The Outstater
Childcare and Charitable Exhaustion
THE PROPHETS WARN that the devil loves an impossible task. A newsroom corollary is that corruption follows an inarguable good. Both apply to the challenge of caring for children in troubled homes due to poverty, emotional crisis or the myriad snares of modern society.
Indiana spends $147 million a year in state and federal monies on the general budget classification of “child care.” It is unlikely, best intentions aside, the experience of Minnesota and California in mind, that all of that actually cares for children. Indeed, the first mistake government makes in addressing such an intractable problem is to assume it can help.
Nonetheless, if in the backrooms of the Statehouse a line item that can be assigned to “child care” has a better than good chance of passage. Assuming there is a serious attempt to solve the problems associated with children in broken homes, or with overworked parents, or tragedy and illness or just bad life choices, the challenge is immense.
Estimating the monetary value to “replace” an intact family (read “fatherless”) in a child’s life is inherently hypothetical and imperfect, as the benefits of a stable two-parent household extend far beyond economics to include emotional, social and psychological well-being.
That said, we can compare children from intact families to those from non-intact families (e.g., single-parent or stepparent households), controlling for factors like race, gender and parental education. Intact families earn 16 to18 percent more over their adult working lives than those from non-intact families, after accounting for demographics and parental background. Assuming average U.S. lifetime earnings of around $2 to 3 million, this could equate to a total premium of as much as $500,000 per person.
Even assuming the state can afford to make up that difference, which it decidedly cannot, we still fall woefully short. Indeed, the government welfare system instead of helping fatherless children is creating more of them.
Knowing that, do we have options? Dr. Marvin Olasky writes about a system that did work — “church ladies.” He chronicles the church-based social work of the nineteenth century, a successful war on poverty waged by tens of thousands of local, private charitable agencies and religious groups around the country. These platoons of “the greatest charity army in American history” often were small and formed congregation by congregation. They were made up of volunteers led by poorly paid but deeply dedicated professional managers. But they were highly effective.
“Thousands of eyewitness accounts and journalistic assessments show that poverty fighters of the nineteenth century did not abolish poverty but they enabled millions of people to escape it,” Olasky says. “They saw springs of fresh water flowing among the poor, not just blocks of ice sitting in a perpetual winter of multi-generational welfare dependency. And the optimism prevalent then contrasts sharply with the demoralization among the poor and the cynicism among the better-off that is so common now.”
Considering that each family kept intact is worth as much as a half million dollars in our accounting, the return on investment could be significant, not to mention the relief of discouragement, return of faith and the salvation of productive lives for a generation of children.
Why not give it another try? — tcl
Comments...