> I mean, it's ineffective because it's under-resourced. Child welfare offices and family services in general have been gutted by the politics of austerity in the name of tax cuts and balancing budgets after the aforementioned tax cuts. You can take the best damn engine in the world and if you run it on barely any fuel, you will get barely any power.
Tax cuts at the state and local level, which is where these offices receive funding, are not happening on a widespread level to my knowledge. Increases in my personal state and local tax rates have outpaced inflation for approximately the last decade, and yet somehow every government agency feels they have a budget crisis.
> I've never understood this pervasive logic in our culture where a government service that's deemed ineffective has it's budgets and staffing cut. How is that supposed to help anything?
Because no matter how effective a government agency is, the solution is always to give it more money. No matter how wisely it uses any additional money it receives, any issues the agency has are blamed on a lack of funding by many and the only conceivable solution is to increase funding. And there are many places where these agencies are not being cut, but are still not effective.
There is rarely any serious assessment of whether every function currently performed by the government needs to continue to exist.
Take a look at the budget of any government. By and large, their budgets have increased substantially year over year, yet has the quality of service improved or even been maintained? Schools are the perfect example of my point. Throwing money at the problem isn't the answer.
> And, in regards to the state getting more power; yes but no? I don't think it's a matter of the state needing more power than it has, I think it's a matter of children needing more legal protections for themselves as people. Like it's wild how authoritarian the American system makes parents, whether they desire that power or not.
Children have legal protection from abuse and neglect, the standard of which has been continually raised in my lifetime (which is great to be clear).
> Parents routinely keep their children from going to school because the schools values "don't align" with theirs, but that's not a choice a parent should be making, not really? If a parent is all about that Jesus life and is blessed in whichever way to not really need to function in society, bully for them. That's not necessarily true for their children and they aren't the ones who will suffer the consequences of that choice, their children are but the children largely have no say in the matter until it's FAR too late.
This hits on the crux of the issue, and I don't have an answer to be clear. You are highly concerned about some kid slipping through the cracks because his parents are nutjobs. Other people (I fall more on this end of the spectrum, but certainly acknowledge your point) are more concerned about watching their kid's math/science/english teacher bumble their way through the material but being told that the school is doing a great job and they have no right to pull them out to ensure their time in school isn't wasted.
> We're the only developed nation that has not signed onto the UN's charter for children to have rights as people themselves as opposed to simply the property of their parents, subject to the whims of people who supposedly have their best interests in mind, but with absolutely zero recourse for that child if that child disagrees with those whims.
Who cares, the UN is meaningless, particularly around the concept of positive rights that liberals love to invent with no way of actually providing.
Minor children do have rights that increase as they approach the age of majority in their state.
> It's very strange to me that children effectively exist, in the "land of the free," within tiny totalitarian states until such time as they turn a completely arbitrary age, at which point they're expected to be plus or minus functioning adults, with whatever teaching their parents permitted and completed before then, with, in many places, NO oversight whatsoever.
That's not how things work now in the US. Do you live there?
And let's say we give kids more rights than they have now, are you willing to relieve parents from their legal and financial responsibilities and have the state take them on instead, because the kids can't do it themselves (which is the point of them having a legal guardian)? How will you fund and manage that exactly?