And if we’re going to ask more of ourselves, my question is what poor excuse for a government can’t rustle up a bowl of cereal and a banana? I just don’t get why social spending is such a problem unless we have a major wide spread problem with government priorities.

You know, I mean if that’s how many legislators are incapable of recognizing the value of not making parents choose between food and shelter, then we have legislators who are just criminally… ah… criminally negligent with respect to understanding the issues.

Qualification for subsidized school meals have nothing to do with the parents physical ability or willingness to feed their children, only their income. Or is "rustle up a bowl of cereal and a banana" code for something like "Get a job, you lazy bum, and clean up your tenement and stay home with your children and stay away from the drug dealers and pay your 'fair share' of taxes and keep off the grass and it's all your own fault anyway."

Shaming the poor for being poor is a new low.

Obviously she's never heard of food deserts, where there might be nary a banana for miles around.

I actually think that's a pretty valid point.

If the parents can't afford to feed and shelter their kids, maybe they shouldn't have kids in the first place. At least in my area, there's access to free birth control for situations like this.

Shorter O'Beirne: "The problem of poverty is so enormous that we shouldn't even bother trying to solve this small facet of it."

I've come across this thinking in volunteer projects, like nonprofits that distribute groceries to a limited number of clients. It's true that bags of groceries are not going to solve any huge social issues, and it is valuable to expend some effort in improving the bigger problem. But the impact of small-scale projects should not be underestimated; it's sure better for those families to have groceries than to have them go hungry, or have them choose between food and utilities.

Some people also gripe that the clients take the food bags for granted and just expect them to arrive every week. Well, yes, it's nice to not have to worry all the time about where basic necessities are coming from. I hope they do take them for granted, and can focus their energies on other things.

There was a great article in a recent Economist (3 weeks ago?) about Britain and its view on subsidized meal programs. I would link the article, but there's no point because whenever I comment with a link, they don't show up.

Ah, the privilege of being white, (upper) middle class, and never having struggled with poverty so extreme it's hard to keep your children well-fed on your way between several poorly-paying jobs!

To be fair, I (white, never worse-off than lower middle class, never struggled to find work) now and again find myself feeling just a touch of this too - "why can't people just take care of themselves?!" But then you have to be a responsible person and remember the centuries of systemic issues that contribute to keeping the poor down. Not everyone is born with the same set of privileges, opportunities, and knowledge laid out before them.

At least she gets it right for a second, when she says "we have problems that are WAY bigger than..." Too bad she cut herself off before she said something sensible!

This is the first time I've ever commented on a post, and I find it very disrespectful to say that poor parents are negligent parents. When I was in school I was on a reduced lunch plan 40 cents instead of the $1.50, and my parents were not in the least bit negligent parents. This program made it easier for them to give me the advantages that other children in my district also had.

And to those who say they agree that poor people shouldn't have kids, not everyone who is poor started out poor. My family only started to have trouble financially when my mom got sick: after all of my siblings were born.

I read O’Beirne's comments not as criticising the poor but as casting doubt on the fact that the people participating in these programs can't actually put food on the table. As if to say she wouldn't have a problem with the program if only the children of families who really couldn't afford to feed them were using it.

In other words, she isn't saying that poor parents are negligent, but that negligent parents are using the system meant for the poor, to feed their kids so they don't have too.

I'm not saying I agree, that was just my interpretation of what she was saying.

I think it is a really important point to realize that being poor is a state of being and not an intrinsic part of a person. There are not "poor people" and "rich people" there ARE people who are poor or people who are rich. And as has been stated above, being poor now doesn't mean you were always poor or will always be poor.

I am a 26 year old, white person with a solid working history who graduated this year with a master's degree who has gone unemployed/underemployed for 9 months, despite beating down doors to get any job I could. I have ended up taken a minimum wage (or less if you include union dues) job moving boxes just to be able to feed myself. Even with this job I fall way below federal poverty standards. While I do not expect to be poor forever and (gratefully) have the potential of long term prosperity, I AM poor now. If I had kids right now, they would be involved in these kinds of programs and it would be a life saver. I never planned to be this poor. People don't plan to be this poor. But, I would prefer to live in a society where being this poor is treated with the same moral impartiality as having the flu, rather than as a mark of a broken, negligent or criminal person.

Oh man, that's really awful.

My parents both worked full time. I was on the reduced-price lunch program, as were both of my brothers. It worked out great, because my parents didn't have to spend their few evening hours making lunches for the next day. We got to participate in sports etc. because we had the extra time, not to mention the extra money.

I can imagine that if both of my parents had jobs that required them to be out of the house insanely early, we would have been on the breakfast program too.

(BTW: This was on an American military base. People in the lower ranks of the Navy don't make a lot of money, and most of our moms worked, but military housing is fabulous from a kid's point of view because all the houses in a neighborhood would have kids in them! I *lived* outside in the summers.)

This is just another example of people trying to make a social problem into an individual problem. Instead of question what is contributing to the need for such food programs, people want to ask what is wrong with the parents? Children having food is for the greater good of everyone. Having breakfast enables the student to concentrate on lessons instead of hunger pain. Having a better educated society benefits us all. Who cares about reading when you do not know where your next meal is coming from?

For the first thought to be "something is wrong with the parents" is neglecting social, institutional, and political policies that all contribute to so many families needing to enroll in these programs.

This is a classic Libertarian argument. Of course sex education in our schools is so shamefully bad that lots of kids actually get to puberty not knowing that sex results in children and not knowing about effective contraception.

So much privilege shown here... it's not like everyone can even afford to put food on the table, what with the wages of today. Assuming that the parents are negligent is such an error. No one (hopefully) would _want_ to starve their children - people do the most they can, most of the time.

Why can't the poor just eat their bootstraps?!

It's always good to know I'm a negligent parent because we happen to be working class. My son is on the reduced price breakfast and lunch program at his school because we went from three barely there incomes to two barely there incomes, when my partner's father died. On his pay, and his mother's pay, we could feed our kid, but given that he has special dietary needs that require expensive food, having them provided by the school relieves us of at least one financial burden.

Excuse the language, but if we're going to be judging people's parenting skills based on idiotic assumptions, what kind of poor excuse of a parent would raise such a selfish judgmental douche?

What is her solution? Letting the children starve? Forced sterilization? Putting all the poor children in foster care?

Ugh. Ugh. Ugh. Ugh. Just ugh.

Commenting on the video transcript:

This is "Karma Cult" thinking, aka The Just-World Fallacy:
http://youarenotsosmart.com/2010/06/07/the-just-world-fallacy/

Viewed through a the Karma Cult lense, it makes perfect sense to view poverty as the universally accepted form of punishment. I'd be willing to bet Ms. O'Beirne believes she's actually doing people a *favor* by threatening to eliminate a program that, in her view, defeats the rules of Karma.

Trying to argue with a Karma Cultist in terms of unpredictability is pointless, as your social circumstances are a direct reflection of how inherently good a person you are. A cultist believes poverty is a karmic consequence for 'bad decisions' - ones that invariably align with the cultist's existing moral code.

I'm not sure how to challenge/defeat a cultist's memetic structures.

Just read an article on this at Pandagon. The author was pointing out that Ms. O'Beirne is basically proposing that children pay the price for their parents' supposed lack of diligence.

does anyone know how I can contact this woman and give her a piece of my mind?

So, let me get this straight... we should spend the money to provide the wealthy with giant tax cuts but we can't invest pennies a day for poor kids to eat basic food.

The school lunch/breakfast/even dinner program costs so very, very little.

I am really surprised this hasn't come up yet but has anyone else here worked in the child welfare world in any capacity? Most children who are removed from their parents are removed from poor homes. Legally, not having the food or healthcare your kid needs is neglect-- yet poor families don't always have access to all the basic resources kids need. Additionally, in situations of domestic violence, mental illness and drug abuse, middle class and wealthy families are more likely have the bank accounts, health insurance and social networks to overcome crises. Poor families don't have the same back-up--- and top of that, they deal with classismm racism and sexism in their encounters with the government and social service providers-- who are also much more involved in their personal lives and decisions-- it's invasive and obviously colored by the idea the NR editor expresses-- it's poor people's fault they're poor.

Here are some family stories illustrating what I'm talking about:

http://cfrny.org/clients.asp

I haven't seen this mentioned yet...what about children in foster care who receive reduced or free breakfasts/lunches? I wasn't in the system for long (2 years), but I was grateful as hell that I was guaranteed at least two meals every school day.

Is she suggesting that foster parents are negligent for relieving the financial strain of having to care for and feed multiple children who are not their own? You could argue that they (the foster parents) are being reimbursed, they can provide food with that money, etc. but unfortunately this is not always possible. In some homes food was readily available and there was time to eat and/or pack a lunch before catching a bus or walking to school, but mostly this was not the case for me.

@Shay

Good point, and in light of your comment and mine above it; I just wanted to say I would love to see some insightful posts here on Sociological Images about foster care/ child welfare. These families and kids seem to be invisible to so many people...

Not that I agree with the person in the video or the person tentatively defending her, but I see a lot of well meaning people talking about poor people's problems in terms of domestic violence, job loss, middle-class temporarily poor, or the other extreme: beaten, poorly educated, prostitutes... and that doesn't really match the research that's out there as to why poor women have children young.

I can't find the study I was looking for, but here's one that's good that's similar. (Sorry for super-long link, I guess I'll put it at the end. It's Avenue to Adulthood: Teenage Pregnancy and the Meaning of Motherhood in Poor Communities by Gabrielle Raley)

The study I was looking for, that I wish I could reference, was even more specific. It compared teen moms with siblings who didn't have children, and with teens who had intended to keep their pregnancies but miscarried. They found very little difference in their outcomes long-term.

Basically, look at it like this. You're not a prostitute, you're not being beaten, you're just poor, and live in a poor neighborhood. (And for the sake of argument, lets say your family is a happy one... family is in fact the bright spot and the one thing you can rely on when things are difficult... which makes having kids seem something to look forward to!) Your job prospects consist of the local stores, Walmart and Target. And they probably will whether you graduate high school or not. You don't know anyone who has a professional career. Now, given that if you do what your peers do and work a low-paying service job, and expect to for the rest of your life, where is the incentive to delay childbearing? You're young, have energy, your parents are young enough to help out (either in terms of young enough to still be working and help with bills or healthy enough to babysit regularly.) If you wait 10 years to have kids you wages will not be any higher than if you have kids young. College isn't on your radar, and like this article mentions, a diploma from Ghetto High School doesn't mean a lot to colleges, advanced classes aren't offered there, and GHS likely didn't teach you to the same standard as the other incoming freshman anyway.
Or (diverging from research to my own opinion here) college seems so impossible, you almost have to be optimistic to the point of having delusions of grandeur to think you'll get there, so why not think you'll get there with kids? That's one thing I don't see mentioned in research but I see personally among friends. College isn't a full-time 4-year process, it's a take a few classes at a time over 10-20 years process. So you do it with kids. So IMO, it doesn't even mean they don't have dreams, it just means they see it's going to take them longer to achieve them. (I graduated with my BA at 35 in 2008 with three kids, two of which I had relatively young, and begin working on grad school next year.)

http://books.google.com/books?id=8fuWo810RHEC&pg=PA251&lpg=PA251&dq=Raley+Avenue+to+Adulthood:+Teenage+Pregnancy+and+the+Meaning+of+Motherhood+in+Poor+Communities&source=bl&ots=pbmQ4WU5f_&sig=CfDWpwa5MFXeL881a1iwhY8TJfc&hl=en&ei=gKQATaCqHYeosAOPpcWvCw&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1&sqi=2&ved=0CBgQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=Raley%20Avenue%20to%20Adulthood%3A%20Teenage%20Pregnancy%20and%20the%20Meaning%20of%20Motherhood%20in%20Poor%20Communities&f=false

Also good, shorter link:
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=389x2818946

Book "Promises I Can Keep" by Keflas and Edin is excellent book on topic too.

Also the book "Strapped" by Draut will cause you to examine why the generational gap might view the possibility of going to college differently.

It's also pretty funny that the same people who would say things like this are the same people who are against both birth control and abortion. Thanks to them "access" to these things is not always there.

I am not saying that poor people should be restricted from having children. This is not a new idea either - I believe we had forced sterilizations of some(read minority) populations in the 1950s or 60s.

Some of the ugliest things just never go away.

You know what population are heavy users of the subsidized breakfast/lunch program? Enlisted military personnel, who are paid so poorly that most families with a couple of kids qualify for WIC and food stamps until they are promoted to E-5 or higher. In my experience, even with the buffers of housing and commissary benefits, the budgets these families live on are extremely lean. I'm sure all my active duty friends will be thrilled to learn that they are "criminally negligent" for having kids while serving their country.

Oh Please Ms.O’Beirne - just save it. The entire social safety net as well as our system of public education exist for no other reason than for the benefit of the ruling class. Sure poor people survive because of these programs, but ultimately they would not exist if they did not benefit the elite.....and you know it.

So let's try this: Let's do away with all social spending and replace it with one law - everyone who can work must (if not in the private sector than in the public sector - we'll have some freak'n well manicured parks) and everyone that works must be paid a living wage that will cover everything - food, shelter, clothing, private education, health care, transportation, and savings for emergencies and old age. How is that going to work out for you Jim and Jane Capitalist?

Don't like that one - how about this: everyone who isn't 100% economically self sufficient on their own wages/investments (no more of those insidious tax code wealth transfer schemes) will be sterilized. If you can't prove you are worthy to reproduce by the time you are 25 the birth control that has been required of you since puberty will be replaced with sterilization. If you are unfortunate enough have children and then fall into poverty, no worry, an infertile self-sufficient couple will relieve you of the burden of your children. Eventually everyone will be equally gifted, intelligent, well-educated and lucky, and poverty will be no more!

But who will wait the tables, run the cash registers, stock the shelves, mop the floors, scrub the toilets, haul the garbage, care for the children, mow the lawns, harvest the crops, protect our colonial interests - oops - I mean defend our country, etc. etc? Certainly our smart, gifted, educated, lucky offspring can't be expected to do that kind of work! Well no they can't, but no worries - we would be happy to have the impoverished citizens of the world as our guests to help take care of this special work for us - as long as they agree to not reproduce while they're here, or require the need of our health care system for any reason, or our educational system, and above all promise not to get their poverty on us.

How will that work for you Ms. O’Beirne?

Oh whatever. Even if this logic was sound (it's not), the fact stands that there are kids who aren't getting enough to eat at home. The reason this program has so much support is that no matter WHY the kids aren't able to get good breakfast at home, they still need to eat. No one wants hundreds of thousands, even millions of kids to just starve. If their parents are criminally negligent, it's not the kids' fault and they shouldn't be punished.

And frankly, most of those parents AREN'T criminally negligent. It isn't a crime to have a low-paying job, or a job that requires you to drop your kid off at school early enough that you can't prepare a balanced meal (which may be the case in addition to low-income; I know many families, some who can financially manage to feed their families, but end up having to drop their kids at school at 6 because they have to go to work. IDK about all schools, but I know some with the breakfast program just say that any student who shows up prior to a certain time gets food). And poor people pay taxes too; it's not like the government is hunting down self-righteous wealthy libertarian-minded people and shaking them from the ankles. We're ALL paying from it, and frankly, we ALL benefit from the children not being punished by starvation because they didn't happen to be born into a certain tax bracket.

I agree wholeheartedly with the original poster (decius) and I wanted to add something to the discussion that has not been mentioned yet. I am a middle school teacher at a Title I school and, as crappy as some of the food is, doing away with FARMS (Free and Reduced Meals) would be a terrible thing. I would not be able to perform my job as effectively without the program: If a child is HUNGRY, that child CANNOT learn at the same level as well-nourished peers. You can't learn effectively and function at a higher cognitive level if your physical needs are not fulfilled first. O'Beirne's idiotic comments makes me want to shriek until all my hairs fall out.

I keep coming back to the fact that kids qualify for FARMS based on their parents' income and resources. There's not some prerequisite "hunger test" to prove that they're not being fed at home. The point is that this program recognizes that providing growing children with adequate nutrition is both important and difficult. Maybe a family can't afford nutritious food. Maybe the parents work such long hours the kids have to come to school quite early and/or stay quite late. Maybe if they weren't at school, they'd be the one in charge of cooking for themselves and their siblings. (How nutritious do you think meals prepared by 8 year olds tend to be?)

Maybe before they started using FARMS, the parents WERE scrounging together cereal and/or a banana, but what did that mean the family had to go without? And how much nutrition are kids getting from that cheap cereal, anyway? The meals I've seen served at free breakfast programs in my area tend to be a lot more nutritious than the typical cereal breakfast. If you were able to receive better nutrition for less money, would you turn that down?

These are the realities of growing up poor. Sometimes parents are being negligent, but in most cases they're just doing the best they can. What is so wrong with schools relieving some of that burden, especially if it helps the students to achieve more in school? Isn't that the whole point?!

Ugh ugh ugh! Not to mention, cereal and a banana lacks protein and will likely have the kids hungry two hours later. I would bet that yes, any parent CAN rustle up those items, but that school breakfast provides a more complete meal that MOST working parents have a hard time putting together in the morning.

So I suppose this makes me a negligent parent, because as a single divorced mother with full custody (because my ex was a pedo I left him, does that also make me negligent??), and as a single undereducated mother my children qualified for the free lunch and breakfast programs, while I worked 2 jobs and went to college. So be it.