Quotulatiousness

May 19, 2013

Scottish government assigns state guardians to all children

Filed under: Britain, Government, Law — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 09:02

The SNP has introduced brand new form of interference in the lives of Scottish families:

Under the “scary” legislation, known as Getting It Right For Every Child or GIRFEC, every child aged under 18 will have a ‘Named Person’ with the legal right to ensure they are raised in a government-approved manner.

It will also mean that sensitve personal details about every child — even down to the names of their pets — can be recorded, stored and shared on a central database.

Incredibly, GIRFEC has already been adopted by almost every local authority in Scotland and yet most people — including some MSPs — have no idea of the full extent of its Big Brother-style interference.

[. . .]

For children under five, the state guardian will usually be a health visitor, while for school-age children it will usually be the headteacher or deputy head.

They will have to record “routine information” about their charges, which is then stored in a vast database, and can raise concerns about a child’s wellbeing that could ultimately result in them being taken into care.

Marion Samson, headteacher at Westquarter Primary and Nursery in Falkirk, is a ‘Named Person’ who says her role is to “challenge” families who are not bringing up their children properly.

However, in response to her profile on the government’s Engage for Education blog, one teacher – giving her name as Sian Dawson — described GIRFEC as “quite a scary notion”.

She wrote: “Perhaps the Scottish Government would be far better tightening up the processes surrounding child protection for those who actually need help rather than not trusting the majority of families to do a good job.”

According to a Scottish Government training document seen by this newspaper, the specific aim of GIRFEC is to undermine parents and give the “community” a greater role in raising children.

April 14, 2013

Differing national philosophies on child-raising

Filed under: Europe, Health, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 10:56

In The Atlantic, Olga Khazan compares the way American parents interact with their children to the rather more relaxed parenting styles of other nations:

The biggest difference between American parents and their counterparts in Europe might be that they are far more relaxed about enrichment than we are, according to a study released this week by Sara Harkness and Charles M. Super at the School of Family Studies at the University of Connecticut.

Not only are Americans far more likely to focus on their children’s intelligence and cognitive skills, they are also far less likely to describe them as “happy” or “easy” children to parent.

“The U.S.’s almost obsession with cognitive development in the early years overlooks so much else,” Harkness told Slate.

For part of their research, the authors focused just on parents in the United States and the Netherlands. The differences are stark: American parents emphasized setting aside “special time” with each of their children, while Dutch parents spent a few hours each day together with their kids as an entire family.

American parents said they struggled to manage the sleep schedules of their babies and young children, explaining that they try to entertain or distract them when they wake up in the middle of the night.

April 3, 2013

Parenting classes are a waste of time and money

Filed under: Education, Government, Health — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 10:02

Elizabeth and I took parenting classes, as neither of us had much experience of dealing with infants or small children before our son was born. Although the instructor was good at being re-assuring that we’d do fine as parents, almost none of the “skills” we were taught were actually of much use after the baby arrived. Since those early-90’s days, parenting courses have become even more common, but as Frank Furedi points out, no more relevant to the actual needs of parents and their newborns:

The parenting programmes promoted by government are based on a mixture of prejudice and the pseudoscience of so-called parenting research. Such ‘research’ is underpinned by a fundamental transformation in the meaning of parenting, which has been turned from a relationship into a skill. The core assumption in the government’s proposal for parenting classes is that childrearing consists of a set of practices that need to be learned by mothers and fathers. These practices are depicted as skills which can be taught by those who have the requisite professional qualifications.

No one could dispute that childrearing is something that is learned by mothers and fathers. Every human relationship involves a continual process of learning and gaining an understanding of the other person. Parents need to learn how to engage with the imagination of their child, how to stimulate her and when and how to restrain her from doing something harmful. Successful parents learn on the job. However, the really useful lessons we are learning have little to do with abstract skills, but rather are about understanding the relationship we have with our children.

The question is not whether parenting has to be learned, but whether it can be taught. Not everything that has to be learned can be taught. Parenting cannot be taught because it is about the forging and managing of an intimate relationship. And it is through the conduct of that relationship that people develop the insights and lessons suitable to their lives and conditions. One reason why professional intervention into family life is unlikely to have beneficial results is because each relationship contains something unique, which is only grasped by those involved in it.

[. . .]

However, the project of transforming parenting into a skill does have negative and potentially harmful consequences. When human relationships are recast as skills to be managed by professional trainers something very important happens in the way we conduct our personal affairs. As I argue in my study Paranoid Parenting such policy interventions cultivate a kind of learned helplessness among parents. Through exaggerating the complexity of child-rearing, parenting experts contribute to the eroding self-reliance of modern mums and dads. Inevitably, the principal outcome of such interventions is to distract parents from learning from their own experience. And yet learning from experience is the key to developing the confidence for making those crucial judgment calls that confronts parents on a daily basis.

March 23, 2013

“Having it all” versus “being happy”

Filed under: Business, Media — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:32

In the Globe and Mail, Margaret Wente talks about the tension many women feel in trying to lead full lives, both professionally and personally:

Sheryl Sandberg, the billionaire COO of Facebook, is everywhere these days. Her new book, Lean In, is a smart, strategic guide for women who want to succeed. Be more assertive, conquer your fear, manage your guilt, don’t sabotage yourself.

All good advice, in my view. But these days, a lot of smart, highly educated thirtysomething women are having an entirely different conversation. They’re not talking about leaning in. They’re talking about leaning back.

[. . .]

Given the realities of the modern workplace, the mystery isn’t why there aren’t more women at the top but why so many want to get there. “To reject a high-flying career … is not to reject aspiration,” Judith Shulevitz writes in The New Republic. “It is to refuse to succumb to a kind of madness.”

Most women, if they have the choice, are happy to trade long hours and money for flexibility and control. This explains why nearly a quarter of women who have MBAs and children have dropped out of the work force 15 years after graduation, according to a U.S. study. When these findings were released, they produced much hand-wringing about the failed promise of feminism and lingering discrimination in the workplace. But what they really reflect is women’s stronger preference for a balanced life.

High-achieving younger women don’t think this is going to happen to them. It takes them by surprise. They get an MBA or law degree, a demanding job and an equal-opportunity husband. And then they have a baby and – wham. As one young mother in her early 30s puts it, “I had no idea I’d be so crazy about my child.”

I suspect a lot of the frustration young women encounter is that they’ve been lead to expect that they can cope with both a full-time, active, fulfilling career and raising a child simultaneously. The reality is that for most women, it’s a binary choice: you get either the job or the family, but not both. When this realization hits home, it can feel like a betrayal.

December 18, 2012

P.J. O’Rourke on marijuana and same-sex marriage

Filed under: Humour, Law, Liberty, Religion — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 09:37

December 16, 2012

Queen Victoria: not a model mother

Filed under: Britain, History — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 11:58

A BBC documentary will shed some light on the domestic life of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert:

Helen Rappaport, author of Magnificent Obsession and a contributor to the three part series, said Queen Victoria and Prince Albert were “pretty awful parents” to their four sons and five daughters.

“She hated being pregnant. She had prenatal and postnatal depression. She didn’t breastfeed her children who she thought were horrible dribbling little things. She was not in the least bit maternal.

“Queen Victoria liked sex, but she didn’t like the result.”

[. . .]

Queen Victoria’s relationship with Prince Albert was a tempestuous one, punctuated with rows.

Prince Albert, who chided Queen Victoria in a letter. “It is a pity you find no consolation in the company of your children.

“The trouble lies in the mistaken notion the function of a mother is to be always correcting, scolding and ordering them about” he wrote.

November 26, 2012

New child abuse panic in Britain

Filed under: Britain, History, Media — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 11:00

In sp!ked, Neil Davenport talks about the ongoing child abuse panic that is gripping Britain, and contrasts it with the 1987 horror show that was the investigation into systematic child abuse in Middlesbrough:

In retrospect, it is suggested, the move in recent years towards intrusive policing of family life, and in particular working-class family life, was a positive and enlightened development. Incredibly, the re-evaluation of the policing of the family as an enlightened thing has included attempts to rehabilitate the long-discredited Cleveland child-abuse scandal of 1987, when 121 children were removed by social workers in Middlesbrough on the grounds that their parents had abused them. That scandal was closely followed by allegations of child-abuse rings in Rochdale and Orkney in 1990. In each case, the vast majority of the allegations were found to be false. Yet now, in the wake of the Savile scandal, broadsheet journalists claim that the ‘public fury’ against the paediatricians who made the Cleveland allegations was ‘too simplistic’. It created a ‘saga of rogue doctors and wronged parents’, which doesn’t capture the reality of what happened in Cleveland, apparently. In other words, the suggestion is that there was some truth in the Cleveland allegations, and that the state must rediscover its nerve to interfere wholesale into suspicious communities.

[. . .]

As has been previously argued on spiked, it was from the mid-1980s onwards that child abuse took centre stage in the national consciousness. In 1986, the founding of Esther Rantzen’s ChildLine gave credence to the growing belief that children were no longer safe in their own homes or communities. This paedophile panic, largely driven by figures from the political left, reached its devastating pinnacle in Cleveland in 1987. Here, two paediatricians, Dr Marietta Higgs and Dr Geoffrey Wyatt, became convinced that the widespread rape of young children was taking place in this part of Middlesbrough.

Higgs and Wyatt based their evidence on a technique called reflex anal dilation, which would supposedly detect signs of sexual assault. After Higgs had experimented on her own children and found a negative result, she concluded that any positive result must mean that other children had been abused. Despite it being too small a control group to give any definitive answers, the dubious test and results were still enough evidence for the state effectively to kidnap and contain over 100 children and arrest their parents.

[. . .]

This resulted in the setting up of a public inquiry, led by Elizabeth Butler-Sloss, which examined instances where sexual abuse was said to have taken place. In these cases, the courts subsequently dismissed the charges against the vast majority of the parents. During the inquiry, it was revealed that social workers were driven by malignant prejudices rather by any sense of duty or professionalism. In video-recorded interviews with the allegedly abused children, social workers were seen threatening and attempting to bribe the children in order to make them confirm social workers’ belief that they had been abused. Leading questions were asked of the children, which would not have been permitted in court.

The impact on the children and the accused parents was devastating. It took some of the innocent parents two years to get their children back home. For years afterwards, the children and parents of Cleveland reported being terrified of any knock on the door. One of the children taken away by the authorities said recently: ‘We were abused by the very people — the doctors and social workers — there to protect children. We were essentially put up for adoption. My father now says he did not dare even put a towel around me at the public swimming pool for years. He was afraid of cuddling us in public. My parents’ lives have been shattered.’

November 25, 2012

UK bureaucrat removes foster children from home of UKIP supporters

Filed under: Britain, Bureaucracy, Government, Liberty, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 10:30

I heard about this case yesterday, and I’d hoped that it was just a mangling of the report, not an appallingly bad exercise of municipal power:

The stunning decision by Rotherham Council to remove three children from a foster home (where they were happy) because the foster parents support UKIP shows that the “culture war” here in Britain is being waged not by the Right, but by the Left.

Joyce Thacker, the council’s director of children, who said her decision was influenced by UKIP’s sceptical take on multiculturalism, is the mirror image of those mad American right-wingers who want to outlaw abortion clinics and homosexuals. Unlike them, though, she is in a position of power. Hers is the latest in a series of increasingly chilling actions of this nature taken by bien-pensant officials.

[. . .]

The special interest of the Rotherham case — and no doubt why Ed Miliband was so quick to condemn it — is that in five days’ time the town has a parliamentary by-election. Labour is already in a bit of trouble here — about 80 of the 114 members present at the meeting to select its candidate walked out in protest after the favourite, local man Mahroof Hussain, was excluded from the shortlist. Many of them said they wouldn’t campaign for the woman Labour chose, Sarah Champion.

November 20, 2012

Undervaluing, denigrating the role of the family in a child’s life

Filed under: Britain, Government — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 11:11

In sp!ked, Tim Black takes issue with the blithe paternalistic comment by a British government minister that children should be more frequently removed from their homes and put into “care”:

Still, it is a dubious testament to Gove’s eloquence that he gave a striking expression to the state’s usurpation of the role traditionally played by adult family members. As he put it, ‘the rights of biological parents’ have for too long been treated as precious. It is time, Gove is saying, for these filial bonds, which have been central to society for centuries, to be demystified, disenchanted. After all, what is a mother or a father, or a daughter or a son, other than an arbitrary accident of nature? The words signify nothing more valuable than a set of random ‘biological’ outcomes. To privilege certain adult-child relationships on the basis of biology is to succumb to the allure of tradition, and to condemn many children to a lifetime of misery. ‘In all too many cases when we decide to leave children in need with their biological parents’, Gove concluded, ‘we are leaving them to endure a life of soiled nappies and scummy baths, chaos and hunger, hopelessness and despair’.

With the family blithely dismantled, and the roles of father and mother treated as little more than semiotic jetsam, Gove was able to propose his alternative to biology: the artifice of the state. ‘I firmly believe more children should be taken into care more quickly and that too many children are allowed to stay too long with parents whose behaviour is unacceptable. I want social workers to be more assertive with dysfunctional parents, courts to be less indulgent of poor parents, and the care system to expand to deal with the consequences.’

Gove’s is a frightening vision. As the meaning and value of being mum or dad is actively reduced by politicians to mere biological facts — in short, as tradition is wilfully disenchanted — so it becomes easier for the state, through its various agents, to assume the role of guardian. The result, complete with empowered or ‘more assertive’ social workers, and their correlative, impotent and less assertive parents, is a society with ever increasing numbers of children placed into Britain’s far from distinguished care system.

Quite why this scenario is considered progressive is not entirely clear. Living with a mum or a dad deemed ‘bad’ or ‘poor’ by a social worker would surely, in many cases, be far better for a child than surviving, parentless, even in a vastly improved care system. Besides, while Gove might not care to acknowledge it, the bond between parents and their children is not merely biological; it is possessed of considerable human and social value, too. Parents do not simply love their children; they help to socialise them, and act as a source of authority. To seek to erode this bond even further than it has been is deeply reckless.

September 10, 2012

Extending the state’s say in private decision-making

Filed under: Britain, Law, Liberty — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:55

Barbara Hewson on recent legal developments in Britain which extend the state’s ability to interfere in the private lives of adults:

For centuries, the High Court has claimed an ‘inherent jurisdiction’ to take care of the persons and property of those who could not look after themselves. This power covers minors and wards of court, as well as adults who lack mental capacity. It originates in an ancient Crown Prerogative, going back to feudal times (1). But in a little-noticed legal development, some judges of the Family Division have started to claim an ‘inherent jurisdiction’ over the lives of adults in full possession of their faculties.

This is a disturbing trend. These rulings are given at private hearings. Parliament, the public, and indeed the Ministry of Justice, are none the wiser. The problem, at base, is a constitutional one. Our judges are unelected, and are not supposed to make laws. That is parliament’s function.

Parliament has said that people become adults at age 18 (2). Most people think that the point of reaching adulthood is that you get to decide where you live, and who your friends are. If you make unwise decisions, that is unfortunate, but it is not a basis for the authorities to intervene. However, last March, in a case called ‘DL’, the Court of Appeal said that the High Court is entitled to disregard adult decision-making (3).

[. . .]

Judges of the Family Division of the High Court have been seduced by what Frank Furedi has called ‘the fatalistic sociology of the precautionary principle’. This views all human beings as innately powerless, vulnerable and at risk (7). And if to be at risk is a condition of life, then everyone becomes a legitimate target of judicial intervention and protection. This refusal by the courts to acknowledge adults as self-determining agents has ominous implications for liberty and the law.

August 11, 2012

Kidnapping children to “save them” from gay parents

Filed under: Politics, Religion, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 11:19

Words sometimes fail me, as when I first heard of this notion some religious nutbars are pushing to set up a 21st century underground railroad to “rescue” children from gay and lesbian parents:

As has been widely reported, Bryan Fischer of the American Family Association asserted in a tweet Wednesday that “we need an Underground Railroad to deliver innocent children from same-sex households.” Lest anyone imagine he was speaking merely in metaphor, a second tweet from him linked to a Chicago Tribune story about the impending trial of a Mennonite clergyman “charged with aiding and abetting the kidnapping of Isabella Miller-Jenkins, now 10,” who was spirited out of the country so as to evade court orders mandating visitation with Janet Jenkins, who had helped raise Isabella as part of a same-sex couple. Fischer’s summary: “Head of Underground Railroad to deliver innocent children from same-sex households goes on trial.”

Fischer and his American Family Association, it should be noted, are clownish figures whose extremism is a turn-off even to many true believers on the social right. (It can nonetheless be interesting to observe who deems them respectable enough to associate with; for example, the Values Voter Summit, which draws major political figures like Eric Cantor, Jim DeMint, and Ted Cruz, considers Fischer a suitable speaker and AFA a suitable prominent sponsor.) Anyway, Fischer thrives on outraged publicity from his adversaries, so enough about him. What’s worth rather more attention (and provides some insight into the mounting campaign against gay parenting from some quarters) are the two articles he tweeted.

If you’re not familiar with the epic Miller-Jenkins custody-kidnapping case, it’s worth catching up by way of The New York Times‘ account the other day. (Jenkins’ lawyers at GLAD have posted many of the documents, and I’ve been covering it off and on for years at my Overlawyered blog.) While nothing short of tragic for the individuals involved (the little girl is now growing up in a strange country and for many years has not seen Janet Jenkins, who helped raise her), I concluded a few years ago that its greatest significance as a social turning point was in revealing the new willingness of many in organized religious conservatism, “even the lawyers among them, to applaud and defend the defiance of court orders.” Since then, important sections of the social right have evolved further toward a position on lawbreaking more often historically associated with those well to their left.

July 19, 2012

Walter Olson: more red flags in the Regnerus study

Filed under: Health, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 11:00

Some studies provide results that challenge common beliefs and understandings. Others reinforce them. But some studies are designed from the desired results backwards. The Regnerus study on gay parents’ influence on their children appears to be one of the latter. Walter Olson points out that even in its own terms, the study shows something different from what it is intended to:

By now almost everyone has had a whack at the recent Mark Regnerus (University of Texas) study claiming that young adults who report having a gay parent score worse on a range of life-success indicators than children from intact biological families. According to the study, these kids as young adults have lower educational attainment, are arrested more often, and have more trouble in their own relationships, among other problems. Critics have pointed out that the story is mostly one of collapsed heterosexual families, not “same-sex parenting”: The great majority of the kids were born to male-female couples, most of the presumedly gay dads and many of the moms didn’t get custody of their kids after their relationships dissolved, and few of the kids were actually raised through long periods by gay couples. LGBT advocates point out that sociologist Mark Regnerus accepted $695,000 from the anti-gay Witherspoon Institute to carry out the study.

But many critics have missed one of Regnerus’ most unexpected findings, one that may illuminate his study’s shortcomings. Specifically, and feeding into pretty much all the other problems, the study diagnoses children of gay parents as having a huge problem with poverty. Here’s Regnerus:

    Sixty-nine (69) percent of LMs [respondents with lesbian mothers] and 57% of GFs [those with gay fathers] reported that their family received public assistance at some point while growing up, compared with 17% of IBFs [those with intact two-parent biological families]; 38% of LMs said they are currently receiving some form of public assistance, compared with 10% of IBFs. Just under half of all IBFs reported being employed full-time at present, compared with 26% of LMs.

Those are big gaps. And of course they’re much at odds with the affluent image of gay families presented in both pro- and anti-gay-parenting literature as well as Modern Family-style popular entertainment. What do they signify?

Probably the biggest single reason is the one cited at the outset: This is mostly a survey of what happens when heterosexual families crack up. (Interestingly, if a married couple stayed together, they were counted as an “IBF,” no matter whether one or both partners pursued same-sex liaisons.) Decades of data indicate that children of family breakup do worse than children whose parents stay together, on many variables related to adult success. One reason, though not the only reason, is that they grow up significantly poorer.

July 17, 2012

How the Nanny State undermines family life for parents and children

Filed under: Britain, Government — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 08:13

Jennie Bristow at sp!ked:

… Bailey’s diagnosis of the dangers inherent in eroding parental authority was absolutely spot on. By attempting to ‘nationalise’ childrearing, whether by providing classes to instruct parents in officially approved childrearing methods or by using schools to inculcate children in a heightened awareness of the failings of their mothers and fathers, in recent decades, government parenting policy has stripped parents of their directly authoritative role.

Instead of being the boss of their own homes, parents are situated as mediators in the relationship between the child and the state, and told that their primary responsibility is not to do right by their child but to show that they are doing the right thing according to the current parenting orthodoxy. The effect of this, as Bailey suggested last year, is to disorient both parents and children, as both question the basis for parental authority.

Was this what caused the riots last summer? Not on its own. The behaviour of those young people engaged in the mayhem was profoundly shocking – but so, too, was the response of the adult population, from the middle classes cowering in their living rooms and boasting about that in the press, to the failure of the police to intervene decisively. What underpinned the chaos was the open collapse of adult authority, and this should have provided a wake-up call to our society about the need to grow up and take responsibility for the younger generations.

But the problem of parental authority forms an important part of the generalised crisis of adulthood, and it is worth reflecting on the relationship between the two.

June 21, 2012

Light to moderate drinking during pregnancy has no measurable health risks

Filed under: Europe, Health — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 09:26

As Radley Balko pointed out on Twitter, “Prediction: The activist public health crowd will go absolutely nuts over this study.” Jacob Sullum on a recent European health study:

Despite the familiar surgeon general’s warning advising women to abstain completely from alcoholic beverages during pregnancy “because of the risk of birth defects,” there has never been any solid evidence that light to moderate consumption harms the fetus (as Stanton Peele pointed out in Reason more than two decades ago). New research from Denmark, funded by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, indicates once again that heavy drinking is the real hazard. In a study of more than 1,600 women (“nearly a third of all Danish women who were pregnant between 1997 and 2003,” Maia Szalavitz notes in Time), children of women who consumed nine or more drinks per week during pregnancy had shorter attention spans and were five times as likely to have low IQs at age 5 than children of abstainers. But no such effects were apparent in the children of women whose alcohol consumption during pregnancy was light (one to four drinks per week) or moderate (five to eight drinks per week). “Our findings show that low to moderate drinking is not associated with adverse effects on the children aged 5,” the researchers said.

Szalavitz cautions that a “drink” as defined in this study contained 12 grams of pure ethanol, compared to the American standard of 14 grams, one-sixth more. Given the relatively wide consumption ranges, that difference probably does not matter much. Szalavitz also notes that, unlike earlier studies, this one asked women about their drinking while they were still pregnant, so the responses are less likely to be skewed by inaccurate recall. Still, self-reported drinking, especially by pregnant women, probably underestimates actual consumption, meaning that the amounts associated with no neurological impairment are apt to be bigger than those indicated by the study.

One of the issues with studies of this sort is the very need for self-reporting: most people, after a lifetime of public health warnings, will under-report their drinking (whether consciously or not). In this case, that’s a useful thing to provide some level of comfort in the findings: if most women in the study under-reported their actual intake of alcohol while pregnant, yet the children show no negative effects developmentally, we can concentrate on those few who really do over-indulge and whose children do suffer as a result.

June 15, 2012

Perhaps “Dad” is not superfluous after all

Filed under: Health, Science — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 08:24

In the National Post, Misty Harris reports that — contrary to certain assertions from the gender war front — fathers actually do have a positive role to play in the lives of their children:

Though the prevailing Father’s Day question is what to get Dad, a new study suggests the more pressing issue is what dads can give in return.

In a long-term analysis of 36 international studies of nearly 11,000 parents and children, researchers have found that a father’s love contributes as much — and sometimes more — to a child’s development as that of a mother, while perceived rejection creates a larger ripple on personality than any other type of experience.

The power of paternal rejection or acceptance is especially strong in cases where the father is seen by his child as having heightened prestige in the family, as this tends to boost his influence.

“In our half-century of international research, we’ve not found any other class of experience that has as strong and consistent an effect on personality as does the experience of rejection — especially by parents in childhood,” says co-author Ronald Rohner, whose study appears in the journal Personality and Social Psychology Review.

My relationship with my father was less than positive, and I don’t think I’m mischaracterizing it by calling it “rejection”. However, he did provide me with a useful parenting template: I could usually figure out what to do as a parent by remembering what my own father did … then not doing that.

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