Investing In Our Kids

On July 14, 2014, President Obama tweeted "If we make investments early in our children, we will reduce the need to incarcerate those kids."  I immediately re-tweeted, “Truer words have never been spoken.”  I am still very much a novice tweeter, and I have been somewhat selective as to what I re-tweet as it appears some folks just re-tweet about everything they receive.  I re-tweet things I agree with, or that I think are funny or provocative.  This tweet from the POTUS is not original.  We have heard this said by many people many times before, but at this point in time I truly wonder whether or not it is a common belief.  One would think so, but when one looks around at the current state of affairs in this country, I am concerned.

It seems that investing in our children has become a political football.  In order to appease political supporters and special interest groups, elected officials have continued to cut funding to education throughout the country.  In Iowa, education spending does make up a very large part of the budget, yet legislators are getting away with breaking the law by not allocating funds when they are supposed to, and the Governor gives lip-service to supporting education, but is cherry-picking programs that he values.  There are similar — and worse — stories in other states.  As I write this, Congress is supposedly working to reauthorize the federal bill for education . . . eight years after it was to have been reauthorized.  These examples kind of paint a clear picture where children rank as a national priority.  Note: Congress did reauthorize the Elementary and Secondary Schools Act in late 2015, eight years after it was due to be reauthorized.

I question whether the generation of parents raising younger kids today are truly investing in raising those kids so that they can be strong, independent contributors to a society.  Half the kids in this country don’t have two parents with them in the house where they reside, with many having absolutely no relationship with the man responsible for them being here.  There are also kids that have two parents in the house they live in, but one wonders how committed the parents are to raising the kids.  This investment is just as important, if not more so, than financial investment.  You don’t need a lot of money to teach children values and morals, or show them love and affection.  There are myriad of troubling statistics about the breakdown of the traditional American family.  The cost is a couple of generations of young people that many are very concerned about.

One aspect of our society that seems to be investing in our children is business and marketing, and I question how healthy that is.  Advertisers and manufacturers have discovered how profitable a market young people are, and thus we have children and young people who have have become quite materialistic.  This has come with a number of related issues where children have been exploited.

The health of a nation is best measure by how it treats its children.  In my opinion it is time for our nation to have a check-up because what I see is an unhealthy environment for a lot of our kids.  We need to pay attention to what President Obama tweeted and it is time for all of us to invest in our nation’s youth.  Otherwise, we will need to invest in our prison system, which is a very expensive alternative.