an obvious thing but a society genuinely interested in producing more healthy children would also invest heavily in its foster and child protection services, and boy, let me tell you, that is not a good picture in much of the United States.
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One of the more interesting aspects of horseshoe theory, imho, is seeing a conservative like David Frum come around to basically that position — that if you want society to value life, you have to put resources into life.
The Evangelicals only care about the pre-born and the post-mortem. Everything in between is every man for himself, and God forbid you take the Beatitudes seriously or apply any of Christ’s teachings to real people…
we don't have good education, homestart is being cut, we don't offer child care or healthcare.
medicare is being cut.
we don't provide well for pregnant moms.
US average caseloads for a child protection worker are almost double the UK, and the UK levels are considered by most staff to be dangerously overloaded.
Also not something where the states you'd expect to be better are actually better. As of 2019-2020 Connecticut is one of the richest states in the US and less than half of the foster kids graduate high school - compared to 57% in Florida. Less than 1 in 3 foster kids graduate from HS in Colorado.
Neat, I assume this is related to the multiple cases of judges issuing orders about our foster care system that resemble R. Lee Ermey monologues and the state basically saying "you can't force us to care"
Sadly it’s bipartisan consensus that children are better off being abused by blood relatives than live with nonrelatives who don’t abuse them. It is particularly a hegemonic belief among conservative jurists.
In my area, CPS just doesn’t intervene if a kid is over 8 unless they have been hospitalized multiple times or have incontrovertible evidence they are being raped.
Not just foster and child protection services: it's hell trying to get kids into daycare and kindergarten in American cities, and once your kids get in, it's expensive hell
And come to think of it, depending on where you live, elementary, middle, and high school are all hellish or hellishly expensive. That is the case in Nashville where I live.
The first home I went to, a phone call between my birth mom and I was recorded, and I later got called a liar by a social worker while in the psych ward for calling that foster mom emotionally abusive. I also was told by other foster parents to request to be sent to their house, just to be refused.
That’s another area where “for profit” has caused significant damage. Probably including what amounts to human trafficking, like when kids have been taken from their parents at the border or from reservations and vanished into the “foster system.”
A society interested in producing a healthy future for all would have the majority of it's citizens be healthy and fit and into sports instead of obese and sedentiary. A lot more than you imagine is wrong with American culture.
The red states are lowering child work laws. This is terrible for foster kids. They will be forced to work long hours including nights, even school nights.
We’d also make streets safer for children so that they could bike and play outside and actually foster some sort of independence. But Americans love speeding 40mph down residential streets and hate protected bike lanes so kids are effectively under house arrest and need driven everywhere.
This is...not true, any more than a society interested in saving lives and keeping people safe would invest heavily in cops or prison guards. CPS are the cops for poor women of color, and a lot of what they do in practice is hassling people who don't have enough money for good housing or childcare.
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medicare is being cut.
we don't provide well for pregnant moms.
Neat, I assume this is related to the multiple cases of judges issuing orders about our foster care system that resemble R. Lee Ermey monologues and the state basically saying "you can't force us to care"
The day a PI knocked on the door asking for my husband, and asking if I knew a young person with an obviously African-American name.
We established that he was looking for a different Greg Pearson. He left his card.
He was trying to find the kid's biological father to get him out of DC foster care.
I hope he did locate that man and that he took the kid in.
Because foster care in this country is bad. Foster care in the DMV has
So, yes. And also invest in tracking down family members and give them help if they want to take the kid in but aren't sure they can afford it.
(I think the DeVos family profits from that?)
From there the babies and kids could be thrown off a cliff and they would shrug.