Father loses appeal he never should've had to file

A Gatineau father who grounded his 12-year-old daughter was once more a loser in court when Quebec Superior Court overturned his appeal of an earlier decision that basically, completely deprived him of his parental authority and once more let our Nanny state remind us who is really in charge.

Here's the cliffs-notes version of events: in 2008, a divorced father with custody of his 12-year-old daughter caught the girl surfing websites he had declared off-limits and was posting inappropriate pictures of herself on the web. As punishment, the father told the girl she would not be allowed on her class' Grade 6 graduation trip to Quebec City.

The girl had been given permission to attend the trip by her mother (the non-custodial parent), but when the girl's father wouldn't sign the permission slip for the girl to accompany her classmates, the girl learnt her lesson and that was that.

Well, that's how it should have ended.

What really happened was that the girl contacted her legal-aid lawyer (who she had known from the parents' custody battle) and took her father to court, which somehow found that the girl could go on the trip, and the father appealed on principle.

Since then, the relationship between the girl and her father has soured completely and the two don't really speak at all, his lawyer, Kim Beaudoin said. "We went from a child who wanted to live with her father, and after all this has been done, they're not speaking anymore. Either way, he doesn't have authority over this child anymore. She sued him because she doesn't respect his rules," she added. "It's very hard to raise a child who is the boss."

And that's the crux of the argument. There are consequences to every action in your life, and now, because a pre-teen disagreed with her father's punishment, every parent everywhere must tread lightly, lest they upset their offspring, who the Quebec Superior Court has declared is now the real boss in these situations.

So, parenting as we know it, with parents helping their children learn through trial, error, praise and punishment, has fundamentally changed forever.

CBC News reported that in its Monday ruling, the appeal court warned the case should not be seen as an open invitation for children to take legal action every time they're grounded.

But that's exactly how kids are going to take it. Do you have any idea how many high-school teachers get threatened with lawsuits these days? All of them -- on a near-daily basis.

At the risk of coming off as flippant, if my four-year-old daughter decided that she's had about enough of daddy telling her to brush her teeth, she could take her mother and I to court to force us to stop forcing her to clean her bicuspids for a couple of minutes near bedtime.

Luckily for us, she doesn't yet know any lawyers. You know what? I think it's lucky for her, too.