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5. CHILDREN
Written by Robert Fellmeth

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Peter Burgess COMMENTARY

Peter Burgess

5. CHILDREN

Robert Fellmeth

Children of course are our legacy. They’re what we leave behind and what should be a leading frame in this year’s campaigns.

They lack political power. They don’t vote. They don’t contribute to campaigns. Lobbyists for children are 1 percent of the lobbyists for other interests. Even AARP spends ten times more than all children’s advocacy lobbyists.

We prize our forebears who risked everything for us in the eighteenth century. How are people 200 years from now going to view us? That’s what all candidates should be talking about. “We’ve got the future of our children and country at stake here.”

First of all, we want to have children be properly intended by their parents. If children get that, a lot of other problems will go away.

Second, you’ve got to reduce child poverty—the rate in the United States is now 18 percent. That’s one of the highest of all developed countries. If we have a child tax credit, we could cut that by 30 percent. We had a child tax credit in force for a while, but it was sunsetted by congressional Republicans.—it should be restored.

Third, we should make sure we have coverage for childcare, as well as tax benefits for childcare expenses. We’ve got to have parenting education in schools—I took trigonometry in high school and I’ve never used it, but almost every student is going to have some parental role, or uncle, or aunt, and we ought to provide that education. (We got a bill passed in California to do that and the Governor vetoed it).

Fourth, we’ve got serious problems with foster kids and with child abuse in this country. We’ve got a system of foster care—and representation of these children—which is inadequate and defective. There are asset caps for foster children’s benefits, so these children cannot receive any benefits if they have assets of $2,000 or more, which is ridiculous. This “lookback policy” means that any child coming from a family earning more than the poverty line cannot get federal assistance for their foster care costs. Keep in mind that it’s even worse than that because the poverty line of 1996 hasn’t compensated for inflation—so now over half the kids were taken into custody, and who are removed from their home for their own protection, cannot receive federal funding.

Children in foster care do not have counsel—the court judge in the Dependency Court is their legal parent, and they decide everything about those children: where they’ll live, what school they’ll go to, who can visit them, everything about them—and yet they don’t have attorneys in many states,

Of course, we’ve got programs like social security, SSI for disability, SSDI survivor benefits that are supposed to go to children. But these benefits are often stolen, embezzled by the states and the counties. We’ve issued a report on this issue and are now trying to litigate the issue.

Every child who is in foster care should have a trust created to help them when they hit eighteen years of age, because when foster kids hit eighteen they fall off a cliff. These protections need to go to up twenty-one, and then you need to have a trust fund to sustain them up to twenty-five.

And as all young parents know, social media is a serious problem for children. The corporations running these platforms are trying to addict our teens and our children… and they’re succeeding. We’ve got a bill right now in California—A.B. 2408—will allow district attorneys and the attorney general to bring actions to stop purposeful addiction of children. These teens who are being addicted are committing suicide at unprecedented rates.

Mark Green: Bob, for a while under Biden, we had a children’s tax credit that alone reduced children’s poverty in America by a third to a half. Why don’t Democratic candidates say, “Oh, don’t you want to vote for halving child poverty?”

Robert Fellmeth: Absolutely. “Don’t you think we ought to have a better child-poverty rate than Australia or Canada?” Finally, children should also have complete medical coverage. We have to campaign on funding IDEA (Individuals with Disabilities Education Act) and CAPTA (Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment Act) systems. They’ve got to be fully funded— they’re not. Last, states ought to be providing community college education at age eighteen so that our youth can obtain jobs that are significant and important. California did that years ago, and it has a major positive impact.

CHILDREN NOTES

* Frederick Douglas: “It is easier to build strong children than repair broken men.”

* Only 23 percent of American workers have access to paid parental leave.

* America needs a coordinated family policy—childcare, universal pre-K, expanded child tax credit. Only thing holding us back is a reactionary, anti-government party insistent on keeping taxes low to the wealthiest which robs children of what they need.

* 2021 UNICEF Report reported that the U. S. ranked fortieth of rich nations in providing child care to young parents.

* America needs a coordinated family policy—childcare, universal pre-K, expanded child tax credit. Only thing holding us back is a reactionary, antigovernment, reactionary party that keeps taxes low to the wealthiest which robs children of what they need.