Let’s forget whether or not it’s a good idea for a thirteen year old girl to go for a solo sailing tour around the world, no matter how capable she thinks she is or how much support she’ll get, what annoys me about this is the sheer hypocrisy and entitlement of it. In the Netherlands all parents have the legal obligation to keep their children in school until they’re eighteen, yet Laura and her parents think that this obligation does not apply to them just because she has a chance a breaking a world record and a not unsubstantial number of media commentators seem to go along with them where normally they would be the first to cry shame about truancy. The reason being that Laura is a nice, articulate, cute middle class white girl of nice, articulate middle class parents rather than some difficult allochtoon street kid. It’s annoying as fuck that this is taken serious as an issue and that social services had to intervene to make sure her parents obeyed their duty.