Hartford boy’s fatal fall indicts welfare premises

By Chris Powell

Who is to blame for the death last month of the 2-year-old Hartford boy who, along with his four sisters 12 and younger, was left unattended by his mother as she went to work as a taxi driver only for the boy to fall out a window of their squalid third-floor apartment? 

Prosecutors have added a manslaughter charge to the 10 charges of risk of injury first filed against the woman. But her lawyer, relatives, and friends say the government and society are really to blame.

At a press conference the woman’s lawyer, Wesley Spears, said the state Department of Children and Families didn’t help his client enough and the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, which gave the woman a Section 8 housing voucher, didn’t inspect the apartment properly.

A clergyman, Sam Saylor, said the woman “went to work to survive and support her children because no one else would.” He added: “Because we haven’t experienced what poverty and single parenthood are, let us not rush to say ‘bad mother’ without saying ‘bad system.'”

The woman’s relatives and friends wore T-shirts inscribed, “It takes a village,” a reference to the supposedly African proverb that it takes a village to raise a child. The woman’s sister contended, “We all should take accountability.”

DCF Commissioner Vanessa Dorantes, whose department had been monitoring the woman’s household, wasn’t ready for responsibility to be shifted to her agency. The commissioner said the woman and her children had been “connected to community-based supports.” The commissioner asked that judgment be withheld pending more investigation.

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But there is no need to wait before wondering how the presumption that parents aren’t and shouldn’t be primarily responsible for their children has taken root in the culture and policy, along with the belief that there’s nothing wrong with having children outside marriage, with having more children than one can support, and with raising children without fathers.

That two-parent households are far better able to support children is elementary. Within living memory divorce was considered dishonorable for people whose children were still minors. Unhappy couples stayed together “for the sake of the children.” How quaint it sounds today.

While this is the age of free contraception and abortion right up to the moment of birth, it is also an age in which many women think it’s fine to have any number of children without a husband or man committed to his offspring. Of course many men are delighted to evade responsibility. 

After all, when parents can’t or won’t take responsibility these days, the government will — not just with housing but also with cash stipends and medical insurance, food, day care, and the like. 

This support from government is not luxurious but it often provides a better lifestyle than its recipients can imagine achieving on their own after 12 years of social promotion in Connecticut’s public schools.

Government thinks it’s not just cheaper but better to leave children in such a defective environment despite its self-perpetuating demoralization. The only deterrent to profound irresponsibility may be to stop coddling it — to curtail welfare for people who keep having children they can’t support and to put the children in foster homes. 

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Journalism fails to question the presumption that “it takes a village.” The other day a Connecticut newspaper asked why any parents should have to choose between buying diapers and buying food for their children, as if there should be no connection between having children and having the ability to support them. So why should anyone have to choose between having children and having a good time?

In this respect lawyer Spears is right, if for the wrong reasons, to blame the government for the irresponsibility of his client. For as Justice Louis Brandeis wrote a century ago, “Government is the potent, the omnipresent teacher. For good or for ill it teaches the whole people by example.”

For many years government has been teaching that parental responsibility is obsolete. So now as many as a third of this country’s children grow up without fathers and barely parented, with increasingly catastrophic results. 

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Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years. (CPowell@cox.net)

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