How would like a child like this as reported in The Blaze?:

• New Jersey high school senior Rachel Canning is suing her parents for support and college tuition, claiming they kicked her out of the house.
• Rachel Canning’s parents say she left their home last year of her own accord, not wanting to follow their rules, which included keeping a curfew, doing some chores and reconsidering a boyfriend relationship they disagreed with.
• As a result they stopped paying her private school tuition and took away the car they paid for while she has continued to live with a friend’s family.
• A New Jersey judge heard the case and ruled against forcing Canning’s parents to pay weekly child support in the amount of $650 and put off the decision regarding college tuition for a hearing next month.
• “[W]hat do you do when a child says ‘I don’t want your rules but I want everything under the sun and you to pay for it?’”

Does any of this sound familiar? Have you heard that 47 million Americans are on some form of welfare, and most of them believe they deserve it, that they’re entitled to it?

Rachel Canning is no different.

Are her parents demanding? If their testimony is true, then they are, and there’s nothing wrong with it. Their daughter is at a crossroad. If she wants to grow up a responsible adult, she needs to more back home and live under her parent’s rules.

Life’s tough. Now is the time for Rachel Canning to learn that lesson. No parent should be forced to pay for their child’s college education.

She should watch the film From Homeless to Harvard to find out how good she has it. Here’s the true-life account of what this young woman went through:

“Liz Murray . . . rose from some of New York’s meanest streets to graduate from the Ivy League and has become an international speaker. But some of her earliest memories are of her parents spending their welfare payments on cocaine and heroin when she and her sister were starving: ‘We ate ice cubes because it felt like eating. We split a tube of toothpaste between us for dinner.’

When she became homeless at 16, as well as stealing food she would shoplift self-help books and study for exams in a friend’s hallway. Now Breaking Night: A Memoir of Forgiveness, Survival, and My Journey from Homeless to Harvard, [is] a ‘white-knuckle account of survival.’

Born in the Bronx, Liz watched her parents mainlining coke all day. . . . She remembers her mother stealing her birthday money, selling the television, and even the Thanksgiving turkey a church had given them, to scrape together money to score a hit of coke. Liz would turn up to school lice-ridden and was bullied for being smelly and scruffy and eventually dropped out.

The Obama administration unfortunately has made it difficult for parents to lead their children to financial independence by allowing children to stay on their parent’s insurance policies until the age of 26.

We’re creating an entitlement mentality that will one day sink our economy and turn a generation of young people into slaves of the State. This judge could help the process along if he rules that the parents should be forced to pay their daughter’s college education.

The role of civil government will be forever changed by such a ruling. Rachel Canning has learned her lessons well from the political spirit of the age:

“The paternal state not only feeds its children, but nurtures, educates, comforts, and disciplines them, providing all they need for their security. This appears to be a mildly insulting way to treat adults, but it is really a great crime because it transforms the state from being a gift of God, given to protect us against violence, into an idol. It supplies us with all blessings, and we look to it for all our needs. Once we sink to that level, as [C.S.] Lewis says, there is no point in telling state officials to mind their own business. “Our whole lives are their business.”1 The paternalism of the state is that of the bad parent who wants his children dependent on him forever. That is an evil impulse. The good parent prepares his children for independence, trains them to make responsible decisions, knows that he harms them by not helping them to break loose. The paternal state thrives on dependency. When the dependents free themselves, it loses power. It is, therefore, parasitic on the very persons whom it turns into parasites. Thus, the state and its dependents march symbiotically to destruction.2

1. C.S. Lewis, God in the Dock, ed. Walter Hooper (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1970), 314. [↩]
2. Herbert Schlossberg, Idols for Destruction: The Conflict of Christian Faith and American Culture (Wheaton, IL: Crossway Books, [1983] 1993), 184. [↩]