Shortchanging Children Squanders Our Future

Shortchanging Our Children Squanders Our Future
By Gil Villagrán, MSW

My column has been absent from this space for six weeks because I have been assisting my daughter, a nurse in Nevada, take care of her preemie twin babies. In feeding, diapering, bathing and swaddling baby Gracie and baby Ruthie, and after raising my own children to adulthood, I have the exquisite opportunity once again for the most important labor of love in the world: nurturing a child. As I held my grand daughters, I looked into their tiny angelic faces, their eyes staring into my eyes, and I pondered their future. At this age they are total possibility: future scientists, legislators, artists, educators, astronauts. Time, nurturing, education and dedication will tell for my babies, for all babies, what they will be.

They are adored by our extended family and I know that every need, birthday wish, and enriching experience will be provided to the extent possible within our middle class ability. I know that a quality education, from pre-school to graduate school in on their horizon as they age into childhood, adolescence and young adulthood.

But as I look into their eyes, I imagine the eyes of other babies--equally needing to be fed every two hours, kept warm to sleep well, with parents safe in their homes, secure in their livelihoods to provide for their children who they surely love as much as I love my grand babies. How many children are not assured of the most basic needs: food, shelter, healthcare, and education? The answer is that although our nation can easily ensure that all children “born in the U.S.A.”, as the song goes, can have all their needs met, this does not happen. Prenatal health care to ensure healthy development is not a given, as babies are born everyday with preventable congenital illnesses, often condemned to diminished lives. Mothers addicted to drugs give birth to babies toxic with cocaine, meth-amphetamine, heroin, or HIV. Parents living on the streets or shelters have no secure home to take their baby after birth.

Our nation, the richest in history, has a child poverty rate (according to the United Nations)) of 22%, only slightly less than Mexico’s rate of 26%. This measure is substantiated by a U.S. Census Bureau report that 26% of Latino children in California live below the poverty level of $13,000 for a family of three. More alarming, this data is prior to the expected peak of our current financial meltdown of closed factories, home foreclosures, more than one in ten workers unemployed. A number of states are joining California’s approaching bankrupt status, limiting or even eliminating the very safety-net services for children and families created after the Great Depression that may be eclipsed by our current national economic mismanagement.

Prior to this dismal economy, parents earning low wages (under-employed) or no wages at all (un-employed) qualified for services, including subsidized childcare, so that they could work or train for work, and equally important--to ensure child safety, good nutrition, a nurturing environment and the early educational development of infants. These are exactly the CalWORKs programs being ironically terminated by the Terminator Governor-- a billionaire whose four children are assured of every opportunity to the best of everything that money, fame and ruling elite connections can offer. But what are the prospects for the children of the non-famous, not wealthy, not well connected? What public infrastructure will remain after the state budget cuts for the children and families, not just for the low-income, but also for the middle-income working families whose modest American Dream is to raise a family, nurture their children, provide them with a quality education, and the benefits of a lifetime of honest work and responsible citizenship?

As a society we are shortchanging too many of our children, failing to nurture their potential as future scientists, educators, compassionate leaders, inspiring poets, and enlightened world citizens. Our present economic myopia squanders the future, perhaps even the survival of our society.