Thoughts on HB 553: The “Make Parenting Illegal” Bill

by Keri Haruza

When I learned of HB 553, a resurrected version of SB 459 last year, and it was already scheduled for a public hearing in the House Children and Family Law Committee on Tuesday afternoon (1/28/25) at 1:30.  The purpose of the bill is to broaden the statutory definition of “neglect” to include things like “emotional and psychological” neglect, “parentification”–wherein a parent is considered to have mistreated a child by reversing roles, which is defined as giving the child more responsibility (i.e., chores) than is considered the current norm for his age–and the use of “coercion,” which the bill language defines as causing the child to do something he doesn’t want by use of “threat or force.”

When I read the bill aloud to my husband Sunday night, he laughed when I came to the bit about coercion.  “They are making all parenting illegal, huh?”  Well, that is what it sounds like.  Johnny doesn’t want to eat his vegetables, so if you make him eat his vegetables by threatening not to give him dessert, you just coerced the kid, and he will be damaged for life: traumatic stress or something.  Just give Johnny his dessert and step away…

So I went to the hearing.  I arrived a few minutes late and partway through the introductory testimony by one of the bill’s sponsors.  I had put together a one-and-a-half-page testimony in one hour between lessons with my children, and it was not very good anyway, so it was not a great loss that I was too late to sign in to give it.  Anyway, the crowd was more than a little intimidating.

Almost at once, the committee chairman clarified the meaning of “public hearing” for me.  I learned I had always been mistaken in thinking that these are meetings for legislators to hear what constituents think about proposed bills.  Public hearings are for the public to hear what government experts have decided is best for them.  After the experts have informed us all what is best for us and fielded a few softball questions obviously in their favor (if any representative on the committee is too unruly about putting forward upsetting questions, they have to be quiet), then at that point we the public may each have four minutes on the floor–or, as the Chairman pointed out–about forty seconds of the Committee’s actual attention before they promise to tune us out.  Because we are not credentialed, we are not entitled to the interest of our elected representatives.  I had never known that before this hearing cleared it up for me; I don’t remember the Chairman’s name, but I am forever indebted to him for his lesson in the activities of state government.

Despite my initial confusion about the purpose of public hearings, I decided to stay and listen to the experts talk.  The room was full of expensively dressed, perfectly coiffed women in business suits.  The Office of Child Advocacy attorney and her assistant also wore fun masks.  You could definitely distinguish nobodies like me: we wore snow boots on account of the weather and were vastly underdressed. (The one exception to my impression of those testifying as experts was a police officer from Manchester.  He was there in a professional capacity, I believe, as the others were, and he still testified in favor of the bill, but he was simply dressed and had a genuine manner.)  The glittering spectacle of manicured and credentialed testifiers-who all worked for the government–took my breath away.  There were so many of them.

For an hour and twenty minutes, I listened, even though the speakers often repeated the same two points and large introductions were spent stating each speaker’s credentials and congratulating each other on the other person’s credentials.  The chair stated his own and his wife’s credentials for good measure.  I am not from New England; perhaps someone can tell me if this is some kind of normal cultural greeting, sort of like how aristocrats in movies are loudly announced as they enter the room.  Anyhow, between credential exchanges, I heard a lot that astonished me.

For one thing, I discovered that the New Hampshire DCYF is unparalleled in successfully determining correct family outcomes.  Really, if what I heard was true, DCYF should be leading conferences around the country…especially in large urban areas.  Like D.C.  Of the testimonies I was privileged to hear, not one expert could think of a single case in which New Hampshire DCYF was ever wrong.  They could think of thirty cases where judges wrongly refused to separate families when DCYF knew they should, but not one instance of DCYF failure.  It was breathtaking.  It was miraculous.  It defied statistical logic.

Of course, from the assumption of DCYF’s inerrancy, it was easy to follow their argument, although my own point of view still differs considerably.  They complained that the tragic error of judges who rule against them is the fault of a law which, while 40 sections long and which only requires a “preponderance of evidence” from DCYF to get a judgment in their favor, is still not adequate to legally force families who are found innocent in court to accept DCYF’s services.  The law, therefore, is in serious need of an update, they explained to us.

Another surprise came when a committee member asked about the meaning of “abandonment” in the present text of the statute and what age a child may be left alone without a parent being guilty of neglect, according to the state of New Hampshire. I had always wondered about why the law is so vague on this point, myself.  The masked attorney said emphatically that the law is deliberately vague and that no age must ever, ever be specified in the statute: being specific makes it too hard for DCYF to get judgments in their favor.  Apparently, when a law is too precise and specific people figure out what is illegal and avoid that behavior.  That is a problem because, evidently, the purpose of the NH statute on abuse and neglect is definitely not to let on to parents or mandatory reporters what exactly constitutes abuse and neglect.  

I don’t have any credentials, so I can’t see why that wasn’t an instance of members of government publicly confessing to crafting the law deliberately as a trap for parents, and I was under the impression that entrapment is wrong or unconstitutional or something.  But no doubt if I had credentials and an expensive pantsuit, it would all make sense.  In the meantime, I gathered that we should never leave our teens alone now or in the future… we can never know if they are mature enough unless we are from DCYF.

I never really understood the law on neglect here in New Hampshire.  I thought it was accidentally vague, long, and unclear.  I now understand that a great deal of time and government effort was spent making it that way on purpose.  This makes sense, as long as you also understand what the law is really for…to give DCYF total unilateral power to execute its own judgment in each case, with as little interference by independent courts as possible and precluding any possibility of producing exculpatory evidence in any case whatsoever.  However, the experts testified that the current statute does not do so fully enough.  DCYF representatives informed us that the law is forty years old and obviously “outdated.”  Like your gramma’s kitchen cabinets.  So 80s.  The latest and best research, they said, from the field of psychology, indicates a need to expand the definition of neglect to include everything the present DCYF feels to be traumatic to any child on a case-by-case basis.  And, as research in psychology is ever-changing, presumably, updates should be much more frequently made.

One of my questions during the hearing, had I been right about what a “hearing” is, might have been: what percentage of parents and their children does the NH DCYF believe they ought to have contact with to ‘help’ and train them to parent according to Psych Today’s best practices?  30%?  50%?  I think based on their testimony to infallibility and their assertions that neglect is too complex for the untrained person to understand, the answer may well have been 100%.  Maybe it was just my impression, but I could easily imagine all the women I saw and some of the men requiring all parents to get a license in order to keep raising our own children.

Another question that wasn’t really relevant but I couldn’t help thinking about as I prepared to leave: how many of those attending were being paid to attend and testify?  All the ones I heard testified in their professional, government-employee capacity (except the bill’s sponsors), so presumably were paid tax dollars to come help us in this way.  I will never be sure though, because I had to leave to take my daughter to a violin lesson.  I imagine any parent present had to leave to fulfill a parental duty-of-care round about then as it was the end of a school day…except the credentialed crowd, who either had no children or had proxies to attend to them, while they attended to everybody else’s.

 While my description of the hearing’s proceedings is a bit tongue-in-cheek, my concerns about this bill and the attitudes of DCYF in the hearing and those of the bill’s sponsors are not.  “Parentification” and the other proposed new language are terms from one psychological school of thought concerning trauma in childhood and are by no means universally accepted.  Nor is it universally accepted that the purpose of law or even of DCYF itself is to abandon neutrality and endorse a single method of childrearing–the one that has been in place in public schools to their great detriment for over a decade, no less.  Should I lobby to mandate breastfeeding, discipline, or religious activities which I believe to be best practices?

One has only to review the citations in Abigail Shrier’s book Bad Therapy, especially for Chapters 5 and 6, to recognize that there exist multiple schools of thought on the value of the “trauma-informed” approach that HB 553 seeks to enshrine in law.  It doesn’t matter if one agrees with Shrier or her sources.  What matters is that they exist. Representatives Alicia Greg, Charles McMahon, Kimberly Rice, Debra DeSimone, Jodi Nelson, Mark Pearson, Gaby Grossman, Peter Petrigno, Katelyn Kuttab, and Heather Raymond, and Senators Sharon Carson, Regina Birdsell, Cindy Rosenwald and Patrick Long, and NH DCYF put forward an attempt to crush other parenting styles or even competing academic psych theories by fiat.  Most disturbing of all were the assertions that even the current law is actually designed to be vague and indefinite, that it ought to be frequently updated and expanded based on research, and that its proponents really view this as a good thing.

“It will be of little avail to the people, that the laws are made by men of their own choice, if the laws be so voluminous that they cannot be read, or so incoherent that they cannot be understood; if they be repealed or revised before they are promulgated, or undergo such incessant changes that no man who knows what the law is today, can guess what it will be tomorrow.  Law is defined to be a rule of action; but how can that be a rule, which is little known, and is less fixed?” 

–James Madison, Federalist #62

We’d like to thank Keri Haruza for the Op-Ed. As a reminder, authors’ opinions are their own and may not represent those of Grok Media, LLC, GraniteGrok.com, its sponsors, readers, authors, or advertisers. Submit Op-Eds to steve@granitegrok.com

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