Minor Thoughts from me to you

It used to be that a person had a reasonable expectation of privacy. Now? The government snoops on you through your children. Woe be to the person that does anything the government finds questionable.

I found this out after my 13-year-old daughter's annual checkup. Her pediatrician grilled her about alcohol and drug abuse.

Not my daughter's boozing. Mine.

"The doctor wanted to know how much you and mom drink, and if I think it's too much," my daughter told us afterward, rolling her eyes in that exasperated 13-year-old way. "She asked if you two did drugs, or if there are drugs in the house."

I turned to my wife. "You took her to the doctor. Why didn't you say something?"

She couldn't, she told me, because she knew nothing about it. All these questions were asked in private, without my wife's knowledge or consent.

"The doctor wanted to know how we get along," my daughter continued. Then she paused. "And if, well, Daddy, if you made me feel uncomfortable."

Great. I send my daughter to the pediatrician to find out if she's fit to play lacrosse, and the doctor spends her time trying to find out if her mom and I are drunk, drug-addicted sex criminals.

That's just disturbing, on so many levels. I absolutely hate the idea that the government would automatically consider me to be a danger to my children and would snoop behind my back looking for any evidence to convict me and take them away from me.

It gets worse.

We're not alone, either. Thanks to guidelines issued by the American Academy of Pediatrics and supported by the commonwealth, doctors across Massachusetts are interrogating our kids about mom and dad's "bad" behavior.

The paranoia over parents is so strong that the AAP encourages doctors to ignore "legal barriers and deference to parental involvement" and shake the children down for all the inside information they can get.

And that information doesn't stay with the doctor, either.

Debbie is a mom from Uxbridge who was in the examination room when the pediatrician asked her 5-year-old, "Does Daddy own a gun?"

When the little girl said yes, the doctor began grilling her and her mom about the number and type of guns, how they are stored, etc.

If the incident had ended there, it would have merely been annoying.

But when a friend in law enforcement let Debbie know that her doctor had filed a report with the police about her family's (entirely legal) gun ownership, she got mad.

Ya think? These doctors are state officials are turning lawful actions into near crimes. What gives them the authority to do that?

And people wonder why I have such a strong dislike for doctors. Maybe it's because so many of them think that it's their God-given right to be interfering, know-it-all, tin-pot dictators in charge of making sure society is healthy and pure.

Hardly.