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1. 29 percent of agencies would screen this in.
2. 82 percent of agencies would screen this in.
3. 54 percent of agencies would screen this in.
4. 47 percent of agencies would screen this in.
5. 43 percent of agencies would screen this in.

Friday's story on the recalled playground slide was interesting, but this was one of the occasions in which I found the reader comments even more delicious. (And that's no slight to reporter Paul Walsh. Great job on the story.)

Playground safety really seems to strike an emotional chord with readers. Parents only had to take one look at a picture of the recalled slide and wonder who would have green-lighted such a contraption in the first place (I took to calling it "Aerosmith: The Slide," because it oddly reminded me of Steven Tyler's tongue.)

From reader cuban78: "My 4-year-old son wanted to ride this slide at a playground last summer after T-ball. There's no sign on it that has an age recommendation -- it's just there on the elementary school playground. I have to say that I was pretty nervous to see him use it -- it's a tricky transition at the top, and there's no instructions, so the kids try to ride it like a regular slide, with their feet on the track instead of along the sides like the kid in the photo. Needless to say, I held his hand the whole way down and he wasn't interested in using it again."

But then there were the commenters recalling the playgrounds and playtimes of their youth -- including the metal jungle gyms and other contraptions erected in a pre-litigation world.

Society pays about $755 million per year to hospitalize U.S. children and teens who suffer illnesses or injuries due to illegal alcohol consumption, Mayo Clinic researchers reported earlier this week in the Journal of Adolescent Health.

The rate of alcohol-related hospitalizations among 15- to 20-year-olds was highest in the Midwest, and highest among Native American boys in that region. The study reviewed 699,506 hospital discharges among 15- to 20-year-olds (excluding child birth cases). Shockingly, researchers found that 79 percent of these teens were drunk on arrival to the hospital, and 5.6 percent (39,619) met criteria for an alcohol use disorder, according to a Mayo press release on the study.

 “When teenagers drink, they tend to drink excessively, leading to many destructive consequences including motor vehicle accidents, injuries, homicides and suicides,” said Dr. Terry Scheenkloth, a Mayo addiction expert and psychiatrist. 

Daycare problems are in the news this week with the closure of a notorious facility in Brooklyn Center and the death of a child at a Coon Rapids family-based day care.

Advocates said the closure of the Arena Early Learning Center is a reminder that parents should look up the license history of their children's current or future day care facilities using the Minnesota Department of Human Service's web site. This is in addition to using the up-and-coming Parent Aware site, which comprehensively ranks licensed child care centers in the state but might not even list those that have bad disciplinary records.

The checkered history of the Arena facility can be seen here. The absence of any recent disciplinary action against the Coon Rapids home-based daycare where the child died can be seen here.

A common question is why parents kept their children at the Arena facility if they had any suspicions of its quality or problems with the staff there. Part of the answer has to do with the fact that it offered 24 hour service during the work week. Parents with night shift jobs have very few options when it comes to professional, licensed child care.

Some larger daycare chains have tried extended hours but found that they were money-losers. Many parents need night hours for a while, but then switch to regular day jobs. Daycares find it hard to maintain a stable base of children to financially support night hours.

"It’s a puzzle that’s been around for a long time," said Ann McCully, executive director of the Minnesota Child Care Resource & Referral Network. "I don’t think we've gotten any better at solving it."

An interesting flap emerged last week between Hennepin County and the Minnesota Department of Human Services over whether the county was closing dormant child support cases too quickly -- and without legal justification. An initial review suggested as many as 217 child support cases in Hennepin County were inappropriately closed -- with a total of $5.9 million still owed in those cases, according to figures provided by DHS.

The dispute -- spurred by a Channel 5 report -- seems in many ways to be an administrative matter over whether the county is following the letter of state and federal law. Officials from both agencies acknowledged that the closed cases at issue involved debts that deadbeat parents were unlikely to pay in full or at all. The cases the county closed -- inappropriately as it turned out -- had not seen payments in years and involved children who were now adults.

In some ways, the issue behind this dispute is the more interesting one: the lingering impact of the last economic recession that has left child support payers and payees struggling to make ends meet and raise healthy children.

"If we thought there was money out there that could be used for the support of a child, we'd be going for it," said Deborah Huskins, an area director for the county's human services and public health department. "These are cases where we don't think that is going to be the result ... Most of these people (owing money) are in desperate straights themselves. There are a lot of people who have fallen on hard times ... The fact of the matter is they don't have any money themselves or the money they do have is a form of public assistance that is not collectable under federal and state law."

The life circumstances don't necessarily matter, nor does the county have the legal authority to close a child support case just because a payment hasn't been made in a long time, said Anne Barry, deputy commissioner of the state human services department. Philosophically, that would set a bad precedent to deadbeat parents that they could avoid paying if they just stayed out of sight for for enough years.

"We get federal money because the federal government expects us to implement policies on these programs, which includes the belief that if an obligation is owed, an obligation is owed," Barry said. "Just because a payment hasn't been made in five years doesn’t mean that an obligation isn’t going to be fulfilled … None of us should be comfortable with that."

The specter of losing federal money is driving this dispute. The county had been closing dormant cases in part because it is judged by the federal government on the percent of cases in which payments are made. If the county's batting average is too low, so to speak, it could lose federal funding. But Barry said the financial penalties would likely be worse if a federal audit found that the county wasn't following the law and was closing cases prematurely.

The state conducted another review of closed cases last week and found that Hennepin County isn't the only offender. There were numerous cases in Ramsey County and statewide in which child support cases were closed without adequate justification. The state has ordered that these cases be re-opened, making the counties responsible for overseeing them and pursuing payment from deadbeat parents if at all possible again. County officials are hoping for changes in state legislation that would legally define hopeless collection cases and give them adequate justification to close them out.

A new study in the Journal of Adolescence identifies three parenting styles and the style that produces the most stable children. Which parent are you?

a) Authoritarian parents are demanding and highly controlling. They are detached and unreceptive to their children’s needs. These parents support unilateral communication where they establish rules without explanation and expect them to be obeyed without question.

 

b) Authoritative parents are demanding and controlling. They are warm and receptive to their children’s needs. They are receptive to bidirectional communication in that they explain to their children why they have established rules and listen to their children’s opinions about those rules.

 

c) Permissive parents are nondemanding and noncontrolling. They tend to be warm and receptive to their children’s needs, but place few boundaries on their children. If they do establish rules, they rarely enforce them to any great extent.

And now for a brief tangent. I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that the father in the now infamous Feb. 7 Facebook discipline video (see below) is more in the authoritarian category. (Watch with care. It contains expletives and, of course, the violence of the father shooting his daughter's laptop 10 times.) This frustrated father sure lays down the law, but research would suggest that his daughter isn't going to gain any more respect for his authority as a result.