Institutional child abuse

     The huge Louisiana Department of Children and Family Services - DCFS and the industry that serves it is an insidious product of welfare-promoters, or liberals--Democrats, expanding both federal and state governments. Tradition-preservers, or right-conservatives, are also to blame, for not effecting reform. Child abuse through adult empathy, or biased emotional-governance, is a cottage industry that nourishes a generational cycle: The abused child is not likely to overcome the psychological damage and may abuse children as a customary practice. It is a self-promoting expansion of government at the expense of both children and a civic culture.

     While the human being is the most psychologically powerful animal species, it takes about three decades of authentic coaching for an infant to acquire the understanding and intent to live a full life. 

     Puberty happens at about age ten, but the body completes wisdom parts of the brain at age twenty-five. In other words, children and adolescents may conceive a child without intent to care for the child. It follows from a few years to build wisdom that the typical human is not mature enough for parenting until the late twenties or early thirties. Yet some grandparents are in early thirties.

     A nation needs civic persons, who start as newborns. “Civic” means prepared and intent to be individually-independent-with-public-integrity. Education, rather than cultivating appetites, is the key to a civic nation. 

     Traditionally, mating is celebrated in the late teens to mid-twenties, but the outcome for the child is not always bearable. Pregnancy at age ten is so exclusively risky that some countries encourage elective abortion. Teen pregnancy is discouraged.

     However, conception without intent to nourish the child through the three-decade transition from feral infant to civic young-adult is barely frowned on and the government funds the practice. The consequence is adults who are not prepared for adulthood. When irresponsible parenting becomes publicly obvious, the fed requires the state to either reform adults so that the abused child can stay in his or her minimally secure life or attempt to find adoptive parents before the child’s age 18. The federal government promotes and supports irresponsible parenthood, cultivating the cycle of abuse. 

     However, rampantly poor parenting is apparent in today's chaos. Both religion and progressivism have had their experiments, especially in Europe, but unfortunately in the USA, too. It is time to establish public-integrity as private-liberty-with-civic-morality. I also like calling it individual-independence, which a dependable colleague, my sister, suggested.

     Government combats AIDS, partly by nudging adults toward responsible sex. Arbitrary abortion of unwanted fetuses is grudgingly allowed. Metaphysically expressed, children waiting to be born need and want an urgent program to discourage wrongful conception and parenthood. Unlike AIDS, wrongful parenthood is unconstrained in Baton Rouge. The civic victims are the children born to irresponsible parents, and the sad beneficiaries are the offices that serve the institution. Government, both federal and state, should stop institutional child abuse. A civic people are allowing it to happen, and therefore need to reform.

Copyright©2016 by Phillip R. Beaver. All rights reserved. Permission is hereby granted for the publication of all or portions of this paper as long as this complete copyright notice is included.  

Note: this essay was inspired by AP politics writer Melinda Deslatte's article, "Analysis: Social services agency struggles under budget cut," December 11, 2016, online at

heraldcourier.com/news/analysis-social-services-agency-struggles-under-budget-cuts/article_80dad432-98f4-5a78-bcf0-bd345a734903.html .