Its great, that we can all agree, to disagree. I'm sure we all believe.... it is very important for all babies to be able to learn to fly. They need to develop their chest muscles, practice landing, develop self confidence. We as a family took it one step furthur, practiced flying with two people in our family. One for take off, one for landing. Safety was of course, our priority. ( watch out for windows, etc) Sophie was " clipped", when we got her. Had no idea how to fly. We spent more time with her, growing her feathers and working on her flying ability. Kiki, our Amazon on the other hand, we had since she was a baby. A " trim" for her, was keeping her flying to three rooms. Sunny our rescue, was never clipped or limited.
We trimmed during terrible two's for Kiki and Sophie. They could fly quite well, just only three rooms away. Not everywhere. The only reason we could have better control of them flying everywhere, was having a very close relationship with our trimmer. He knew them well, and helped us during terrible two's and training. It was a very short period of time before they were fully flighted again.It did help with training, stepup and down, introduction to entire family, spending time with us. They could fly off whenever they wanted too.
Jayd... please be careful about throwing out the word " abuse". None of my birds were ever abused. They fly everywhere now and have a very happy home. Nancy