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What to Do When You See Unaccompanied Black Children in Public Spaces.
Laura Browder/Source: Houston PD This weekend, a black single mother was arrested for leaving her 6-year-old daughter and two-year-old sitting unaccompanied at a table in the food court of Memorial City Mall in Houston, TX. “My children weren’t even 30 yards away from me,” Laura Browder, a college student, wrote in a statement following her arrest. A potential employer scheduled a last-minute…
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Why can't conservatives see the benefits of affordable child care?
By Jay Livingston, PhD
Ross Douthat is puzzled. He seems to sense that a liberal policy might actually help, but his high conservative principles and morality keep him from taking that step. It’s a political version of Freudian repression – the conservative superego forcing tempting ideas to remain out of awareness.
In his column, Douthat recounts several anecdotes of criminal charges brought against parents whose children were unsupervised for short periods of time. The best-known of these criminals of late is Debra Harrell, the mother in South Carolina who let her 9-year-old daughter go to a nearby playground while she (Debra) worked at her job at McDonald’s. The details of the case make it clear that this was not a bad mom – not cruel, not negligent. The playground was the best child care she could afford.
One solution should be obvious – affordable child care. But the U.S. is rather stingy when it comes to kids. Other countries are way ahead of us on public spending for children.
Conservatives will argue that child care should be private not public and that local charities and churches do a better job than do state-run programs. Maybe so. The trouble is that those private programs are not accessible to everyone. If Debra Harrell had been in France or Denmark, the problem would never have arisen.
The other conservative U.S. policy that put Debra Harrell in the arms of the law is “welfare reform.” As Douthat explains, in the U.S., thanks to changes in the welfare system much lauded by conservatives, the U.S. now has “a welfare system whose work requirements can put a single mother behind a fast-food counter while her kid is out of school.”
That’s the part that perplexes Douthat. He thinks that it’s a good thing for the government to force poor women to work, but it’s a bad thing for those women not to have the time to be good mothers. The two obvious solutions – affordable day care or support for women who stay home to take care of kids – conflict with the cherished conservative ideas: government bad, work good.
This last issue presents a distinctive challenge to conservatives like me, who believe such work requirements are essential. If we want women like Debra Harrell to take jobs instead of welfare, we have to also find a way to defend their liberty as parents, instead of expecting them to hover like helicopters and then literally arresting them if they don’t.
As he says, it’s a distinctive challenge, but only if you cling so tightly to conservative principles that you reject solutions – solutions that seem to be working quite well in other countries – just because they involve the government or allow poor parents not to work.
Conservatives love to decry “the nanny state.” That means things like government efforts to improve kids’ health and nutrition. (Right wingers make fun of the first lady for trying to get kids to eat sensibly and get some exercise.)
A nanny is a person who is paid to look after someone else’s kids. Well-off people hire them privately (though they still prefer to call them au pairs). But for the childcare problems of low-income parents, what we need is more of a nanny state, or more accurately, state-paid nannies.
Jay Livingston is the chair of the Sociology Department at Montclair State University. You can follow him at Montclair SocioBlog or on Twitter.
The racist caricatures of black “welfare queens” cruising around in Cadillacs while ignoring or abusing their children were used to create policies that we all have to live with. They were used to create policies that force parents into impossible choices and then blame them for the less-evil decision that they make. They created a situation where a black mother is always a suspect, where taking her children away is the first response from authorities.
America has declared war on its black mothers.
People. I live right near North Augusta, SC. That's basically Aiken.
Remember ABC, "At the Playground"? Things ain't the same no more. Now mothers getting sent to jail for sending their kids to the playground. Read it.
Working Mom Arrested For Leaving 9 Year Old Daughter At Park
Working Mom Arrested For Leaving 9 Year Old Daughter At Park
South Carolina’s News Channel 6 in North Augusta reported recently on the case of Debra Harrell, a working mother jailed for leaving her 9-year-old daughter at the park while she went to work at McDonald’s.
“The little girl is fine, but some say an area the mother thought was safe could have turned dangerous. It’s an afternoon of fun in the water at Summerfield Park in North Augusta, but…
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Debra Harrell
Signal boosting a crowd-funding endeavor to raise money for Debra Harrell, the woman who was arrested in South Carolina earlier this month for the crime of being poor, having a job, having a child, and allowing her to play in a park during summer vacation.
Lenore Skenazy first brought much-needed publicity to Harrell's story, and h/t to The Jez for the YouCaring link.
Taking Care of the Weeds
Taking Care of the Weeds
My mother’s parenting advice to me was succinct and a hair disappointing. “Children are like weeds. If you leave them alone, they grow up.” There it is. Straight from the Less is More School of Parenting.
Having heard this more than once while I was growing up and pretty much using this as my fundamental approach to raising four children, you would think I’d have my legs dangling off the side of…
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