A friend shared the following thoughts with me, I am going to post later tonight, but cant now, I am at the office.

Here's what she said:

I have spent alot of time thinking about why the system doesn't work and why so many kids fall through the cracks.  This is what I have come up with so far...tell me what you think...

* The government doesn't want to be in the business of taking children away from their parents.  It's a dirty business.
* The government doesn't want to pay to care for these children properly once they've taken them away.  That costs money, and makes for 'big government', and the only time the government feels ok about being 'big government' is when they're building weapons.
* The tax payers don't want to pay to care for other people's children.  They feel they struggle to take care of their own kids, why should they have to pay for someone else's?
* The tax payers don't bother to educate themselves on the conditions that many of these kids live in, so there's no public outcry that means anything.
* No one has the backbone to do something preventative, like require people to have a license to have children, so that the incidences of child removal from the home are minimized.  Untold damage is done the moment you remove a child from the primary caregiver.
* Children are a by-product of sex, and no matter how hard you try, you can't regulate sex.
* Too many people work in this country (I bet it's around 25%) work without making a living wage that would allow them to afford decent housing and basic necessities.  Drugs and alcohol are the cheapest and most accessible entertainment around, and unfortunately serve as a major distraction to proper parenting.
* Most of these parents are only parenting as well as they were parented.
It's hard to give your kids life-structure that you did not receive yourself.