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Friday, July 27, 2007
America’s children need a mom, dad — not entitlement
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
As routinely as the coming of the dog days of summer, another of those interminable “studies” that purport to show that “Georgia” has failed children landed on the desks of reporters last week, prompting the usual grim-faced accounts that, by golly, the state ranks “among the worst … for taking care of its children.”
Georgia has about 2.25 million children under the age of 18. Of those, 16,000 are in the custody of the Department of Human Resources and, on a daily basis, about 20,500 are in the custody of the Department of Juvenile Justice. But Kids Count 2007, a selective collection of data assembled by the Annie E. Casey Foundation for the benefit of lazy journalists across the nation, largely ignores the most significant factor in determining the well-being of the 2.2 million children in Georgia: whether they have a mother and father in the home.
While noting that 35 percent of children in Georgia live in single-parent homes and that 39.2 percent of all births in 2004 were to unmarried women, its guidance on reducing the child poverty rate focuses not on marriage or fathers, but on government.
Its five most effective strategies for reducing the child poverty rate, according to a 2005 report, are to build political support to raise the minimum wage, expand programs, such as the Earned Income Tax Credit and unemployment insurance, food stamps, health insurance, as well as incentivizing savings and more rigorous child support enforcement from men who can pay.
There’s no question that many or all of the foundation’s strategies have merit. And it should be noted, too, that its strategies report does take note that “children who do not live with both parents are much more likely to live in poverty than other children.”
But as a rich foundation with the financial resources to direct attention to any solution whatsoever that would better the lives of children, it skims over marriage to focus on indicators that suggest government has failed or is responsible for low birth-weight babies, for example, or infant mortality or child deaths.
Among its indicators of whether a state is “taking care of its children” are also teen deaths, births to teens, high school dropouts, teens not attending school or working, children in families where no parent has full-time, year-round employment, children in poverty, and children in single-parent families. All are relevant indicators of something.
Laura Beavers, research associate for the foundation, acknowledges that the annual report is directed to government. “We hope our information is used by leaders to make changes for kids,” she said. “The reality is government officials and the bureaucrats are the people who use or information the most, but they are certainly not our only audience.”
The reality is that 69.3 percent of black children, 46.4 of Hispanic and 24.5 percent of white children in 2004 were born to unmarried women.
Nothing government or any foundation or advocacy group can do to create a social safety net for children will do more for their well-being than giving them a mother and father in the home.
But yet the foundation’s emphasis is on government. Black leaders, facing an epidemic that is destroying the lives of children, are unusually silent, the greatest failing of this generation of leadership. Hispanic leaders, too, look away.
The National Urban League, at its annual convention last week, launched a campaign “for a stronger and more prosperous urban America.” As with the Casey Foundation’s Kids Count emphasis, the solution is government. Expanded childhood education and insurance and affordable child care recommendations constitute its recommendations for children. As with the Casey Foundation, it would raise the minimum wage and expand the Earned Income Tax Credit, along with other suggestions for expanded government.
Listen to America. Children have no voice pleading for the right to be born with a mother and father in the home. They have adults in leadership positions railing, rallying and re-enacting. But rarely do they see, hear or read of influential voices, black, white or Hispanic, pushing for the cultural change that would do far more to create healthy children than all government programs ever can.
• Jim Wooten is associate editorial page editor. His column appears Sundays, Tuesdays and Fridays.
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