all the sex we want without having babies. And if a woman does happen to get pregnant (horror of horrors!) and doesn’t want the baby, we have abortion to kill off that life. If the mindset is...

I was reading an article about how on the program "Dexter" about a serial killer who kills the bad guys. The article discussed bringing kids into the storyline, and Dexter is morphing from a cold, hard killer to a person that can alternate between being a loving Dad and then a cold hard killer. "Dark in a new way" boasts the article. With kids on the set, some observations are made: It's a strange thing for any child in their development years to spend time on a film set, says Dexter's altar-ego, actor Michael C Hall of his young co-stars. "They are not really privy to the darker elements - they're kept from that. But they are also little sponges and they absorb energy. There could be a scene where nothing explicitly is being said, but there's a great deal of violent thoughts or tension between the characters and we'll start the scene and the actors will give over to whatever that pretending is and [Luke or Evan] will totally burst...

Society no longer encourages women to be mothers. Motherhood is almost a dirty word unless you are a gay male who wants to adopt a child, and then it's all about getting access to that wanted child and the mother discarded. But we used to value children, didn't we? I don't know what it was like in New Zealand, but in the United States they were considered a child-centred society after WWII. By the late 1950s however, women who saw motherhood as service to society and who dreamed of scores of little kids to nurture, were suddenly caught in the crosshairs. A new wind had blown in from academe. Chic "mental health" professionals were suddenly sneering at homemakers, even part-time working moms, accusing them of "momism" and "smother love," that was producing weak sons and aggressive daughters. I had been ignoring the sneering columns in the press and ladies magazines about motherhood being parasitical and wasting women's talent. I had...

Sean Plunket has written an opinion piece on the fact that it seems a bit rich for parents to split up and organise things to maximize living off tax payer benefits. It can be financially more lucrative than working apparently. But to give you an indication of just how far we let our standards slip, one comment jumped out at me: children...deserve the love and support of at least one of their parents No Sean, children deserve the love and support of both parents. And they deserve parents that stay together and raise children as a family. That's what they deserve. Life doesn't always give them that, but the danger of lowering the bar again and again is that we get to the point where we think children only deserve to be fed, clothed and educated. Anything else is overly idealistic tosh unbecoming of a modern society where broken families are not just a norm, but an expectation. Sean suggests in his piece that raising your children is a fundamental duty, and I agree. ...

Why will no one call this what it is? A gang of six teens terrorised classmates in late 2007, chasing younger boys around the school, dragging them to the ground to remove their pants then violating them with a screwdriver, scissors, branches, pens, pencils and drills. Should be called "Homosexual kids reign of terror". Reference: Dominion Post, Front page, School bullies reign of terror.

Well I'll be darned: Naughty five and six-year-olds are increasingly being turfed out of school as experts say the behaviour of young pupils is getting worse . One child psychologist says poor parenting is part of the problem, and exposure to drugs or alcohol in the womb is having a terrible impact of some children. The story comes with it's very own opinion poll whereby you can express your opinion as to why the " behaviour of young pupils is getting worse ". In a Government guided by experts initiative, of course, a tool that had been in the parental arsenal for guiding wayward children for ever - the humble smack was ruled to be not only poor parenting but illegal besides. And although a public opinion poll on the matter, a referendum no less, revealed that the ordinary New Zealander thought the tried and true smack was not poor parenting but in fact a way of instructing non conforming young children that their own will was not the be all and end all and tha...

Labour's latest dastardly plan is to disband the Families Commission and replace it with a Ministry for Children, because as they say, children are the most vulnerable in our community. Well, yes they are, 18000 of them are murdered every year in our public hospitals before they are even born. I don't think Annette King was talking about those children, however. The Families Commission is useless, so I won't be surprised if it gets wiped out in the future. But, I'm not sure what it's potential replace, a Ministry for Children is actually supposed to do beyond working out how to take over even more from parents. We be rest assured, however, that if Labour ever come back into power, all will be revealed in due course. Especially once such a ministry is set up. On Kiwiblog, I said that this was a further step in the nationalisation of children, and suggested if there was a real concern for children, then maybe a Ministry of Marriage would be more appropriate. ...