Penni, the first thing I would do that is constructive is fully fund HeadStart for two-year-olds. Three is really much too old to start, now that we know how early intervention needs to begin, in terms of brain function.
The second thing would be to at least try to arrive at a societal consensus about removing children permanently from abusive and neglectful homes long before we do. I am sure you know that about 4,000 children are abused to death in this country every year by their parents, most of whom have long records already with social services departments. Your own experience with the baby you wanted to adopt is a really good example of how quickly children's spirits are broken. At the same time, foster care needs to be totally revamped. Adoptions need to take much less time. All the rules about same-race adoptions need to be erased, if they have not been already. While a black child growing up in a black family is ideal, certainly having that child grow up in a white family is preferable to languishing in foster care.
I also think that child development needs to be taught on a serious level starting in about sixth grade, in age appropriate ways, to all children. The total lack of real knowledge of how children develop in healthy ways I encounter everywhere I go is just totally shocking. We are making inroads into the teenage pregnancy rate in America, and need to continue to bring the rate down. These children are much more at risk than children born to adult mothers. I think we need to spend the money to put counselors back in schools, and provide a lot more individual and family therapy to children who are then identified as "at risk". Then I would revamp totally the criminal justice system. There is a city official in Florida, I believe it is St. Petersburg, who has had tremendous success in actually turning children around who were headed into lives of crime. I saw a segment about him and his programs on a news magazine show. Did you happen to see it? There needs to be a concerted effort to seek out the juvenile justice programs in America that work better than others, emulate them, and spread them around. This is our last chance with most of these children.
We do have subsidized breakfast and lunch programs in the schools, but fifteen million children here go hungry to some extent. I would try to maximize the benefits of these programs, especially making sure every child in America who qualifies is fed, and I would also boost the quality of the food they get. Michael Cummings' example of a privatized program to do this over at Feelings a couple of months ago would be fine--I have no desire to institute huge new governmental programs. Whatever works is just great.
AFDC is on its way out, with welfare as a concept being a policy of the past, not the future. However, I think we will find there is a group of hard core unemployable people who are too damaged to work, but have children. Are we going to let their children starve and live in the streets after the two year limit expires? We will be facing this question very soon in America. And if we are going to put everyone to work, then the minimum wage needs to be high enough to provide at least a very basic lifestyle. In many areas of the country now, shelter and food cannot be provided at all with minimum wage jobs. I know I am not paying more for things like hamburgers than I did many years ago. The minimum wage is artificially low. I would certainly pay a little more so everyone working fulltime can at least make ends meet.
I think subsidized housing is a very bad idea, in terms of large housing projects. Children learn from the adults in their own communities, and mildly dysfunctional adults also are capable of learning from good role models, so I believe that instead of housing projects, rent subsidies large enough to get people out of ghettos and into middle class neighborhoods would be better. This would also spread the poor out in the community, so there aren't whole neighborhoods where almost everyone has given up, plagued by drugs, crime and despair.
And why can't all public schools be of quality, with plenty of charter/magnet schools, and well-kept physical plants? We really send messages to poor children that they are not worth much by the way we warehouse them in inner cities and send them to literal cesspools to be 'educated'.
Did I mention that drug addiction needs to be decriminalized, and treatment made available for everyone? We have made poverty and drug addiction against the law in this country, and that is why more of our population is in prison than any other society on earth, per capita. Here are two interesting and provocative columns on this drug problem, from my local rag this week:
sfgate.com
sfgate.com
I don't really think your tax bracket would change if this society sort of started over and decided to prioritize children. After all, it costs far more to house criminals than it does to provide early intervention and better public health programs. As far as the moral and spritual problems endemic among the poor, who can really address the moral and spritual until basic human needs have been met? I think if we took some steps to really save poor children in a more basic sense, then the relative luxuries of morality and spirituality would kick in.
I read something a long time ago that really affected me. It was about lowering the rate of cigarette smoking in pregnant women. The remark, by a sociologist, was that if a pregnant woman is homeless, or being abused, or strung out on drugs, stopping smoking is a pretty low priority. I think that is a very useful analogy here.
I know we both want the same thing. I guess we look at how to get there differently. While the cost of doing something is high, the cost of keeping things the way they are is incredible. And I guess I am more influenced by European social engineering than you are, since my husband is Irish and I read Irish newspapers. Really, the little bit we invest in children here, and the rampant proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, and the rate at which we imprison people, are just shocking when compared to the way other western countries look at these issues. |
