About the Legislators’ Guide
to Children’s Issues
1999

The Legislators’ Guide to Children’s Issues 1999 provides lawmakers free-market approaches to a variety of issues affecting children. The guide contains several issue primers relating to:

• Child Welfare;
• Education;
• Environment;
• Health Care;
• Safety; and,
• Tax and Fiscal Policy.

The guide also contains easy-reference policy recommendation lists for each issue area and contact information for each contributing author, including web page addresses when available. I would encourage you to use the Pacific Research Institute, the contributing authors to this guide, and the Project on Children Advisory Board members as resources for your work.

Given the timeliness of these issues and the need for presenting positive solutions, it is my hope that this guide will provide you and your staff with a "starting point" in crafting policy approaches that rely on family and civil society, rather than government, to meet the needs of our nation’s children.

If you would like to learn more about the Pacific Research Institute, the Project on Children, or its other programs and activities, feel free to contact the Institute at (415) 989-0833 or visit us at www.pacificresearch.org.

This guide would not be possible with the valuable time and hard work of several Pacific Research Institute staffers. In particular, I wish to thank PRI president Sally C. Pipes, Jennifer Berkowitz, Lloyd Billingsley, Dawn Khalil, Dominique Lazanski, and Cindy Sparks.

— Naomi Lopez

Introduction & Overview

The Truth About "For the Children"
Eloise Anderson is the Director of Social Services for the State of California.

Federal Efforts in the Name of Children: An Overview
Naomi Lopez is the Director of the Center for Enterprise and Opportunity at the Pacific Research Institute.

The Truth About "For the Children"

Children are our future. Collectively, they hold the future of the nation in their dreams, ambitions, and endeavors. How they are treated will determine what they will become and how they will treat each other and us. They give back what they know.

Their needs for security, stability, and love, in tandem with their genetic disposition, form the foundation for a child’s development into adulthood. What they see, hear, and experience becomes the framework on which they will venture into the world.

"For the Children"

Today, there is a heightened interest in the plight and circumstance of children, particularly poor children, as long as direct, personal involvement is avoided. As a result, we surround poor children in a multitude of government programs to mold them into our middle-class, university-educated images.

Americans’ willingness to spend billions "for the children" is based on the misguided notion that if government does it, it does not cost. It is the irrational belief that someone else will pay. We have failed to understand two fundamental truths: First, children are the responsibility of their parents. Whatever plight or circumstance children find themselves in, parents are the key. Second, nothing is free, especially freedom.

Today, we seem to desire further government takeover of parental responsibilities. This trend is now expanding from poor children to include "protection" for middle-class children. This is evident in the strong advocacy for every conceivable kind of program to save children—poor and middle-class alike.

Parental Accountability

In the name of children we are creating new entitlements, expanding government, and destroying our freedom. For example: Government now provides breakfast, lunch, and soon dinner to many children. Why? Because when children come to school without eating, parents are not held accountable.

Instead, we require responsible parents, along with adults who have chosen not to have children for economic reasons or for not wanting that particular responsibility, to pay for the feeding of those whose parents are not being responsible. It does not end there. Whatever happened to parental responsibility?

The public perception of poverty has evolved from a mere lack of resources into an excuse for irresponsibility where there are no expectations for responsible behavior. In this view, that the poor are helpless and government must intervene in their life, poverty is perceived as an affliction—a disease.

The Nanny State

If government is going to be the parent, there is no need for parents to be responsible. Over time, parents lose their desire and ability to be responsible. Pre-school education is a prime example. Pre-school education was intended to give children what some parents had not—familiarity with language, numbers, colors, etc. It intended to provide the fundamentals from which the school builds reading and other more complicated skills.

Before the government became a child’s first teacher, few children came to school unprepared. Since then, the number and proportion of unprepared children have skyrocketed. (Today’s successful pre-school programs usually include strong parent involvement.) Parents no longer need to invest the time and energy to prepare their children.

Family Structure

The circumstances of certain children, regardless of their class, has led some to look back on their own childhood—a mythical time—to determine the way family life should be. Many are now governed by these mythologies.

There is a remarkable amount of evidence that indicates children do not fare well in single-parent families. This is interpreted to mean children have poor outcomes if they come from families where the parents are adolescent or have never been married. The propaganda machinery has focused on the single poor urban parent. But this is only part of the story. Evidence shows the problem to be more pervasive.

Children of divorced parents do not fare well either. There are many more children with divorced parents than with never-married parents. The divorced parents tend to be more financially established, but the outcomes for their children are not much better than the children of never-married parents. We continue to seek some magical program, government-funded or administered, to intervene and "fix" the children—without realizing that the government, in many cases, causes and perpetuates these problems.

The Bottom Line

We have selfishly expanded government to accommodate our desire for easy, impersonal answers rather than investing the time and effort in working for real solutions. As a result, we have created full-time, career politicians whose main purpose is to redistribute to us what we are unwilling to obtain through our own effort. Our children now fall into the category of things for which we are unwilling to sacrifice.

Since we are the most materially well off people in the world, we have come to believe we are entitled to this condition—no effort required. It has become acceptable to take away private property and freedoms if it is "for the children." If we act as though creating a totalitarian government is warranted, we may wind up sacrificing freedom.

What Lawmakers Should Do

Federal and state lawmakers must return parents to their natural roles and responsibilities as caretakers and nurturers for their children. Neighborhoods, communities, churches, and a child’s home must replace bureaucratic institutions.

The new trend of protecting middle-class children is doomed to fail. If government is allowed to protect these children the way it has "protected" poor children, they will suffer the same fate as today’s poor children. Once again government will trump parents’ responsibilities.

Lawmakers must resist the temptation to develop new programs in the name of children. "For the Children" cannot be the national motto. We must, as a nation, agree that there are some places where government does not belong. If not, it is our children and future generations that will pay the price.

— Eloise Anderson

Federal Efforts in the Name of Children:
An Overview

Children represent the future and there is no doubt that children’s issues deserve the most serious and careful consideration. But policies aimed at children must be judged not on the good intentions of their promoters, but whether or not they actually help children. If one gauged the well-being of children strictly by the flurry of alarming media accounts and the rhetoric of child-welfare advocates, one might believe that American children stand in dire peril—and that government should do more to help them. But for all the good intentions, little attention has been paid to the government’s current efforts.

Self-proclaimed child advocates often portray government efforts to assist children as woefully inadequate. Their prescriptions for reform frequently center around increasing government’s role through increased government spending and additional involvement in the lives of children and their families. To agree with this approach is to be "for children," while to pursue other solutions is to be "against children." While this simplistic approach is highly effective with legislators and the media, it neglects key questions regarding the effectiveness of government programs.

Many of these groups, such as the Children’s Defense Fund, the Coalition for America’s Children, the Child Welfare League of America, and Families USA are silent on the issue of how government spending will impact children when they become taxpayers. Solutions to these important problems do not lie in the same old quick-fixes. Children deserve effective, long-term solutions that will not sacrifice their prospects for a brighter future.

It may come as a surprise to many lawmakers that the federal government currently operates more than 150 programs directed specifically towards children at an annual cost that exceeds $50 billion. See Table 1. This is in addition to many well-known social welfare programs such as cash assistance, Food Stamps, Medicaid, and housing assistance that target the entire family. What may come as a bigger surprise is that federal spending on children, far from being in decline, has increased by more than 240 percent during the last 20 years. See Figure 1.

In recent years, our nation has witnessed a number of high-profile, energetic campaigns on behalf of children. The recent onslaught of new efforts includes, but is not limited to, internet decency regulation, the V-chip, limitations on the advertising of smoking products, day care, health insurance for uninsured children, and parental leave. This trend is so strong that Georgia Governor Zell Miller implemented a program that provides every newborn in his state a classical music cassette or compact disk.

In today’s political climate, children’s issues are politically charged and sentiment rather than logic frequently rules debates surrounding them. Lawmakers, the media, and the public too often support expanding government efforts on children without examining existing programs to determine whether or nor they are effective. Children and their families deserve better than expensive, bureaucratized approaches.

A pro-child agenda need not be limited to further expansion of government programs—which in many cases may not improve children’s status. There are better ways at hand: private alternatives to public health-care delivery and education, reducing families’ tax burden, reducing the unfunded liabilities of Social Security and Medicare, and balancing the federal budget. Most important, the responsibility for parenting should be transferred from the government back into the hands of parents.

The nation’s children do indeed constitute the future and deserve the most careful consideration. But before further attempts are made to expand government’s role, lawmakers should be fully informed about the cost—both monetary and social—and effects of past and current programs. Most important, the nation should conduct a sober, reasoned debate on the proper role of government in the lives of our children.

— Naomi Lopez

Nothing contained in this briefing is to be construed as necessarily reflecting the views of the Pacific Research Institute for Public Policy or as an attempt to thwart or aid the passage of any legislation.

1999