Was I A Criminally Negligent Parent?

Conservative commentator Kate O’Beirne got me thinking about my parenting skills. A few days ago, at a Republican gathering at the Hudson Institute in Washington, DC, called “Less of Washington and More of Ourselves,” she railed against the federal school meal programs as just one instance of the feds “taking over” a responsibility that properly belongs to “ourselves.”

Let me say here and now we fed our kids. I’m not positive about breakfast because I usually got up later than they did, but they brown-bagged lunch in elementary school (Mike lived on PBJ for years) and/or got money for lunch (although apparently the lunches in junior-middle-high school were awful and they often brought theirs). We always had dinner but often it involved rice-a-roni or mushroom soup with noodles and tuna, so that might not meet Kate’s standard for acceptable parenting.

So here’s what Kate actually said (no kidding):
“My question is, what poor excuse for a parent can’t rustle up a bowl of cereal and a banana? I just don’t get why millions of school children qualify for school breakfast unless we have a major widespread problem with child neglect. You know, I mean if that’s how many parents are incapable of pulling together a bowl of cereal and a banana, then we have problems… [that] can’t be solved with a school breakfast, because we have parents who are just criminally negligent with respect to raising children.”

Kate, let’s check our facts. First, you really have to have milk with the cereal. But more to the policy issue here, school meal programs are for kids from low-income families – and income level has to do with the availability of jobs and the skills and experience of employees. Parenting ability has nothing to do with it.

Kate, you need to stop by an elementary school in a regular neighborhood (ie, not McLean), where kids are dropped off very early by parents who have to get to work – parents whom you suggest may be “criminally negligent” because they don’t earn much and they’re overworked. These parents do the paperwork to get their kids into a meals program that helps them be better prepared to learn. I’d say that, far from being negligent or abusive to their children, these parents are breaking their backs to earn a decent living and to take care of their kids.

Kate concludes that we should “ask more of ourselves” and less of the federal government. I agree. If we can feed our kids well – no small matter, involving shopping, cooking, putting the meal on the table and cleaning up -- we should. (Or at least call for a pizza.) If we can’t, though - if we work two jobs, work overtime, are going to school to get ahead, have aging parents to care for - should we let them be hungry or underfed? Should we trust to the often unpredictable state to allocate funds? Should we throw outselves on the mercy of non-profits that are always scrambling for money (usually from the feds)? Or the profit-driven private sector?

Who’s criminally negligent then?