this post was submitted on 26 Jun 2023
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Politics
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Nothing screams "my kid is going to turn away from truancy" like having a parent in prison.
When your cure only hastens and reinforces the bad behavior, your cure is bad and you should feel bad.
I would have no issue at all with child protective services being engaged, but sending an overworked single mother to jail isn't helping anything, it's just slaking bloodlust for punishment when people don't do as you'd wish.
If the goal is ensuring every child is equipped with an equal opportunity for education, then there are always better choices than hauling mom or dad off to jail. Can you seriously not see how patently absurd that is? It's a boneheaded move from top to bottom and she should feel shame for the rest of her life for putting her political muscle behind it. Educating every last child is important, but this proposed solution only makes things worse.
And that's what the issue is. It's not that there was intervention, it was this specific intervention is stunningly short sighted and entirely punitive.
If your child is missing 80 out of 180 days of school, you're doing a bang up job as a parent.
Sure, that parent is failing that child. I'm not disputing that. It doesn't matter whether the parent has an intent or capability to do right by their child, only whether they are. In the end, the child is being failed, and I don't think for a second that the right call is to sit back and do nothing.
But jailing the parent is simply not going to make it any fucking better. It's like trying to fight a house fire with a flamethrower.
It is simply and solely because of this incredibly poor lack of reasoning and judgement that I don't have a positive opinion of her. If I had to say anything nice, I would say "she was able to identify a problem", but her solution was so astoundingly and obviously counter-productive I'm not inclined to have even a neutral opinion of her, much less a positive one.
(Edit: And where I say "her solution", I mean the one she championed; I have no insight as to whether it was her brain-child or just something she threw her political muscle behind)