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Originally Posted by lurkette
But it's not just about education - it's about treating maternal depression, providing adequate child care for parents who have no choice but to work, trianing pediatricians to recognize and refer abuse and neglect, ensuring healthy social and emotional development as well as cognitive development, and providing a community safety net for when the family fails, or better yet, to KEEP the family from failing. We're finding that it's the social and emotional development skills that matter even more than cognitive skills in predicting good educational and social outcomes. It's about making sure that every child has a healthy environment of relationships as well as a healthy physical environment in which to develop.
/soapbox. Sorry, this is one of my jobs: communicating developmental science to policy makers - and I get a little worked up about it.
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Lurkette the road to hell is paved with good intentions. The welfare programs have created a helpless and permanent underclass. Right now this same underclass has made it impossible to give needed help to those in New Orleans with their lawlessness. While what you say sounds wonderful in theory, in practice so far it is nothing but a dismal failure condemning multiple generations to helplessness and dependency. Without a total revamping of the system, and a total cut off of funds for some people, this will only continue to grow.