What social programs can we establish to promote families (especially in low income areas)?

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It seems that neither the welfare state, nor the militarization of the police can raise everyone out of poverty and/or prevent crime. I believe, that the best way to help the poor and prevent crime (especially in low income areas) is better promote families and encourage men to take responsibility and be fathers and husbands. What do you think, either the government or the private sector, can do to promote families?
 
Some are fond of the school vouchers that were in the forefront a few years back, but did not get off the ground, as I recall. The gist of it was that families that verified sending their children to private schools would receive a tax credit and not avail themselves of public schools.
 
Have every student listen to or read a chapter of the Bible at the start of each school day.
 
johnnyt3000 said:
It seems that neither the welfare state, nor the militarization of the police can raise everyone out of poverty and/or prevent crime. I believe, that the best way to help the poor and prevent crime (especially in low income areas) is better promote families and encourage men to take responsibility and be fathers and husbands. What do you think, either the government or the private sector, can do to promote families?
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What does your teacher say?
 
johnnyt3000 said:
. I believe, that the best way to help the poor and prevent crime (especially in low income areas) is better promote families and encourage men to take responsibility and be fathers and husbands.
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In lower income situations a marriage can result in a different tax situation or reduce elegibility for assistance and make things more economically difficult for a family. In some situations it is more economically advantageous for them to remain unmarried. Though not being married doesn’t necessarily translate to a man being uninvolved in the lives of his children.
 
Well, if no teachers of yours have made comment, what do you say?
 
“I am for doing good to the poor, but…I think the best way of doing good to the poor, is not making them easy in poverty, but leading or driving them out of it. I observed…that the more public provisions were made for the poor, the less they provided for themselves, and of course became poorer. And, on the contrary, the less was done for them, the more they did for themselves, and became richer.” - -Ben Franklin

Best idea…exclude government.
 
estesbob said:
Jobs
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Of course, it doesn’t do much good if the jobs that are created use skills that the poor don’t currently have. I have been hiring people for years at upper middle class wages and not once have I hired a poor person.
 
For Captain America, yours is the Post of the Year 2015

Single mothers try their damndest, but this method just child-rearing just doesn’t work as a social policy. God bless them, but more is needed.

Liberals (once called “progressives” as a rhetorical dodge in the early '00s) absolutely FEAR this issue----it calls to question the whole “Sex Is Everything and the Purpose of Life” philosophy.
 
you are 100% correct to p(name removed by moderator)oint this as the issue that is most important, however there is no “social program” that can solve this issue. Not only have the welfare state and other social programs not eliminated poverty, they have made it worse. And there is one simple reason why…you cannot legislate people out of poverty, and more importantly, you cannot legislate morals and ethics. Government has nothing to do here. our culture needs to change. Our schools, media, and pop culture (completely taken over by liberal progressives) have brainwashed kids for DECADES into believing the family isn’t that important. divorce is ok, premarital sex is ok, teen pregnancy is ok, single parenthood is ok, marriage is old-fashioned, and now gay marriage and gay adoption are ok, etc. it will take decades to recover if we are ever to recover.
 
I think some of the effort has to be directed at high school students and young adults.
  1. Controversial as it sounds continue sex ed programs (that also include abstinence as the best method). The teen birth rate has been on the decline for decades but teen mothers are mute likely to become single mothers.
  2. find a way to include a home econ and parenting class in the high school curriculum.
  3. adjust most of the existing social programs so that they don’t favor single parents as much.
Lastly, the problem is not something that social programs can do much about. The real question is how do you encourage both men and women to want too form families?
 
madtom said:
. Our schools, media, and pop culture (completely taken over by liberal progressives) have brainwashed kids for DECADES into believing the family isn’t that important. divorce is ok, premarital sex is ok, teen pregnancy is ok, single parenthood is ok, marriage is old-fashioned, and now gay marriage and gay adoption are ok, etc. it will take decades to recover if we are ever to recover.
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What you describe are values to be instilled by parents.

divorce is ok - That’s not the schools, it is observation of the parents of many peers.

premarital sex is ok - when I was in school (class of 2000) the message was abstinence is best but if you don’t wait than reduce here are the risks and how to reduce them. Media on the other hand…

teen pregnancy is ok - with the exception of that stupid MTV show this has no basis in my reality.

single parenthood is ok - fair enough

marriage is old-fashioned - in it’s current state it is harder and harder to explain how the benefits outweigh the risk for not only men, but also women. I don’t remember marriage coming up in school, but yea the media reports of the carnage from failed marriages probably had a chilling effect.
 
HerCrazierHalf said:
What you describe are values to be instilled by parents.
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based on the topic of this thread, what parents? 🙂
but seriously, of course these are values to be instilled by parents. The issue is that there was a time when society at large would reinforce these values. Now society at large contradicts these values. Parents may be the primary influence on children, but they aren’t the only influence.
 
The demographic profile of high-poverty neighborhoods is really quite different from wealthier neighborhoods. I volunteered for a Detroit anti-poverty organization for a short time, and looked at the demographic patterns. Suffice to say that in Detroit, the sand is shifting under our feet, in both the gentrifying city center and in the poor neighborhoods elsewhere in the city.

Between 2000 and 2010, Detroit lost population – about 200,000 people. If you look at the composition of that lost population, the male/female ratio was above 1 for populations under 25 in the year 2000. The most likely explanations I can see for that is incarceration and emigration, the latter as a result of the area’s loss of high-paying unskilled jobs. If you look at populations over 24 years old in 2000 that left the city, the majority – sometimes by far – were women. Women aged 25-54 really left in the greatest proportions.

These trends were even more extreme in the high-poverty neighborhood in which I was working. A greater fraction of young people (aged <25 in 2000) leaving that neighborhood were males than city-wide, and a much larger fraction of people aged 20-49 were women.

I looked at this picture and it told me that the loss of young men – for whatever reason – led to a demographic imbalance, such that lots of younger adult women ended up single. That is probably why younger women left the city, and its poorer neighborhoods – at such rapid rates.

These findings led me to a theory by sociologist William Julius Wilson, who proposed the idea of an “unmarriagable man,” a poor man who due to poor education and/or criminal background in his youth is now unable to secure stable employment and income. Women look on these men as poor candidates for husbands. Wilson found that in poor urban neighborhoods, men often accused women of caring about nothing but money, and women accused men of being no-good, unemployed bums. Popular hip-hop songs actually reflect this cultural bias – with women referred to as “gold-diggers” and, men, as in TLC’s major hit, being labeled “scrubs.”

If the Church wants to make a difference and promote families, we need to focus on young people. We need to help young men especially stay out of gangs and keep them in school. We need to help young women attain strong educations. For both, we need to inculcate the value of chastity, and need to work to support the (frequently single) parents to help them support their children with both economically and emotionally.

I’m skeptical of any “magic wand” that is based on solely on tweaking this or that policy “just right.” To me, the most proven and effective way to improve the lives of young people is through one-on-one mentoring. That means each and every one of us who can doing things like Big Brother/Big Sister, scouting programs, etc. What’s a public policy that can help make that happen? How about tax credits for people who volunteer in high-poverty areas?

Fundamentally, though, we as Christians can’t just sit back and rely on the government to solve the problems of poverty.
 
johnnyt3000 said:
It seems that neither the welfare state, nor the militarization of the police can raise everyone out of poverty and/or prevent crime. I believe, that the best way to help the poor and prevent crime (especially in low income areas) is better promote families and encourage men to take responsibility and be fathers and husbands. What do you think, either the government or the private sector, can do to promote families?
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There is no easy answer to your question. I think the first place to start, though, is with the assumption that low-income parents aren’t working or aren’t willing to work and are just taking handouts. The second assumption we need to correct is that these people aren’t willing to be part of a family.

It is impossible for me to comprehend living a life on low wages, working a job where I don’t get paid if I have to take time off to take my child to the doctor, get fired for too many missed days and have to spend more than an hour commuting (via walking, bus, or train) to and from my job each day. Where I don’t have a family member to back me up when my child is sick or on school holiday, when I’m short the rent money, when I lose my home and need a place to live, or who can give me a ride or lend me a car when my car breaks down. A life where I don’t have access to reasonably priced, healthy food and have to work two part-time jobs to make ends meat so that employers can avoid paying for benefits, especially health insurance. I can’t understand how a family already stretched thin can manage when food prices continue to rise, yet wages never increase. And even more stressful… the thought of having no choice in the doctor I’m allowed to see with my family.

The trials that a low-income family face in our country are many and varied, and there’s no bandaid that’s going to fix it.
 
Selah_KY said:
There is no easy answer to your question. I think the first place to start, though, is with the assumption that low-income parents aren’t working or aren’t willing to work and are just taking handouts. The second assumption we need to correct is that these people aren’t willing to be part of a family.

It is impossible for me to comprehend living a life on low wages, working a job where I don’t get paid if I have to take time off to take my child to the doctor, get fired for too many missed days and have to spend more than an hour commuting (via walking, bus, or train) to and from my job each day. Where I don’t have a family member to back me up when my child is sick or on school holiday, when I’m short the rent money, when I lose my home and need a place to live, or who can give me a ride or lend me a car when my car breaks down. A life where I don’t have access to reasonably priced, healthy food and have to work two part-time jobs to make ends meat so that employers can avoid paying for benefits, especially health insurance. I can’t understand how a family already stretched thin can manage when food prices continue to rise, yet wages never increase. And even more stressful… the thought of having no choice in the doctor I’m allowed to see with my family.

The trials that a low-income family face in our country are many and varied, and there’s no bandaid that’s going to fix it.
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your points about stagnant wages, high cost of food and other necessities, and not having family or friends to lend support are great points, but these are issues affecting everyone, not just low-income families. But why don’t people ask the question, “how can anyone in America be low-income?” There is virtually no reason why every single American can’t be at least middle class. With a free education through 12th grade, extremely cheap community colleges where you can learn a trade, ANYONE can pull themselves out of poverty. the question is, are they willing to put in the effort, and if not, why must the rest of society pay for their bad decisions? of course I am generalizing and there are always exceptions, like the disabled, someone losing a job, etc. and these are the people who deserve assistance. But the rest really need a kick in the behind to accept a hand up instead of a handout.
 
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