Children do not always leave home of their own volition. They may be removed by institutions - which use either stealth or force. Those institutions may convince the children to leave by themselves.

A growing number of institutions remove children from their parents and their families. Even at the Kotel some people attract children to yeshivas, where they are taught the right and proper way to live and act. However, not everybody who removes children has such good intentions. Sometimes the motives may border on the sinister.

Those who remove children from homes imply that they know how to raise the children better than the parents. This fallacious reasoning can and has led to major problems and corruption.

During the early years of the State of Israel, the Mapai party removed religious Yemenite immigrant children from their homes, cut off their sidelocks, removed their kippot, and turned them into Labor Party members. Those Mapainiks felt that they knew a "better" way of raising and "saving" young Yemenite children.

Kibbutzim limited the role of the infant's parents in order to assure enough time for working the fields and reclaiming the barren land. The father was seen as a necessary tool for providing the mother with a baby. However, shortly following his birth, the child was placed in an infant home. The mothers were needed to milk cows and drain swamps. The kibbutz could not afford to have them spend their time changing diapers. They felt that it would be more efficient to have one woman change all the diapers, another woman could do all of the kibbutz laundry and cooking, and all of the other women would be able to work in the fields. Parents saw their children for a limited, specified amount of time. In time, the kibbutz bragged that it "knew" how to raise children better and more effectively than the natural parents.

Those kibbutzim may have had some questionable justification based upon economic need. Perhaps we should not criticize the attitude under those circumstances.

However, today we know that it is difficult to justify the removal of a child from a family, and even more questionable to prove that a parent isn’t smart or good enough.

This can be explained by a recent attitude that a mother should not nurse her own children. Authorities argued that modern science could free the mother for other activities. They even implied that artificial milk is superior to the natural product. Parents just aren't as good!

This attitude continues at a later age as well. Girls are welcome to remain at home for a reasonable amount of time during their schooling, although many schools encourage dormitory facilities. However, it is de rigueur in some circles to send boys to a dormitory yeshiva in order to offer him a "good" education. The rebbe, who is in loco parentis, raises all of the children according to the school's image.

Again, in this case, the authorities discourage the parent from raising their own children. They remove the child from the family in a socially acceptable manner.