Ernest Istook: “one of the great blessings in my life is being the father of five children. Three of them are girls. All three of my…”

“one of the great blessings in my life is being the father of five children. Three of them are girls. All three of my daughters are teenagers. We have made the evolution from young teenagers to older teenagers. I heard the gentleman from Pennsylvania recount, for example, going through with his daughters situations like, can I get my ears pierced, when do I start wearing makeup, when can I get a driver's license. We go through all those experiences, and over and over, we run across situations where our children are told they have to have mom or dad's permission, they have to have the consent of a parent, whether it is piercing of ears or things such as that. We can have a child that is involved in an automobile accident, and we find that for emergency medical care they have to have that parental consent. We have situations if a child is going to have aspirin at school, if they are going to be going on a field trip, these are just samples from some of our schools, from one in Virginia, authorization for medication, to be completed by a parent or guardian before they are going to give any sort of simple medicine to a schoolchild.”