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Comment by knightofmars | Hacker News Reader

Given your experience, what are your thoughts on being provided 3 full meals a day within the public school system?

Context, I see arguing over the cost of various food programs that public schools provide. I come down on the side of "Yes, you should be guaranteeing kids are fed (minimally breakfast & lunch and if I had my way dinner too). Otherwise there's no way they're going to be able to focus on school." While the counter argument exists and is usually made from a financial standpoint, "Why should I have to pay taxes for other people's kids to get fed?" Which is, in my opinion, a short sighted viewpoint.

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Socially, children are dependents. If guardians cannot feed their dependents adequately, they should lose their dependents. In the same way we find people guilty of animal cruelty all the time for the same reasons the same must be made of children.

The unfairness in the system emerges from when parents have kids through selfish motivation only to force society as a whole to pay the cost of raising them, when we may or may not have macroeconomic desire to have more children at any given time (and that desire changes, at the society level, all the time).

It is much more important to fix the actual problem - providing sufficient adoption and relocation systems to get kids out of dysfunctional households than to give them awful school cafeteria food and hope the problem goes away while ignoring it. Hunger is just a symptom of broader abuses that we should not just use state dollars to make go away temporarily. Having mentally and emotionally healthy fresh generations is probably the most valuable investment anyone can make.

What you're saying is that we should provided more robust child protective services. Those services would have the authority to determine if dependents were malnourished. If found to be malnourished those dependents would be forcefully relocated into a state (or private) run system that would feed, clothe, and educate them in the interim before they were placed into an adequate adoptive or foster home. At which point the state would pay the foster parent(s) a daily stipend which would be used to continue to feed and clothe the dependent until the point at which they reached adulthood. The state would also provide healthcare and continue to send child protective workers to the foster home to evaluate the home and verify that it meets the standards of an adequate home.

I agree that the solution you presented has the potential to help "break the cycle" so to speak. But inherently the cost of a program the magnitude of which was described is likely to be a large investment. Which, would suffer from the same perspective of economic unfairness as society would end up paying even more than now to raise other people's children. Due to the economic impact, those opposed would likely spin it as a government program to "Steal away and indoctrinate your children with agenda of the state." A subset of the population gets angry when any mention of taking their guns away occurs. How do you think people would act if it was their children? It doesn't matter if you're a responsible guardian, any talk of the state increasing its power to "remove your children from your home" is bound to strike an instinctual part of your brain.

Proposing "free breakfast and lunch" to solve the immediate small term problem of hunger within the school system to help reduce behavioral problems has a direct positive impact. The only real negative is the cost.

> If guardians cannot feed their dependents adequately, they should lose their dependents.

If they cannot, then they should be helped to be able to. If they can but do not, then I'd agree that they should lose them. You're describing two problems with different solutions: Extreme poverty and outright abuse.

Adoption beyond infancy is rare, and I've never heard good things about the foster system, and I'd be loath to put kids into it, except as a last resort.

> The unfairness in the system emerges from when parents have kids through selfish motivation only to force society as a whole to pay the cost of raising them

Financial conditions for families change all the time. A parent looses a job and has difficulty getting a new one. The bread-winner in the family gets hurt, and the family has to limp along on a lesser income. You can't just ascribe unfairness to selfishness. Things aren't that simple.

> Socially, children are dependents. If guardians cannot feed their dependents adequately, they should lose their dependents.

I feel like I'm reading the beginning of one of those hunger game teen dystopia novels

I grew up poor. Subsidized school lunch made sure I ate at least one decent meal a day (to be fair, parental mental health was a bigger factor than income at times). A lot of people grow up a lot poorer than I did.

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