11-year-old Florida boy arrested for refusing to stand for the Pledge of Allegiance

[politicaljunkie41910]

47. I stated very clearly what my opinion was. You're welcome to your own. When my kids were growing

up it was more important to me that they were safe, than right. When a black person challenges authority in this country, and the police are involved, they don't always live to tell about it. As I stated previously, it was mine and my husband's job to determine whether our children's teachers were being fair to them. After all, our job was preparing them for life, and life is not always "FAIR". Our job was to ensure that they had the tools they needed to succeed in life. How you raise your children is your business.

We were very active in our children's schooling and if they had a problem they knew that if they felt they were being treated unfairly, we would be there to stand up for them, and stand by them. But we insisted that they respect authority, whomever that was at the time. Because there is always going to someone in their lives who they are accountable to. I make no apologies for that fact. My three kids are all grown up now. They are all college graduates. They have hood jobs. They have families of their own. They've never been in trouble with the law. They respect us as their parents and they're raising their own children with the same values they were raised with.

I can't say the same about some of their classmates, their sports teammates, or some of their friends in the neighborhood they grew up in, which was a middle/upper middle class suburban neighborhood. Many did not fair as well as mine and that was because IMHO, their parents were too permissive, and didn't require that they respect authority; any authority including their parents. I can't tell you how many of my kids friends/classmates died in high school, but they went to more funerals than any teen should have had to experience. But those kids that died had too many things, too much money, and too little respect for their parents or what they said or thought. Kids need to learn at a very early age that everyone is answerable to someone. If they believe at age 11 that they run their house, they probably do.