I am not an expert about economics or welfare. However, having spent years living in homeless shelters, it seems to me that the government paying people to have babies is a bad idea.
I have written and talked a lot about homeless people and how they are treated. What ought to happen is that an investment is made to help them change their lives; that would initially be a very difficult and expensive thing to do, but it would create productive and independent members of society.
You have to make shelters livable, clean, organized, humane places, which most shelters are not. Society DOES NOT KNOW what homeless shelters are like.
The Pine Street Inn is the cleanest and most organized shelter where I ever stayed. However, it is also plagued by the same problems that every homeless shelter has, which is that homeless people are so stigmatized by society that the money and resources aren't there to ensure that everybody who works at a homeless shelter is educated to deal with the constellation of problems that homeless people have. The good workers are always outnumbered by the bad.
There's also almost no effort to educate homeless people past getting a certificate for work in a service profession. There are tons of smart homeless people who don't know how to read or write, and it shouldn't be like that.
Homeless people should not get screamed at all day by people who work at homeless shelters, but they are. Homeless people should not be degraded at the whim of people who work at homeles shelters, but they are.
There ought to be 12-step recovery meetings and domestic violence programs at every homeless shelter, every day, but there aren't. There ought to be dental care for homeless people who have serious dental needs that's better than getting all their teeth pulled by dental students and then being given dentures, but there isn't.
That's a partial list of what's wrong with the way that homeless people are treated; I have talked and written about it for years.
All of that being said, I would hesitate to endorse automatic welfare for anyone and everyone who wants to have children.
I also am not sure that someone who leaves work to have children ought to be guaranteed to have the same job when he or she gets back to work. I think the feasibility of that idea depends on how much responsibility the person has at work before he or she decides to be a parent. For lower-level jobs, it's probably all right to guarantee that you can have your old job back when you're ready to leave the house; for jobs that require that you have to manage a lot of people and continue to know everything that's happening at your employer's business and in your field for a couple of years, I think that an employer has the right to be concerned that an absence of two or more years while an employee starts or cares for a family could be detrimental to the business. You should probably be guaranteed to have some job when you get back to work; if you're really good at what you do, and your employer is fair, you'll be able to advance again.
What if, instead of directly paying people to be parents, the government gave financial incentives or direct reimbursement to businesses that help their employees take the time to care for their children? What if a business could do something like give employees at least two years of parental leave, and hire people for those years with the understanding that they're being hired temporarily? Most employers probably wouldn't want to pay two salaries for one job, a full salary to the employee on parental leave and a full salary to the person substituting for the person on leave. What if a business could do something like pay 25% of the parent's salary to the parent and 75% of the original salary to the person who is temporarily doing the parent's job at work? What if the government could then help the employer, the parent and the substitute by paying the remaining 25% of the substitute's salary and another 25% to the parent, but only if the parent has left work on good terms for parental leave and only for as long as it's the parent's continue and stated intention to return to that business to work?
What if the business also supported a mentoring relationship between the parent and the substitute employee? The Internet, email, cell phones and Skype make that possible. That way, the parent could continue to know what's happening at work, and the substitute would have an invaluable resource.
What if there were programs at work that encouraged employees who want to have children to start saving money for a few years before they have the children, and to network with other employees who want to have children or who already have children?
Also, as far as respecting caregivers is concerned; it's true that not enough people do. However, getting the admiration of other people is not supposed to be the goal of people who are good at parenting or other caregiving; successful caregiving is supposed to be the goal. If your definition of healthy ambition is to fascinate people by talking about your children, then you're the one who has a skewed idea of what's important. If your definition of successful parenting is that your healthy and independent children like talking to you and want to be at your house for holidays, and if that's the choice that you made instead of trying to scale the heights of financial or other types of power, then you're not going to need outside validation to feel like you didn't waste your life.
Nobody has the right to be disrespectful to people who take care of their children full-time. Nobody has that right because NOBODY HAS THAT RIGHT. Children need to know that someone is there for them; it is detrimental to society when a child doesn't have that person. Even one child not having that person is a risk to society; it only takes one person who grows up unloved to take out that lack of love on innocent people.
Copyright L. Kochman, June 10, 2016 @ 8:19 p.m.
