Parents need help

Feminist writer Jessica Valenti highlights the state of anxious confusion that the welcomed start of the school year has brought to people with children too young to be vaccinated.

Parents I know are scrambling to find pediatricians who might give their not-yet-12 year-old the Covid vaccine off-label, now that it’s FDA approved. Others are simply lying to their local CVS about their kid’s age, desperate to see them protected before they walk into a building with hundreds of other students. I don’t blame them, not even a little. 

I’m doing my own ethical dance, trying to sort out what I can do to shield my once severely ill daughter from a virus that we still know so little about—one that is killing children and leaving others with baffling long-term neurological symptoms.

And this is not just about physical health. Parents have seen the mental and emotional toll the pandemic has already taken on our children—quarantine, of course, but also the learning behind plexiglass desk dividers, and the lack of everyday things like sleepovers or stress-free playdates.

The way kids interact with the world around them has completely changed. It’s a loss that’s impossible to measure.

Her sense of being out on her own coping with an affliction which is invisible to people without kids reminds me of the searing insight the filmmaker Vito Russo gave us about living with HIV in the days when that meant only stigma and approaching death.

Living with AIDS is like living through a war which is happening only for those people who happen to be in the trenches.

It's awful to realize that's where many parents find themselves this autumn.

The general obliviousness of childless adults to the struggles of many parents has distressing policy implications. One of the great successes of the early Biden administration has been the monthly $300 federal child tax credit which is drastically reducing poverty for millions. Yes, having children equates with poverty for too many households. We say we value kids -- finally we're helping as a society to pay for them.

But the legislative sausage making which helped enact the $300 payments made the payments a short term effort, extending only to the end of the year. Democrats hope to extend the program in their big budget bill. But this turns out to be a hard sell.

... the public is not yet in sync with Democratic leaders. In a mid-July Morning Consult poll, only 35 percent of voters said the expansion should “definitely” or “probably” be made permanent, with 52 percent saying the opposite. A YouGov poll from around the same time found only 30 percent of voters favored permanent expansion; 46 percent opposed it.

... The perplexing question is: why aren’t the checks themselves breaking through the partisan divide? Why isn’t the credit selling itself?

1. Not everyone gets the checks. About 39 million households are receiving the checks. But America has about 121 million households. ...

2. Even people who get checks believe that other people shouldn’t. ... [Reagan and the GOPers taught us well to sniff around for welfare bums, you know.]

3. The expanded child tax credit was slipped quietly into a crisis package—perhaps too quietly ...

4. Voters support crisis help more than permanent help. 

... Many Democrats saw opportunity in crisis: Seize the pandemic moment, send out near-universal and unconditional checks, and demonstrate that’s the most direct way to eradicate poverty.

But unpleasant though it is to consider, most voters may not aspire to slashing poverty as much as progressive Democrats do, and therefore may not want to spend huge amounts of money to that end.

I'm prepared to believe that a universal child tax credit is probably the simplest means to reduce poverty in our country. We're rich enough to make that choice. Let's hope Dems can push this through  during the legislative battles that will dominate the fall in Congress.