Saturday, August 11, 2007
For The Children
To adopt a child in the U.S. you have to have a nearly spotless record, a well sized clean and organized home. Your neighbors need to be interviewed, your co-workers are often questioned as well. If you are lucky, you might spend several thousand dollars, and one day, several years later, get a child through this process.
On the other hand, you could be drunk on cheap beer, fool around in the backseat of an old car and get to become a parent that way as well.
If you want to be a child care provider, you will have multiple education requirements, standards for cleanliness, a slew of classes you need to take to be
licensed. You will for example in some areas have to isolate children's backpacks at least 6" apart from each other.
If you are watching kids on the side in your neighborhood, you could have a snake breeding ground in the backyard, and there isn't going to be an issue.
My point is not to say that supervision and regulation are bad things. I also know that some awful things have been done by people adopting and caring for children. Some of the regulations to provide safety are simply amazing as a response to this need.
In my state, if you are feeding a kid nachos as a snack, you must provide exactly eleven chips and exactly one ounce of melted cheese. If you don't, you are out of compliance. There are many children in this country going without a permanent family, and with child care programs that are maxed out because there aren't enough people willing to go through these hoops to be providers. You risk tens of thousands of dollars opening up a facility, and one of your workers accidentally does something that isn't harmful, but against the regulations, and your business could go belly up soon.
If you want to be a rebel and serve 12 chips and 1.25 ounces of nacho cheese, you won't be able to serve poor children who are funded through vouchers, because you would lose your licensing, which means you have to follow all these regulations.
The adoption process has become so complex that many people are finding it easier to take a child out of China or Russia than to be certified just as qualified as the horny teen-agers who produce a child on a drunken whim.
For the children should mean for all the children. If our rules, regulations, bureaucracy are making children go without service, is the good genuinely outweighing the bad?
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