The "Up All Night" problem

I was in Dallas about seven or eight years ago on a business/convention trip. We got in on a Sunday night around 9:00 PM, and rather than sit in our hotel rooms watching TV all night, my co-worker and I decided we'd hit a late show at a nearby multi-plex, since we didn't need to get to the convention center until noon the next day. We ended up going to see the awful Arnold Schwarzenegger film about the anti-Christ, End of Days or something.... Anyway, I was kind of blown away at all the young children running around at 11:00 PM on a Sunday night at a movie theater showing an R-rated movie. Entire families would just wander from one theater to the next, toddlers in tow, watch about 20 minutes of whatever mayhem was on-screen, then all file out to the check out the action on the next screen, while another family would wander in to take their place. This went on for the entire movie. My co-worker and I eventually gave up trying to pay attention to what was happening on-screen (we weren't missing much anyway) to watch the sociological parade on display all around us. As we were leaving, there was a shooting incident in the parking lot, which was also flat-out mobbed with young kids at 1:00 AM on a Sunday night.

I was driving around the streets of North Philly last night and was reminded of this phenomenon, which is pretty much my favorite indicator of the social health of a neighborhood. Your post, Rod, incidently raised an issue that gets short shrift: the astonishing amount of TV and other media that most impoverished children take in, combined with a completed lack of any kind of parental screening or oversight. Maybe one of the intrepid folks over at the Manhattan Institute will take that on some day.

I have noticed this "up all night" phenomena on a number of occasions driving through the west side of Chicago after midnite. Small kids out on porches and even in the street, playing after my kids of similar age had been in bed for many hours.

I've seen it too and it distresses me. It's not just urban poor either, although the numbers are surely greater in poor urban neighborhoods. (People get a false idea of what's "normal" when the entire neighborhood is under-skilled in parenting.)

My mother teaches in a small town and often has a few kids in her class who are victims of this kind of neglect. No one talks to them and no one makes sure they go to bed at any particular time. Needless to say, they struggle in class -- not only with the work, but merely to stay awake. When she talks to the parents about it at conferences, the parents seem convinced that they are *unable* to get the child to sleep. Yes, it's an excuse, but I wonder how many of them really *don't* know how to parent properly. Good parenting among humans (and other higher primates as well) is mostly learned. Only a small portion is instinctual or "comes naturally". I don't see any way to address this other than on a community level, although the government could help by funding community-based programs and perhaps even providing a small stipend for parents who take the classes. How many parenting classes could be supported with the funds from one day of the war in Iraq, I wonder...

I see this kind of social rot as largely a product of our welfare system, which provides financial resources for having fatherless (and almost motherless) children, without controls that demand pro-social behavior from the recipients.

So I have very mixed feelings about the drive to extend more federalized health care to poor children. On one hand, this may extend desperately-needed healthcare to impoverished children. On the other, isn't this just one more time around with "Let Uncle Sam take responsibility for your children so you don't have to"?

No matter how well-intentioned, when the outcome is kids on the street past midnight, a program is not compassionate. Rod, how do you balance the obvious need for, say, poor kids' healthcare, and the moral hazard?

p.s. tell your beliefnet overlords that I really like the very wide typein box for the comments, but it really needs a Preview capability.

Is there any example or evidence that poor people can be disincentivized from socially unacceptable behavior by denying them government support? If someone has socially destructive behavior, what evidence is there that they will become better poor people if we cut them off the dole to fend for their children with even fewer resources?

"If you want to end the "up all night" dilemma, it's not going to be done by creating more socially responsible poor people. It will be done by helping ease poverty and the conditions that surround poverty."

So people can't put their kids to bed on time if they're poor? There are a lot of poor families who manage to be excellent parents. It's not a matter of wealth but a matter of being a responsible parent.

Knee jerk revulsion to idea of the government stepping in to do something about it is just plain silly.

As silly as expecting the government to send social workers by at night to turn off the TV and put the children to bed?

Is there any more reliable way of making sure that another generation of children are destined to be impoverished adults than to tend to your own partying needs while your children do their thing outside until the wee hours of the morning?

Seriously, you want the government to step in "to do something about it." What practical things could the government do to change that self-destructive moral ecosystem? I'm not asking rhetorically; I really want to know.

Economic redistribution. A jobs program. More funding for housing. Drug-treatment programs on demand.

IOW, there's lots of things that could help, it's just not clear who is going to pay for it. The conservative economic model to social welfare has failed, so maybe it's time to fully fund the social safety net and see if it can work. There are plenty of ways to respond to poverty and the underclass, but praying that the problems go away or shaming people into responsibility--or trying to marry them off--isn't the answer.

Let us face the overall societal atmosphere of child raising. For better or worse, over the past 100 years we have moved from a family driven model, with its personal responsibility, liberty and parental freedom of action (and along with it, a sort of 10 - 20% embedded pocket of child abuse, paedophilia, etc) to a state driven model, where the parent is themselves parented by the state, low freedom of action, and very little peer pressure to be a good parent. Even among the rich, there are scary indicators. TV and the net as baby sitters, almost none of the sort of child driven time which those of us 40 or better can recall from our own childhoods, no more walking or riding bikes to school, wildly disparate rates of maturation within the same individual (yesterday I saw an ad for diapers for kids 4 - 12 years, 40 - 120+ lbs!). When the rich are failing at raising children, how can we expect the poor to do even half as well?

You cannot create a program to stop unproductive, ill-educated, under-employed,stupid people from having kids. Obama, fresh off his "hugs for thugs" idea about crime, is just the latest in a long line of happytalk poverty pimps. Yeah, ANOTHER GOVERNMENT PROGRAM!

Government cannot raise kids; parents have to. These people won't. Bill Cosby, his own family's failings nothwithstanding, told the truth. And for doing so found himself marginalized, insulted, detested.

And a double gold star to the government social-egnineering genius who came up with the idea of the housing project. Let's get all the non-working, susbtance-abusing poorly-educated zero work ethic and mariginal family structure people together in one impersonal place, and stack them vertically until we blot out the sun. Grand!

What practical things could the government do to change that self-destructive moral ecosystem? I'm not asking rhetorically; I really want to know.

Thanks for asking.

1. Treatment on demand as many times as needed to kick

2. Pre-natal care with an emphasis on healthy births

3. Health insurance for all low income kids. healthy children miss less school, develop fewer expensive ailments

4. Skill training

5. Parenting classes targeted to urban areas with the highest incidents of child neglect, abuse, and addiction

6. Make these services available in the evening hours and weekends so the folks who are managing to hold jobs can access them after work

7. Crank up the public service announcements, partnerships with community leaders

8. Target funding support to church programs serving these needs particularly in the area of ex-offender services

9. Work to zone out as many liquor and payday loan business as possible from these neighborhoods

10. Institute a massive reclamation project of dilapidated buildings and blighted areas

Do all of the above and when the programs suffer the inevitable corruption or incompetence in implementation, keep at it.

We've spent $500,000,000,000 in a country that hates us on infrastructure, policing, and social services.

Keeping the underclass of our own country from falling so far that they become a breeding ground for sectarian violence in our own country seems a prudent thing to do. This isn't hyperbole, paranoia, or inchoate rage, merely a heads up.

We've spent $500,000,000,000 in a country that hates us on infrastructure, policing, and social services.

At first I thought you were talking about the U.S. War on Poverty (Great Society), but I realize that would not make sense given the context and you must be talking about Iraq (which I agree with you about.)

So let me ask you: why have the problems discussed in this post gotten significantly worse, since LBJ's Great Society programs began?

I like your list Richard. I said in my previous post that most of these problems must be handled by the community, but at least some of the money is going to have to come from the government, IMO. If those of us on the "outside" see this as a real problem, then we ought to be willing to pony up a few tax dollars to help support *real* solutions. My belief is that the best solutions are usually community-based and often one-on-one -- both of which are labor and resource intensive. There are some wonderful volunteer activists working very hard to tackle these problems in their own urban neighborhoods. I wouldn't mind subsidizing some of them to do it full time. Let someone else work their minimum wage job so they can devote more time and energy to the important stuff.

Again, I submit that a person who was not parented properly herself is not going to be a proper parent without help and guidance from someone other than the mother who screwed up in the first place and/or equally neglected peers -- even if she *wants* to! (Men and women who have survived a bad childhood to become good parents have almost invariably had a role-model, mentor, or some sort of parenting education that taught them a better way.) The longer it goes on, the more the problem spreads as neglected or poorly parented children grow up to neglect and poorly parent children of their own.

What I like about the way Obama talks about these kinds of problems is that he talks about these kids as "our" kids, not "those kids over there in that poor neighborhood". Until we all start to look at the crisis in those terms, we won't have the moral or political fortitude to do much about the problem outside of foisting it upon the already over-stretched and dysfunctional school system.

1. Treatment on demand as many times as needed to kick
IN NYC, there are already plenty of open slots in govenment-funded progams. ANyone who truly wants treatment can get it. Most drug criminals are offered treatment over incarceration diversionanry porgrams-repeatedly. The idea that treatment programs are turning addicts away is a complete myth.
2. Pre-natal care with an emphasis on healthy births

You have to show up, which careless indifferent mothers don't do, which is largely how they got pregnant. It's the same thing with parent/teacher conferences; you can set up all thw wonderful programs in the world, but if silly geese choose not to attend, so what? It's all carrot, no stick, unless you're willing to tie benefits to that.And goo goo liberals like Obama the Magnificent don't want to be judgmental.

3. Health insurance for all low income kids. healthy children miss less school, develop fewer expensive ailments
There's no shortage of school-based programs in public schools. Most states have such programs for minors. Again, indifferent parenting-not going to the doctor regularly and treating the ER and ambulance service as primary care instead-means that they never get the care because the parent(and it's usually just a mom) doesn't bother.

4. Skill training

What does it mean other more make work jobs for government bureacrats. So now, people who didn't care about school will suddenly become go getters in nebulous "job training". Fair point-educational progroms in high schools should try to incorporate more techincal and vocational training for less-academically inclined students .

5. Parenting classes targeted to urban areas with the highest incidents of child neglect, abuse, and addiction

Again, common sense and circualr logic. You cannot instill common sense, role models, work ethic and respect for work and education by government fiat.

6. Make these services available in the evening hours and weekends so the folks who are managing to hold jobs can access them after work

If they have work ethic, everything esel falls into palce. In fact, I've seemn such programs become real pain in the keister to working poor. So again, youd' be running programs to employ hacks.

7. Crank up the public service announcements, partnerships with community leaders

Yes, those V-chip, "this is your brain on drugs"and McGruff ads are doing the job.

8. Target funding support to church programs serving these needs particularly in the area of ex-offender services

Bush tried it. It didn't work, and might be illegal. Google "DiIulo, John."

9. Work to zone out as many liquor and payday loan business as possible from these neighborhoods

Good luck. Now you're in the realm of telling people who actually work having a beer after a long day is some awful sin. And conservatives are the nanny state judgmetnal types? If Jesse Jackson's son gives up his Bud dealership in Chicago, let us all know. And let us know when Al Sharpton gives up his endorsement of the payday loansharks.

10. Institute a massive reclamation project of dilapidated buildings and blighted areas

Once you do that, those areas get gentrified. "Affordable housing"-kinda like "jumbo shrimp" or "military intelligence".

Want to do something? End rent controls. Give tax incentives only to small scale 1 to 3 family human scale homes, and stop giving every real estate developer a sweetheart deal simply beause they buy off "community activists" and promise "affordable housing". On this we should all agree-much of the realty debvelopments of the large scale varietyy in most cities are ugly, impersonal, dehumanizing and built with stupid tax abatements. While small scale development, which would foster community, gets nothing other than hassles and grief.

BY all means, lay out what Great Society programs were a smashing success. By any measure, things have become worse, and not simply because of an increase in population. It's not to say government cannot help. But liberals continue with the fallacy that government can by legislation and program and lucre make people decent.

If a parent doesn't make their childrens' health, education and welfare a daily priority, there's not much more anyone can do. Again, Cosby laid it out thew "tough love" solution, and got his head handed to him.

But liberals continue with the fallacy that government can by legislation and program and lucre make people decent.

If conservatives would just shut up and get out of the way, we might just see what we're capable of accomplishing. As long as there's half the nation that cares more about their bottom line than the welfare of the citizenry, that's not going to happen.

I hereby renew my call for secession. Let Blue America get to work helping people, and let Red Amurrka hide behind their gates hugging their guns while they watch American Idol.

TV, please take a breath.

Bugg, it would be easier to agree with you if you offered a gestalt perspective. Richard did not present a laundry list, he presented a meta-program that requires all parts to have a significant effect. Your nitpicking is just that if you don't take a look at how those various programs can interact and give each other support well beyond the dollars spent on them piece-meal.

Half-efforts can work; I live on the other side of Philly from Sean, and around here we have many success stories, some of which have been bulldozed away by real estate speculators, city improvement programs that are half-assed, and burnout amongst the brave people who worked hard at the implementation, and saw no one to step up and help them, let alone step into their shoes at some point.

I wrote in another thread in a different context: so long as leaders cannot make decisions that are right regardless of who profits (if anyone), then those who seek profit will be the drivers of our social agenda. Indeed, we don't have leaders any more; we have agenda promoters, paid for my those who stand to profit from the agenda, and who cannot be bothered to care about who gets screwed in the process.

Sorry, TV. I shouldn't have left my remark unexplained.

There is plenty of documented evidence of social programs that were fully funded and completely wrong for where and when they were tried. There are plenty of social programs that started out in the right direction, but were snafued by degreed professionals hired on their credentials as well as their political connections.

The point is not that things go wrong. The point is that things can go right, and we should keep trying to do those things despite past experience. We should be fiscally responsible, but measuring success solely in terms of what our dollars have bought is, from my POV, the same dehumanizing of the poor that both sides are guilty of in their political tug-'o-wars over programs and funding.

If the policies are wrong-headed, throwing more money at them is not a solution.

But some programs are wrong-headed only if they are poorly funded. If you want to have a long-term impact on poverty, you can't run a program at 75% for two years then strangle it for three decades. The Great Society programs were never allowed to succeed, strangled by conservative presidents and Congress who talked about "welfare queens" on the political stump and considered Ketchup a vegetable.

Programs should exist, they should be well funded, they should be run by people who know what they're talking about. They should not be seen as a magic bullet for solving all societal ills, and they are no substitute for personal responsibility. I have an intimate knowledge of drug and alcohol treatment, and the only way it works is with those patients who realize that they have a problem, who are motivated to deal with it, and who accept that their thinking is the problem- in short, they take responsibility for themselves. Ditto for any other program.

Actually, what I wrote in the other thread works better verbatim than my paraphrase:

Doing the right thing must mean ignoring agendas. If it doesn't then we become a society that only does the right thing when someone can profit from it... oops, already there, I see. :-(