The University of Michigan has completed its top ten survey of health problems for children.  While the top concern is childhood obesity, easily fixed by elimination of toys from Happy Meals (or maybe getting kids to go outside without their Gameboy), the others aren’t so easily fixed.

Seven out of ten of these are traditionally addressed through the criminal justice system.  The primary concern, obesity, has been a target of government attention via regulatory manipulation, which is backed up through the criminal justice system.  Teen pregnancy is a hot button issues because of its religious overtones.  The only concern that seems not to demand a law is stress, though that doesn’t mean some legislator won’t come up with a law and try to justify it as the cure.. 

This list is important in its reflection of the problems on the minds of parents.  Parents, by definition, have children, and there’s no more certain way to curry favor than to craft a law and sell it as the cure to protect their children.

The  list is further broken down by race, with the top 10 for blacks and Hispanics.  For blacks, gun violence and school safety moved way up the list, while teen pregnancy was a mover for Hispanics.  More notably, bullying didn’t even make the list for blacks, but sexually transmitted diseases did.

On the surface, this list is a roadmap for political success.  Whether the problems are real or perceived, whether a manufactured concern from the latest hot topic in the media causing parents to focus on a problem despite the reality of actual harm being farfetched, no politician worth your vote won’t recognize that any law that is cast as the magic solution to the problems of children is the surest route to election.

But consider the experience with drug abuse, the war that began more than two generations ago and has served to put more people in prison in America than in any other country on the planet, and yet there it is, clocking in at number 2.  There’s a message here, that the fixes of which the electorate is so enamored have proven disastrously ineffective in curing the ill, and similarly disastrous in their unintended consequences.

And yet, the rallying cry continues to be “do it for the children.”

Over the past year, the concern that’s garnered enormous attention is bullying, number 5 on the list.  As previously noted, no one has yet been able to come up with an acceptable definition.  While most can agree that it covers one kid using brute force to take another kid’s lunch, this has fallen woefully short of the scope intended by those who seek to protect children.  Instead, the focus has become the feelings of the “victim” of bullying, meaning that if a child’s feelings are hurt, then whoever hurt them is a bully.  Laws are being crafted to make this so, using such language as tormented, threatened, harassed, humiliated and embarrassed.

Such definitions, of course, cover not only conduct that most of us would agree constitute bullying, but also normal, ordinary conduct within its breathtakingly broad sweep.  By criminalizing such conduct, a new generation of potential inmates is born, based largely on the presumptive sense that no one should have to go through life having his feelings hurt.

As society is faced with monumentally difficult, if not intractable, problems, such as unemployment and public debt, it makes it increasingly likely that lawmakers will grab at the low-lying fruit, the ills that are perceived as the greatest to children, and “fix” them to prove how effective they are at lawmaking.  And it’s lists like these that provide them with their easiest and best hits, regardless of ineffectiveness or unintended consequences. 

The rationale is always the same: do it for the children.