The Power of Prime

Parents of obese children who have experienced multiple hospitalizations but have not started to fix it need intense therapy. They need to be separated.

Hi Dr. Taylor

"Let's look at this realistically. Really bad parenting
is already a crime; it's called child abuse. So it's not
an issue of whether to make bad parenting a crime, but
the threshold at which bad parenting becomes a crime."

Right now (generally speaking), parents have to engage
in pretty extreme child abuse/neglect before the
kids are taken away. Most foster parents are fine, but
enough are pretty bad, so the social workers are often
reluctant to take kids away and put them into a potentially
worse situation.

So the idea of the government taking kids away from merely
bad parents is pretty unrealistic, as you point out.

"Create a public-service campaign, Be the Best Parent You
Can Be, that blankets old and new media with positive and
practical messages from celebrities, professional athletes,
etc. Often, just raising awareness can change behavior,
case in point being the anti-smoking campaigns of the
late 20th century."

Excellent idea ! And I also really like your ideas for
reading opportunities, high-quality child-care, living
wages, coaching.

For me the two most important ideas are high-quality
child-care (emphasizing play), and after-school and
summer opportunities for kids to play.

Kids need to play, and most poor and middle-class
kids are not playing enough, instead they are
kept inside, addicted to electronic media.

http://health.usnews.com/health-news/family-health/articles/2009/03/09/1...

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/09/02/let-the-children-play-so...

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/27/opinion/27elkind.html

Terry

We talk a lot about how much we care about children, but we don't spend money on them. As a nation, we are far more interested in wealthy adults than impoverished children. Don't believe me? Just do a quick check of how much money our government spends on things like after school care, health care for poor children, and subsidies for oil companies.

Yeah, depressing, isn't it.

I agree with you on several fronts, namely that bad parenting is creating an epidemic of social and moral problems throughout the world. I think the idea of licensing parents because it assumes that parents are planning to have children and they are calculating when the child will be bore. In poor communities children are born to irresponsible parents. The baby is born out of a one night stand, hot mammas giving it up freely, or just plain old stupidity. They proliferate likes its passing out candy. Almost never is the child planned. So, having them get a license to be aparent will not work. What will work is parenting classes mandated. before the government will pay for your prenatal, and birth you have to attend classes. You will be asigned a caseworker who will monitor your parenting to insure that you are doing it right. If you do you will be continued to receive your help up to a point. If not you will have your tubes tied for ever. You will receive assistance in being educated so you can be self sufficient and job placement assistance. You will have 6 months of additional assistance and then you are cut off, foodstamps and all. If you can't take care of yourself and your child he/she will be taken from you. No more having babies so you can stay on welfare. No more raising generations of welfare dependents. Let's not make it a crime to be a bad parent lets stop it. For those already on assistance they need to start with classes or they will have their aid cut off too.