Strollerderby

Mussolini was the one said to make the trains run on time, not Hitler.

Maybe we should start rounding up the children of Arab anti-semites too? I wonder how that would go over? Or the children of elitist white racists, how do we know that all those parent aren't naming their sons Joseph after Goebbels?

Well in this case there was physical abuse as well, so naming their kids that way is not really the issue.

Physical abuse should always be cause for investigation - and possibly intervention. In an ideal world, intervention would range from teaching young, undereducated, and inexperienced parents better ways to manage anger and handle kids, all the way up to removing a child from his home.  

But I also think that naming a child something should never, in and of itself, be cause for investigation.  I strongly endorse people's rights to say whatever they want - hateful as it may be to others.   And once you say that it's not OK to name a kid Adolf Hitler - you start drawing a line whose contours are going to cause a lot of trouble.  Like Treespeed said - what names are OK? How would one decide? Will it change everytime we get a Democrat or a Jew or a creationist in the White House?

I know people who would probably use the "n" word in front of their kids. Morally reprehensible? Yes. A good reason to separate a family? Hell, no. Something else must be going on here.

As a former social worker I can tell you that naming your child HITLER is a huge red flag that things are seriously wrong and someone needs to investigate -- especially when that is paired with an apparent witness to abuse

Look at it from our perspective, Hilter-name-defenders.  Imagine the headlines: Innocent baby murdered by insane Nazi parents!  Why didn't anyone DO ANYTHING??  It was so obvious!  The parents named the kid HITLER!!  Doesn't this state have any social workers who care about anything aside from a paycheck?  Etc, etc, etc.  And you know what, those headlines are RIGHT.  Thousands of children are seriously injured or killed in households just like this one, ones that hung their red flag of alarm right outside their front door... so yeah, excuse us for investigating.  We tend to think that the well-being of the child trumps the parent's "right" to be sociopaths.

As a former social worker and law school graduate(my credentials, so I know of what I speak) social workers(per Knitty) don't operate on what they "care about"; they work based on state laws and the mandate of the child protective agencies. If we have complaints about those laws or policies we need to contact our legislators to change them.

Let's not blame the social workers.

Knitty, I'm not defending the Hitler Namers, I'm saying that it's probably a poor indicator of wether or not a parent is good or bad despite the comments on this blog. Children are raised amongst all manners of ignorance, hate, and borderline abusive religious traditions. What about all the kids we saw in the movie jesus camp, or kids that go to Wahhabi schools? These places teach the same sort of intolerance and pleas for holy war as any Neo Nazi.