NO pity for the Lazy...
Posted on 01/26/2013 6:21:08 AM PST by Kaslin
Am I the only one who thinks it is immoral to bring children into the world if you don't have the means to support them? I must be one of the few. I rarely see anyone else make the point. Before anyone objects, let me concede up front that a lot of things in life are unpredictable. Women become pregnant despite their best efforts to avoid it. Women can lose their husbands from accidents, war and even homicide. Few of us have a tenured job. Few of us are safe from the economic reversal that would attend the loss of a job.
Still, when you find that:
•Almost four in every ten children is born on Medicaid,
•One in every four children is living in a food stamp household,and
•Entire classrooms — no entire schools, wait, even in entire areas of whole cities — all the children are on the school lunch program.
And,you just can't write it all off to bad luck! What we are witnessing are patterns of behavior. All too often it's intentional behavior.
From teachers we hear a constant drumbeat of anecdotal evidence. Some parents don't care what their children learn in school. They don't encourage learning. They may even belittle it. Also, more and more scarce education dollars are going for what should be parenting rather than schooling functions. The school lunch program exists because tens of thousands of parents apparently can't afford lunch for their children. Now, schools across the country are subsidizing breakfast as well — for the same reason.
Charles Murray has warned that the really important inequality that has been emerging — a dangerous inequality — is not inequality of income. It is the separation of two cultures. Upper-income, highly educated households (including politically liberal households) tend to respect traditional values. They may say they are cultural relativists. But they don't practice cultural relativism. These tend to be intact households — ones with mothers and fathers — where parents invest a lot of time, money and energy in their children. Among lower-income, less-educated households there is starkly different behavior.
Harvard researcher Robert Putman finds that there is a "growing class gap in enrichment expenditures [day care, tutors, games, etc., but not private school] on children, 1972-2006." At the bottom of the hierarchy, the expenditure has increased about $400 per child over the past 40 years, but at the middle income it's gone up $5K.
The time people invest in their children — reading to them, etc., but not including diaper changing time, etc. — shows a growth gap between those with more education and those less. In the 1970s, mothers with only a high school education were investing slightly more time with their kids. Now the number of minutes for both is going up. But the growth has been "much, much faster" among college educated moms. When you add in the dads, the gap grows even larger — it's up to an hour a day of more quality time with their parents.
Moreover, the gap in parent time with children is even greater the younger the child. That is, higher-income, more highly educated parents devote the most extra time with their children during the years when parental involvement is thought to make the greatest difference.
It would be a mistake to think that this is primarily a racial or ethnic divide. Murray's study focuses only on white families, ignoring blacks and Hispanic whites. Putman and his colleagues recently made a PowerPoint presentation at the Aspen Institute. One graph shows that the gap in math and reading scores between black and white children has actually gone down over the past 40 years. But the gap between high- and low-income children (of whatever race) has been progressively widening.
Another stunning graph shows a trend in out-of-wedlock births among non-Hispanic whites. For college graduates, the number is less than 10% and there has been little change in the past 15 years. However, among those with no more education than a high school degree, the number has been soaring and is now above 50%!
I don't have an immediate answer to this problem. Here is one proposal to take the children away from rotten parents. I'm not in principle opposed to that proposal, I'm just afraid there are way too many children for this to be a practical idea.
There are two very bad ideas in Putnam's Aspen Institute presentation that need to be nipped in the bud, however. One is the idea that the behavioral problems of the underclass are caused by poverty. Wrong. Their behavior is what is making them poor and keeping them poor; not the other way around. One hundred years ago almost everyone in the whole country was poor by our standards. That didn't keep our ancestors from building the greatest country on earth.
The second bad idea appears on the last slide of the Aspen PowerPoint presentation. It says, "These are all our kids." But, of course, they aren't all our kids. They are in the custody of some adults rather than other adults. And the adults who have custody are all too often bad parents.
Lloyd Bentsen IV helped with this editorial.
“The school lunch program exists because tens of thousands of parents apparently can’t afford lunch for their children.”
Yawn. The usual GOP hack oversight - it was certain midwestern GOP Congress critters beholden to farming conglomerates like Bob Dole that instituted the school lunch programs.
NO pity for the Lazy...
The more kids they have, the more free money they get. The more kids, the longer the span of years they can collect free money. Make the older ones watch after the younger ones so your style ain’t cramped. Life is good.
Personally, I think that any woman who relies on welfare should be sterilized after the first child. We waited until our mid thirties because we wanted to be sure that we COULD be responsible for a child.
Maybe at the fringes, but not mostly. It’s true that “blue state women”, i.e. educated liberals, don’t keep their babies unless married and settled, but they also generally use a lot of protection, and so rarely get pregnant by accident. Most of them don’t actually even sleep around as much as they think women have a right to, or how they’re portrayed on TV. The article is dead on correct that the highly educated liberals promote these libertine lifestyles, but most of them actually live fairly conservatively. They don’t sleep around much, and although you’ll see them move in sometimes with their “boyfriends”, it’s usually after a long period of dating and in the way to a big wedding.
The group that’s having babies on welfare and unmarried are not “pro-life”. They are the same people who are getting abortions, contracting STD’s, etc. It’s all of a piece.
I think it is bad to bring children in to the world if you have no reason to believe you can support them.
BUT, once they are conceived, I think they are brought into this world. I therefore oppose abortion.
ALSO, I’d like to point out that many have reason to believe they can support a child/children, but then things happen. We can’t perfectly plan out the next 18 years.
I think the solution is to wait until you are reasonably certain you can provide for a family; then marry and have one or more. If bad times hit, your family should support you; and your church; and if you willfully refuse to care for your children it should be a criminal offense.
Wait! That’s what the Bible teaches!! And that’s what our laws used to reflect!
There is no need to take children from their parents to solve this problem. Simply mandate fool-proof contraception like IUDs and Norplant as a condition of receiving welfare, WIC, food stamps / SNAP and Medicaid. All girls in these homes over the age of 12 gets contraception too. The number of illegitimate children to the poor goes down, while they get an incentive to get off welfare or marry someone to support them.
Where’s the like button?
Generations of indoctrination in our nation's godless, socialist-entitlment, compulsory, and single-payer K-12 schools is almost guaranteed to produce VERY BAD PARENTS!
Children who attend our nation's government owned and run godless and socialist-entitlement schools risk learning:
1) To be comfortable with socialism and government compulsion. If the government can give them tuition-free school, why not **lots** of free stuff? Gee! If government is their redeemer and savior, who needs to listen to the wisdom of their extended family? Who needs a husband to head the nuclear family. The government god will take care of them.
2) They **WILL** learn to think and reason godlessly while in their godless classroom. They must just to cooperate with the government teacher. So? Will thinking godlessly help in parenting or hurt. (It's and easy question.)
Do these things and you will not be poor.
how about guys keeping their flies on their pants zipped up and girls their legs crossed?
I don’t think Free Republic has one.
No you're not and you are not alone.
The illegitimacy rate today demonstrates that’s not good enough anymore.
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