I have been told, and I’m too lazy to actually look it up; that Trotsky advocated putting all children in the care of the state – citing that the family as an institution is broken and unfair. If anyone actually has this elusive quote or could back me up, please comment. My best guess is that it’s in this book somewhere.
Simply ejecting a baby from your womb doesn’t qualify you to be a good parent. Yet society assumes that the natural parents are the best choice for the child. If one wants to be a foster parent, one must fit a certain criteria and a scrutinous application process. None of which is needed for natural parents to raise their own children. There’s also the touchy problem that children are seen to belong to their parents. Parents do not own their children. Although a child has the right to be raised and cared for by their natural parents they belong to no-one.
Clearly taking children away from their natural parents to be educated collectively is a bit controversial because it stomps all over all sorts of libertarian (or liberal, I can’t tell the difference) morals. Parents have the right to raise their children, children have the right to be raised by their natural parents. It even says so in articles 5 & 18 of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC):
State signatories must respect the rights and duties of parents [and recognize that] both parents have common responsibilities for the upbringing of the child.
That’s why I suggest an experiment, testing the water so to speak and trial collective upbringing on orphans. Orphans have no natural parents, therefore the quandry over ‘stealing’ a child from their parents is resolved. The real argument is in attacking the foster parent system.
The power to chose whether or not to adopt a child lies in the foster parents. They will only accept children which fit their ‘ideal image’, as a consequence a disproportionate number of younger children are adopted. 57% of all adopted children in 2008 were between the ages of 1 and 4 years old and only 12% were between the ages of 10 and 14 (Source: Office for National Statistics). For babies, foster parents are paid between £100 and £116 per week in state benefits and for teenagers between £151 and £176 (Source: Department for Children, Schools and Families). Taking those figures it costs the state between £91,156 and £105,872 to raise a child in foster care from birth until the age of 16. Putting that in context the state pays out £20 per week in child benefit for single or eldest children (Source: YouGov), £16,640 from birth until 16 years old. You can see where I’m going with this: it costs on average 83.2% more in benefits to raise a child with foster parents than with natural parents. I love these statistics, they make me feel like some sort of an investigative journalist.
The government is biased in favour of raising children in a family . If you go back to the idea that the traditional family is not one of the best places to raise children then the state is making a mistake. There’s very little available information on care homes in the UK, the most I found was in this article in the Guardian Family section last week. I think the government’s initial prejudice against orphanages/care homes come from their depiction in victorian times as little better than prisons where abuse was rife and conditions were only just better than living out on the street.
First argument for orphanages – they’re efficient. If you want to raise say 20 children, have them live, eat, sleep, learn and play together, that way equipment, beds, tables and such are re-used to their full. Secondly it’s possible to build a community spirit among orphans so that they build their own ‘family’ amongst themselves. The staff of the orphanage have a strong influence over the minds of those children. From a very young age they could be indoctrinated with values of equality and community, while there’s ethical issues in doing this the end result would be a cohort of youngsters who reject the bad aspects of our society – racism, homophobia and adherence to reactionary principles. The money saved from not paying foster parents could be re-invested in building good accommodation and facilities in orphanages.
This argument has gone on far too long and took me at least a week to write, here comes the conclusion and then I’ll stop. On one hand the adoption system puts the strain on foster parents, discriminates against older children and raises them in a ‘broken and unfair’ institution. On the other hand orphanages are efficient and can form children to be better individuals.
Leave a comment