Hacker News Reader

Comment by FedRegister | Hacker News Reader

"Nearly a quarter of Dasani’s childhood has unfolded at Auburn, where she shares a 520-square-foot room with her parents and seven siblings."

Okay, not to victim blame, but eight children when her parents can't even support themselves?

View on HN

Those children didn't ask to be born. But now they are. So what do we do about it? Or how would you go about stopping them from being born?

Open that door and you get a whole world of ugly answers and precious few good and/or socially acceptable answers.

Hmm, I dunno. How did China implement their One Child policy?

edit: s/Chile/Child

China use forcible sterilization programs, which is one of those ugly and socially unacceptable answers, for good reason. (The US had a similar program. To give you some idea of how well it worked, the case that decided the constitutionality, Buck vs Bell, involved a woman who was considered mentally feeble due to being black, poor, and getting pregnant at 17. Turns out the last one was most likely due to her being raped by a member of her more respectable foster family, who committed her to an institution to cover it up. The whole thing was deeply fucked from the very outset.)

Forcible sterilization is not a substantial factor in enforcing the policy in China - it's enforced through fines and exclusion from all kinds of benefits.

They didn't ask for a unemployed crack addict mother and an unemployed convict father, and yet the state seems to have given them back to both the unemployed crack addict mother and unemployed convict father. They were living in different, perhaps better, circumstance before they were returned to their biological parents. Why not leave them in those circumstances and instead allow visitation of the parents until they can quash their demons and secure a job instead of holding up the "family must be together" mantra and having them live in this hellhole?

Fosters home are often incredibly bad. I have been told by foster parents to keep your kids out of that system at all costs. (Those foster parents obviously cared about their children, but they've also seen children come through who were previously taken in by someone else just for the paycheck.)

What about things like freely available contraception and decent sex education at school age? I often read that there is occasionally opposition to both in the US.

Telling people you're not victim blaming doesn't mean you're not victim blaming when you then blame the victim.

The victims are the children - the parents should get most of the blame.

The children are the victims. I'm certainly not blaming them for the circumstances they were born into. I am certainly blaming the state for forcing the family back together to satisfy the "families must live together" crowd when mom and dad don't have their shit together, and I am certainly blaming the mom and dad for having eight kids when they can't even support one.

> satisfy the "families must live together"

If you bother to actually ask the child here she will tell you she'd rather stay with her parents and family then have better material circumstances with others.

And a crack addict wants to do crack. Sometimes people don't know what is best for them. That's why we let courts decide custody instead of the child.

That said, in spite of my (probably uninformed) opinion, the courts in New York think that this family is better together in this shelter, so what do I know anyway?

I think the article was pretty clear that the parents are to blame for many reasons. But it was about Dasani, who is not at fault, not her parents.

That Dasani is demonstrating so much vivacity is impressive to us and so worthy of note that we have an article about her. But we expect the opposite, because all of her environmental cues are encouraging the opposite.

how does it make any sense to blame her parents who are the products of the exact same structure she is now struggling against?

It makes sense to lay (some of the) blame at the feet of her parents because they had a choice. Everybody has a choice. Mom didn't have to smoke crack. Dad didn't have to deal drugs. Did they have the same opportunities as rich white kids from the Upper West Side? No. Does that mean that the choices to smoke crack, deal drugs, and have eight kids is something we should just ignore? Certainly not.

It is true, however in a system like this there have to be failures. Only a small portion of the kids demonstrate enough intuitive capacity for learning, like Dasani, that the meager resources available are utilized for them. Therefore the percentage of the population who fails is by necessity larger. So her parents are of course autonomous human beings, but they lived in a structure that was incapable of not producing them.

In what system are there no failures?

You can minimize failure if the point of a system is not output but process. If you continually improve each individual process rather than just optimize for output. So for example in this case if we asked her parents not to produce a good child but simply to figure out how she can get to bed on time every night, then we are asking them to do an easily focused on thing. Do not tell them what to do, just say, "how can you do [x]?" maybe providing access to internet research capacities would be helpful for the parent, but in general simply getting them to focus on how to improve their immediate surroundings in that moment itself produces meaningful change.

you can repeat this method of assigning tasks until eventually the individual, old or young, rich or poor, begins to focus on their own on How things work rather than What they are.

>You can minimize failure if the point of a system is not output but process.

If the point of a system is process then you have the classic "the bureaucracy is expanding to meet the needs of the bureaucracy" situation. At some point you need to look at output.

It's somewhat dishonest to put much, if any blame on Dasani's parents. They were raised without the decision making skills and opportunities necessary to evaluate the long-term consequences of their decisions. This behavior will very likely be passed down to their children.

Each of those children, knowing only their own lives, may grow up to have n-more children that they can't afford. Is it suddenly their fault, or is there a bigger, vicious cycle of poverty at play here?

The blame lies with the society that refuses to help impoverished children break the vicious cycle. Most of the people who deride the need for these kinds of services have never even exchanged words with somebody that poor, let alone been in that situation themselves. They have no idea.

Actually, this is exactly why those who mire in poverty have more children. The logic is that more children = safety net in the future. This is usually prevalent in societies and countries without strong institutions. Hmm...

For anyone interested in reading more on this, it's called the demographic-economic paradox: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographic-economic_paradox

That's not a paradox. It's a misunderstanding of incentives for people of all classes.

I'd agree - I guess it's considered paradoxical as it surprises economists that expect a correlation between birth rates & economic means.

It's really more that economics doesn't properly serve as a predictor of human behavior (news at 11! ;-))

And it works as you'd expect.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R/K_selection_theory

When you're thinking clearly that's easy to see. But when you're living a hard life, my observation is that people generally take what solace they can in more basic elements of their humanity and don't think much about the future, if they're capable of thinking about it at all. 'Auburn is a pit stop,' according to her mother. That seems a silly belief, but if you take that as the context in which her choices are made you notice they become more reasonable?

Your options for dealing with the consequences of those choices are limited by both the lack of preferable alternatives and the need to act with humanity in enforcing them. If you throw the kids into the care system, it's not clear they're going to do any better.

As for stopping people making those choices in the first place, I don't think people who view it as not the parent's fault really disagree with you there. But how?

Making a good choice with respect to employment and the law and so on, and sticking to it, requires that you be a certain kind of person. You need the ability to draw motivation from distant goals, the abstract knowledge to see the path to the goal in the first place, it requires - to a certain extent - that others around you share those qualities, it requires self-control to deny yourself short-term rewards.

And if you don't have those things, you can't make those choices - at least not to start off with. The choices we make are made within the context of our lives, and our beliefs about those lives and where they can be going. What sort of choices would you make if you had their capabilities and their beliefs?

You have to make smaller choices, that make you more the kind of person for who those choices would make sense and be practically achievable. And you have to see those smaller choices making you happier, having a positive effect on your life - to try and develop some sort of self-confidence and motivation.

That latter part is a very complex problem that impacts areas of life beyond just homelessness. It's no particular surprise that unemployment, teen pregnancy, low educational outcomes and so on tend to group together. They're all influenced, to lesser and greater extents, of to be somewhat pithy for a moment, 'Not having your shit together.'

Well get your shit together then.

Yeah, okay, how do we create an environment where that's gonna happen? Given that choices determine the sort of person you'll become and that determines your later choices, early intervention seems likely to be a part of it - perhaps through improving education to the poor. Maybe breaking up communities of homeless people and rehousing them into richer communities so they have better chances of falling within catchment areas of good schools - and aren't subject to a culture of generational poverty.

I don't know, those are just a couple of things. But, however it's done the basic act of assigning blame seems largely immaterial. The world is what it is, people make the choices they make. What matters is that people are suffering - and what's important is what can be done about it within the bounds of compassion and practicality.

In my (limited) experience, large families like this tend to be extremely religious and view birth control as a sin.

Yes your experience is limited. Birth rates rise when children are an income producing asset. The shift from rural to urban populations dramatically lowers the birthrate since normally children are only an expense in a urban environment. However in societies that pay out money per child there is an incentive to have more children and the birth rates for the poorest tend to rise. This phenomena has been documented around the world and has nothing to do with your views on religion.

My views on religion? Um? Both my parents grew up in families with 9+ children because all of my grandparents thought birth control was a sin. That's my experiences. That's in an urban setting. All their large family neighbors did it for religious reasons too. I don't personally know a single large family that isn't doing it for religious purposes. There are also some large families who are doing it for religion in the media such as The Duggars as well as some public movements for large families such as Quiverfull.

Thats nice. The data disagrees with you. Just google up urbanization birthrate for many papers on the topic.

Isn't the marginal support per child something absurdly trivial after the first few?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com