For a teenager at home with your laptop and 7th grade course work with too many people making too much noise or drunk uncle William downstairs screaming at the TV set?
If your mom and dad are fighting and the atmosphere is toxic?
or your uncle is hurting you?
Can safety be found? Can I call for help?
What if you are a single working parent or two parents working and no child care and no money and spending long days and troubling nights wondering about safety, food, the next day, next week and what’s next.
These issues are bigger today for more of us than since the great depression.
At that time, constructive government programs managed to rebuild this nation into the productive world leader it has been for many years.
True then and true today; any community anywhere at any time, can only be as productive as the children it raises.
KARA thinks that we had enough prisons before the pandemic, enough trouble with school performance before the forced home schooling today and most importantly, enough children in foster care, on Prozac, behaving badly enough to go to jail or becoming teen and preteen moms with no parenting skills.
Living through this public health crisis will be very different for children in communities that care and for those that do not recognize the need for care and safety of their children during and after this pandemic it ends.
Teachers, social workers and health and public safety officials (less emphasis on the policing piece of police duties and more on safety when working with children) may be the most important people in our community at this time. Without their help and access to resources required to ease the burdens of struggling children and families, this nation will spend many decades trying to rebuild a society that works.
Communities concentrating on families, education, healing and well-being will recover faster than communities steeped in punishment models without rehabilitation or an adequate safety net. Economically, this is a no brainer.
Supporting more and more people with serious behavioral, criminal and mental health problems who are unable to cope with daily life means fewer people doing productive labor and more people needing care and feeding.
It really is a no brainer.
With all the suffering and anxiety our communities are facing every hour of every day,
there is little chance that the tiny voices coming out of toxic homes will be heard by anyone anywhere.
These are hard times for everyone but a very dark time for abused and neglected children.
This is why Kids At Risk Action is building a PSA program (support our efforts)
to build support for programs that make life better for at risk children
(share this widely)
