Richard V. Reeves, Isabel Sawhill, & Kimberly Howard write,
interventions in parenting are politically unpalatable. Conservatives are comfortable with the notion that parents and families matter, but too often simply blame the parents for whatever goes wrong. They resist the notion that government has a role in promoting good parenting. Judging is fine. Acting is not. Liberals have exactly the opposite problem. They have no qualms about deploying expensive public policies, but are wary of any suggestion that parents—especially poor and/or black parents—are in some way responsible for the constrained life chances of their children.
Later, they write,
Forty-five percent of mothers with less than a high-school degree, and 44 percent of single mothers, are ranked as being among the “weakest” quarter of parents. At the other end of the scale, higher levels of income, education, and family stability all predict stronger parenting. There are also sizable racial gaps in parenting scores. Our analysis suggests that the biggest gaps are not between the helicopter parents at the top and ordinary families in the middle, but between the middle and the bottom. Forty-eight percent of parents in the bottom income quintile rank among the weakest, compared to 16 percent of those in the middle, and 5 percent of the most affluent.
Still later,
In our new paper, we estimate the effects of HIPPY on longer-term outcomes of participants. The goal of the program, offered when children are age three to five, is to effectively train parents to be their child’s first teacher. Families receive biweekly home visits from a paraprofessional for 30 weeks out of the year, along with biweekly group meetings. Parents are also given books and toys. A high-quality evaluation of the program found significant improvements in reading and school readiness in first grade. Using a microsimulation model—the Social Genome Model—we predict that HIPPY participants are 3 percent more likely to graduate high school, and 6 percent less likely to become teen parents. These are modest effects, but positive ones, given the importance of the outcomes.
Of course, if the improvements in readiness in first grade fade out, or prove impossible to replicate in subsequent studies….
Overall, this is an essay that is modest in its claims, and I give the authors kudos for that.
Pointer from Timothy Taylor.
Here is another essay, however “modest,” that again proposes that more of the human relationships in our society should be conducted vicariously through the mechanisms of governments, thereby increasing the functions of governments.
Underlying these suggestions is the inference that “Governments” are entities or are organic beings that can “do” things, rather than mechanisms operated by other human beings with motives and objectives.
The particular politically determined “programs” referenced raises the question of when and how did we come to the juncture that the relationships involving parents and children have become a function of governments?
The claims may be modest, but from the excerpts you provide I’d say the assumptions are anything but modest.