Top 10 Parenting Scandals of April, 2011

April 7, Kids Cop a Feel at Career Day

Parents are peeved to find out that 4th-, 5th-, and 6th-graders handled silicone breast implants as part of a “Career Day” discussion with a local plastic surgeon at a Virginia elementary school. The clincher: they were never warned ahead of time or given the choice to opt their kids out. One mom expresses her dismay, saying, “With everything going on with body issues and … bullying and stuff like that, you don’t need to add [this] to the mix.”

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April 9, Ultra-conservative church encourages child abuse

Leaders of the Independent Fundamental Baptist Church, which has thousands of locations nationwide, tells worshipers that God wants them to beat children as young as two weeks old. Why? Because crying too much is a willful behavior “that needs to be broken.” One pastor is overheard on an audiotape proclaiming, “How many whacks is irrelevant; you might need 100 strikes. That’s what the Bible speaks about.”

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April 11 — 18, Young children served booze at family restaurants — not once, not twice, but three times

First an Applebee’s serves a margarita to a 15-month-old instead of apple juice. Then a toddler gets sangria instead of orange juice at an Olive Garden. And then, just a few days later, a 4-year-old receives a mudslide instead of a milkshake at Chili’s. Strollerderby’s Sunny Chanel sums up our anxieties when she asks, “Has this always been happening and parents just didn’t notice, blaming those terrible twos or thinking their child was just acting out, not drunk?” Will we soon be sniff-testing our preschoolers?

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April 12, Is it okay for TSA to give 6-year-olds pat-downs?

A YouTube video of a TSA agent patting down a six-year-old girl goes viral, fueling the ongoing debate over how much is too much when it comes to screening air travelers. As Sunny Chanel notes, viewers don’t have any “back story” on the video clip — maybe the girl’s parents didn’t want her exposed to radiation via the X-ray machine. Still, watching a grade-schooler get a vigorous groping creeps us out.

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April 14, Zsa Zsa Gabor plans to become a mom at 94

94-year-old Zsa Zsa Gabor will become a mother again, her husband announces to the press. The nonagenarian starlet has been unable to walk since 2002 and has recently undergone a leg amputation and hip replacement. Still, her 67-year-old spouse, Prince Frederic von Anhalt, says he’ll make her a mama with the help of “an egg donor, artificial insemination, and a surrogate mother.” The idea was allegedly Gabor’s, although von Anhalt is on board so that they can carry on the family name. Plus, he says he needs “something to live for” after she dies.

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April 15, Mom loses custody for refusing to give daughter psychiatric meds

Detroit mom Maryanne Godboldo loses custody of her 13-year-old daughter after refusing to wean the child off of anti-psychotic medication. A physician had prescribed Godboldo’s daughter a psychotropic drug, but a second opinion says the meds are unnecessary, so Godboldo stops administering them. That’s when Child Protective Services steps in, claims she is “in denial” about her daughter’s mental health, and takes the girl. The psychiatrists who examine the daughter say she doesn’t need the meds, raising questions about the original diagnosis — and why the government has more control over a child’s treatment than her parents.

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April 18, Is perfecting your Café World score worth your baby’s life?

A Colorado mother is sentenced to 10 years behind bars for the drowning of her 13-month-old son, whom she left alone in the bathtub while she played Café World on Facebook. Shannon Johnson told police that her son, “an independent baby,” preferred to be left alone in the tub and that she didn’t want him to become a “mama’s boy.” She said she left the child alone in the bathtub for a few minutes while she played the game in another room and came back to find the baby on his side with his face in the water.

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April 19, Should a 10-year-old boy be allowed to have a sex change?

A court rules that Jamie, a prepubescent Australian boy who’s identified as a girl since toddlerhood, will be allowed to undergo sex change therapy. The boy’s parents and medical experts say that without the therapy to reverse early-onset puberty, he might commit suicide. The boy can start taking the first round of drugs now, then at age 16, he may appear in court to seek approval to start the second course of therapy. Although the decision may give some folks pause, it seems a fitting choice for Jamie, who says he feels like a “freak” and a “girl in a boy’s body.”

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April 20, "Fat grades" to be implemented at schools across the country

Several states announce that they will issue grades for students’ weights and Body Mass Indexes (BMI), to be reported alongside students’ academic grades. The ratings, which will be accompanied by nutrition and exercise suggestions, are intended to persuade parents to act early to prevent obesity and related health problems in their kids. With all the conflicting messages about body image and eating disorders, it remains to be seen whether grading a kid’s fat will do more harm than good.

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April 21, Wonkette writer makes fun of Trig Palin for being “retarded”

Wonkette writer Jack Steuf breaks the laws of parenting decency by mocking Sarah Palin’s son for having Downs Syndrome, referring to the boy as “the great gentleman scholar” and “the magic intellectually disabled baby prop” — and uses “the r word.” No matter your political leanings, you just don’t mock kids with disabilities, right? Steuf appears to have received that message. He later apologized for the post (although he stands by his criticism of Palin using her son as a “political prop.”)

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