Let's Not Keep Throwing Kids Away, Literally and Figuratively
A scared teenage girl decides she wants a baby because she needs someone who will love her back. A teenage boy wants proof that he is a man, so he counts how many children he can father. Those are terrible foundations for bringing a person into the world. Raising a child asks you to put yourself last for years at a stretch, and it asks for a kind of judgment that most people simply have not grown into yet. That part of the brain is still under construction well past the teenage years.
A welfare system that rewards having children without any expectation of actually parenting them makes the problem easier to repeat. Kids grow up with no discipline and no affection. Some of them get pushed out the door entirely and are left to figure out survival on a sidewalk. And then society turns around and scolds those same kids for being angry and for refusing to play along, as if the adults and the institutions that failed them had nothing to do with it.
Given all that, why would any of these children trust a single person? The neighborhoods many of them land in do not run on middle-class rules, and I understand why. When you are trying to stay alive, you do whatever the street or the household demands of you, and the adults around you (biological parents, the adults they get placed with) are often just collecting a check. Plenty of those adults were raised in exactly the conditions they are now recreating for the next kid.
We talk about a parent's right to raise their own biological children however they choose, but that framing quietly erases the child, who has rights too. Some of these same adults treat abortion as their go-to form of birth control.
What I keep seeing is the victim getting blamed. The child absorbs abuse that nobody can really dispute, whether it comes from the system, from the parents who gave birth to them, or from the families the state handed them to, and somehow the child is the one who ends up accused of being the problem.
Meanwhile, the parents who actually do the work (love, structure, a real set of values passed down) get nothing from the system for it. There is no payoff for raising a child well. The payoffs flow to failure.
Custody decisions land in the hands of people who frequently have no idea what a child needs or what a good parent even looks like. Even the ones who do understand are boxed in by rules and statutes that make little sense on the ground.
In one northern county of my state, the judges assigned to custody cases are the ones who have fallen short everywhere else. Custody is where they get parked as a kind of demotion, and nobody gives them any instruction on how to decide these cases in a way that actually helps the child standing in front of them.
My proposal for that county is a dedicated training program for the judges who handle custody. Forty hours of hands-on work led by people who do custody determination for a living. Making it hands-on matters, because a judge will sit through real training in a way they never would with a packet they can skim and forget. I would also build the group to be mixed, so that no single judge gets nudged toward one predictable outcome.