We develop the kind of citizens we deserve. If a large number of our children grow up into frustration and poverty, we must expect to pay the price.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
We pay a price when we deprive children of the exposure to the values, principles, and education they need to make them good citizens.
Generosity has built America. When we fail to invest in children, we have to pay the cost.
But for the children of the poorest people we're stripping the curriculum, removing the arts and music, and drilling the children into useful labor. We're not valuing a child for the time in which she actually is a child.
We need to shift from an economic organizing principle for human civilization, to a humanitarian organizing principle. Making money more important than your own children is a pathological way for an individual to run their affairs, and it's a pathological way for a society to run its affairs.
We have a responsibility as a state to protect our most vulnerable citizens: our children, seniors, people with disabilities. That is our moral obligation. But there is an economic justification too - we all pay when the basic needs of our citizens are unmet.
Far less wealthy industrialized countries have committed to end child poverty, while the United States is sliding backwards. We can do better. We must demand that our leaders do better.
There are 500,000 poor children in this state that did not choose to be poor, and we have to take care of them.
I am deeply concerned about the impact of poverty on children because poverty can destroy their future and bind them to a life of misery.
Rich or poor, every child comes into the world with some imperative need of its own, which shapes its individuality.
We do nothing for children between the ages of zero and five. And we seem to be quite happy to have children growing up in not just poverty, which wouldn't be so bad, but isolation, lack of people around them, lack of support, lack of ability to go out and play in the dirt.