I am still haunted by an experience I had many years ago, when my girls were young.  We were at a McDonald’s having lunch, and the girls were playing in the play-yard.  There was a little boy about three years old playing with them.  His mother told him it was time to leave, and he ignored her.  She then came up to him and started beating him in the head. 

I was horrified, but I didn’t know what to do.  I was afraid that, if I said something to the mother, she would beat the boy even worse when she got him home, so I ended up sitting there speechless and did nothing.  I have thought about that incident many times since, wondering what happened to that boy and what I might have done differently.  I thought of him again recently as I read an argument that the government should expand the SCHIP program to provide health insurance for children in higher income families who can afford health insurance on their own, because the program needs to cover children whose parents don’t care enough to buy insurance for them. 

Certainly there are bad parents, like that mother I saw at McDonald’s, and as caring people, we want to help those children, but we really need to think about the actual effects of government programs.  We need to ask whether having government provide services for children on the assumption that parents are bad actually make matters better for children or whether it really makes matters worse.

When the government takes over services that could otherwise be provided by families on their own, two bad things happen.  First, the vast majority of families, who would have provided the services themselves or used their own money to buy those services on the open market, now are taxed so the government can provide the services.  These families lose the freedom and control they once had and now are forced to fight through the bureaucracy to get the services their children need (usually at a much higher cost, which is now hidden).   Second, the children whose parents do not care and who would have been neglected before will continue to be neglected, because their parents still will not care enough to make sure they take advantage of the government programs.  Thus, despite the good intentions, when the government takes over, the vast majority of children are worse off than they were before. 

The best place to see this happening is in the government schools.  Educators agree that the most important factor for a child’s success in school is support from the parents.  If the parents don’t care and are not supportive, chances are the child will not do well in school. 

There is no question that a child with bad parents is at a serious disadvantage in life.  Unfortunately, as has been shown repeatedly in government schools and other government programs, such as welfare programs, which drive fathers out of families, putting the government in charge does not solve the problem. 

What a child needs most is someone to fill the role of the caring parent, and that is a role the government cannot play.  If the biological parents are not playing their proper role, the child needs some other relative, a neighbor, a friend, a caring person in a charity, or a new family to take a personal interest in him and fill that role. 

If we really care about the children, we ought to provide encouragement and moral support to extended families and appreciate the crucial role they play in children’s lives.  And, in extreme cases, we should accept and promote the government’s role of removing the child from a bad home and finding another family that will support and protect him.