Goals 2000 will tranform parents into "state-approved guardians of their own children," working under the "constant supervison and guidance of psychologists, social workers, and other 'experts.'"
"In the government-mandated collaboration with social service workers, parents will clearly be junior partners," warns psychologist Seth Farber. The ever-present threat of "the permanent removal of children from their parents' home" will inhibit the exercise of parental authority, says Farber, who is co-director of the Network Against Coercive Psychiatry.
Farber is sharply critical of colleagues who remain silent about Goals 2000, even though they know it represents "an abuse of authority, and a betrayal of the vocation of the therapist." He insists that "professional expertise is no substitute for the kind of tacit and intuitive knowledge of a child's needs that is a product of parental bonding." Therapists know this, Farber says. "They know that, by placing parents in a permanent position of subordination to experts, they damage parents' image in the eyes of their children, undermine their authority, and grievously harm the parent-child relationship. They know that putting children in counseling for an extended period of time can be damaging to their sense of self-esteem." Farber argues that mental health professionals and the mass media have fostered an "idolatry of professional expertise," and in so doing have obscured "the incalculable value of common sense, parental devotion, and civic virtue."
Farber states emphatically that "there are many mental health professionals and social service workers who are aware that the program envisaged by Goals 2000 is a usurpation of authority that threatens to destroy the integrity of families and communities, and thus to undermine the organic supports for the development of character and individuality. They know this," he says, "but a professional code of silence condemns them to a passive complicity."
Farber notes that the number of teenagers under 18 admitted to private hospitals for psychiatric care nearly tripled between 1980 and 1986. That threefold increase was due not to an outbreak of adolescent aberrations, but to a broadening of the definition of mental illness. "In the 1980s mental health professionals, in their drive to bring as many individuals as possible under their control, redefined childhood itself as a symptom of a mental disorder," says Farber. Ironically, "those professions that Goals 2000 would place in the role of raising children demonstrated in the 1980s that they were unable or unwilling to protect children's interests, and frequently forced them to endure the emotionally devastating consequences of involuntary psychiatric hospitalization -- which routinely includes forced psychiatric drugging to render children compliant."
Goals 2000 "places responsibility for social order and personal fulfillment in the hands of an elite of 'experts,'" says Farber. "This vision of the public good is in conflict with an alternative vision articulated, among others, by the founding fathers of our country [which] regards ordinary citizens as competent individuals, capable of raising their own children without continuous intervention by specialists."
