There are things it is impossible to expect ourselves to control.  We can't, for example, control what happens in a home where a child is being neglected or abused, especially if that neglect or abuse hasn't been reported to anyone.  We can't control the family chaos that comes when a family lives at poverty level due to a number of causes.  We can't make people help their children with homework.  We can't even keep young people from committing crimes.

We should, however, be able to consistently keep children safe once neglect and/or abuse has been reported.  We fail to do so.  We should be able to work with families in poverty to make it easy for their children to stay in the same school while the family has to move.  We fail to do so. We should be able to create urban schools which engage young people and help them succeed.  We fail to do so. We should be able to keep young people who have been locked away due to the commission of crimes from being beaten and raped while incarcerated.  We fail to do so.  

As someone who cares about children, that kicks in my fight or flight syndrome, and given that I often can't figure out who to fight or, when I know who to fight, how to fight them, I want to run.  I know I am not alone.  There are many thousands of youth advocates, child welfare workers, educators, juvenile justice workers and others who feel overwhelmed, helpless, angry, and scared.  Several of them do quit each year.

In my opinion, our culture is a child neglecting culture.  We have a high percentage of abusing and neglecting families, and our state and local governments are often child neglecting governments.  A parent who knows that another parent in the family is abusing a child is neglecting that child when not taking protective action.  Unfortunately, people deny that others in their world are evil, and fail to accept that it is abuse.  Likewise, failing to provide adequate food, shelter and protection for children in your care is neglect, and when we are in a position to do something about neglect and don't, that is participation in neglect.  Most states are now underfunding basic needs of children in their care to such a degree that it can only be described as neglect.  Currently, since we are a democracy, that means almost every citizen in the United States is knowingly, or unknowingly participating in child neglect.  

Nationally, states have responded to the current recession by cutting the largely inadequate budgets of programs who are charged with taking care of abused and neglected children.  They have cut already inadequate education budgets, especially in urban areas.  They have made changes in juvenile justice practice which has led to overwhelming levels of juveniles being raped and sexually abused while incarcerated.

As many of these programs were barely able to meet the needs of their children prior to the cuts, these cuts have created situations in which children who were removed from homes due to abuse and neglect are being cheated out of what they need to heal.  This is just one example.  Children in schools and juvenile justice programs are also being cheated out of basic educational and safety needs.

The politicians who do this deny that their decisions negatively affect children, but everyone who works with children knows that is untrue.  One of the latest trends is to justify decisions by claiming that what was being done prior to the cuts wasn't working anyway.  At least this is partially true, but what they fail to say is that one of the reasons some things didn't work were that they were already underfunded.  Frankly, I have never before seen this degree of willingness to tell "The Big Lie" to cover up what states and local governments are doing to children.

There are fixed costs in doing anything.  The fixed costs of caring for a child do not change when a state imposes a 17% across the board cut in payment over two years. (Several states have cut more than this)  Instead, some area of need will not be adequately addressed.  For youth in care, that usually means that needed therapeutic services are cut, and that will lead to higher levels of incarceration due to criminal activity later.  There are similar consequences for education and juvenile justice.

Oh, we make progress sometimes.  We might get a new governor or mayor who really cares, hires and listens to those who know, and puts things in place that make improvements.  This keeps our hopes alive that we can benefit children.  For the most part, however, we get governors and mayors who pretend to care, hire and listen to those who either don't know or don't care and who do damage to children in the process.  I have seen far too much of the latter for the past three to four years.  As a result, I am tired, my flight response has kicked in and I want to run.  

But I won't.