I agree, my question is what can be done to support and guide today's children. Good Schools are obviously a large factor, but the kids can only spend so much time at school. How do we educate/inform/encourage/motivate today's parents and guardians to provide for today's children?
I don't know. Those parents have their own subpar childhoods influencing their undesirable ideologies and behaviors now.
What doesn't help are the positive, helpful parents removing their students from local public schools. If the school community is positive and their child brings home positive things, that's going to make it more likely for the 'other' families to buy-in. If their only contact are negative phone calls from school and their child only has negative stories to bring home, then it's the same old shit and they have no incentive to improve.
I've always taught at Title 1 schools and have lived in poorer areas and if I may, one thing I've learned is that when people are poor, anything that isn't an immediate need is irrelevant. Following traffic laws? Nah. Holding a door open? Right. Sitting down with my child and asking them about their day, earnestly? Nuh uh. Turning down my music because it's late and my neighbors might not appreciate it? Puh-lease.
I understand this is a wide, general...generalization. It's unfair to many, but it's still real-world observations over the course of years.
Anyway, it's about immediate needs/wants being met. A 20 year old interacts very differently with you if they're texting on their phone than if their phone just got cut off. A parent suddenly doesn't have time to help with homework when they're trying to do the math that gets them to the end of the month (math they struggle with in the first place).
How to provide that? I don't know. Universal basic income? Too liberal, right? Raising the minimum wage? Destroys all small businesses, I know, I know.
Basically what it comes down to is that we have 2 options and maybe both will be required. We're going to need one generation to be amazing and just "get it" and yearn to do better. And we need to remove excuses from the generation before it by just inundating them with assistance. I know, that's a dirty word, but instead of decades of assistance that keeps the same ghettos from the 70s still ghettos today, a one-gen only deluge of help might do it. Might turn a corner. Might move the needle in the right direction.
I doubt any of you will agree, and that's fine. I don't claim to have THE answer, it's just a shot in the dark. But financially, this is superior to what's been going on. It's like a contract with a football player - no one-year deal is a bad deal from the team's perspective, no matter how rich. The problem that hamstrings teams are bad long-term deals. We've had a bad long-term deal with poverty for decades. Cutting a fat, virtual one-year deal is, at least, something different.