We don’t often find ourselves cheering opinion columns in the Chicago Sun-Times, but Mary Mitchell stepped away from the herd and deserves a salute.
“We no longer are talking about children being at risk because they are being raised in single-parent homes,” Mitchell wrote last week, but she dared to do just that.
What about the teens who are being raised in the streets? What about the teens who are out all hours of the night? Those are among the questions she asked.
“It might be time to expand the meaning of ‘neglect and abuse,’” she wrote. “When young people are allowed to run wild, should it be considered neglect and abuse on the part of their parents or guardians?” she asked. Without a finding of neglect and abuse, the Department of Children and Family Services cannot intervene to help, she wrote.
Mitchell wrote to the same effect earlier this month. “With carjackings skyrocketing and the primary offenders being young people, it must be because there is a severe lack of supervision in too many homes,” she wrote, though she said that’s probably due to the pandemic.
We don’t think expanding DCFS’s jurisdiction is much of an answer, so we wish Mitchell hadn’t pinned hopes on that. The state is broke and DCFS would, under any circumstances, be a poor substitute for two good parents. This is a social problem, not a matter of government jurisdiction. And we wish she hadn’t blamed the pandemic for parental neglect, though it probably did make the problem worse.
Still, Mitchell is clearly on the right track.
And it’s not a popular track to take because, as she said, it’s a matter most won’t even dare to talk about. It’s hard now to believe that Barack Obama regularly talked about the importance of two-parent homes, though he dropped the subject entirely after being elected president. And here’s none other than CNN’s Don Lemon lecturing on the same thing in 2013.
Today, comments like Obama’s and Lemon’s would be ridiculed on CNN and across most of the media.
Let’s hope that doesn’t happen to Mitchell.
-Mark Glennon
Expect no retraction or apology. This what they do.
The state’s existing buyout program for its own pensions is the precedent for Chicago, which should be a warning: Look out for similar exaggerated claims and shoddy analysis.
Just another legacy of LBJ’s great society programs.
Gottta admit his prediction regarding the so called N voters was a success though.
How sad it is that Mary Mitchell is being praised for being against carjackings.
She isn’t to be praised. Maybe welcomed to the world of the normal people.
(I recall one speech by Obama where it was mentioned. He didn’t talk about it regularly.)
It was a “staple of his speeches,” as this idiot wrote here: https://www.chicagotribune.com/opinion/commentary/ct-missing-black-fathers-obama-20170110-story.html But as I said, he dropped it.
Mary Mitchell has always told it like she saw it. She’s been doing this for years. The wokesters always neglect to mention personal and family responsibility. If you bring children into the world, you are responsible for them. If they are out running around and causing havoc on the street, someone at home has failed them. Sometimes the “victims” victimize others, both because of poverty, and a loss of hope. Although “children of privilege” do bad things sometimes too, there is a social and moral disconnect out there right now. These young people have lost hope they have no role… Read more »
Blm has encouraged lawlessness and the crime connected with it and these real domestic terrorists are supported by Lori, Preckwinkle, Foxx, the black caucus and especially senile Joe and his blm chosen vp lying racist Harris.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WK4M9iJrgto&feature=emb_title I am sure Mary Mitchell disagrees with everything in this documentary on Thomas Sowell. That’s why she is misguided and frames the issues incorrectly.
By the way, get a stickshift car. The little buggers can’t drive them.
Thank you Jeff !! Long live the great Tom Sowell ! He turns 91 this June !
We had to get to the point where people were afraid to pump gas to illicit a critical response such as this.
Socialist engineering will still argue for the next 20 years that gender is a mere concept, that families are obsolete, that government can raise your Kids, that a Judeo Christian basis for law is wrong, that the constitution is wrong, etc… The Sun Times and the left is now following that road all out, well, because that is “science”. So big deal, that some two bit columnist at a rag newspaper dared to utter a sentence every normal parent would agree with, is not courage. She wont be cancelled at all, she is the right color to not have to… Read more »
Wokeness and its insanity will eventually fade just as some of the insane hippy stuff during the 60’s seems foreign to us now, like communal living, free love, heavy drug use, and so one. And little more than a decade after the height of the hippies, the summer of 69, we had the go-go 80’s with President Reagan winning 49 states in the electoral college, and many of those hippies cut their hair and got real jobs. Unfortunately a few of them went to universities to spread their poison, and it’s made a resurgence, but it will be short-lived. I… Read more »
Debtsor, I really hope you are right. I hope it does fade before woke/progressive philosophy does irreversible damage.
This is an unusually optimistic post from you.
🙂
Don’t confuse my long term optimism for pessimism of our existential battles ahead!
Thank you for giving me an inkling of hope debtsor!!
It’s true, woke will fade when the results from wokeness become fully apparent. Crime is already starting to rise after decades of decline, schools are failing completely with remote learning after years of just limping along, cancel culture and shaming – the strongest Scarlet Letter of wokeness – is decried by everyone except journalists and the most woke. Corporate America (outside of an insulated oligarchy in Silicon Valley) is feeling a feeling a backlash https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/companies/funny-heartwarming-or-serious-will-super-bowl-ads-be-super-boring-this-year-as-brands-skirt-controversy/ar-BB1dieLq because wokeness REPULSES half the country. Wokeness is not just a minor irritation, like the ‘we are all in this together’ but a disgust that… Read more »
I’ve heard it more and more, but I like the idea of Republicans starting with local government — school boards, trustees, etc. Democrats figured this out long ago, and we’ve allowed them to control the narrative. We’ve continued about our lives, not wanting to be bothered, but then we complain when government is too intrusive, because Democrats are activists. We should have service to local government as main tenet to our ideology, rather than the libertarian ideal of letting the government rot away with control by Democrats. It’s what the Founding Fathers intended — sacrifice some time to help lead.… Read more »
Yep,agree to alk the above and i havent bought any nike garbage since the Colin Kaperdick b.s.-wont ever buy nike again
Is she actually advocating for (gasp) *accountability*…?
As Hawk Harrelson would say *she gone*…
Two parent households are ‘whiteness’ and ‘white privilege’. The BLM website, said until recent, and this is NOT fake news: BLM: “We disrupt the Western-prescribed nuclear family structure requirement by supporting each other as extended families and ‘villages’ that collectively care for one another, especially our children, to the degree that mothers, parents, and children are comfortable,” It takes a community to raise a child, not two parents. It’s just that in some areas, the local gang members are the community, and they ultimately raise the neighborhood children to become sociopathic cold blooded killers and criminals. But Defund the Police… Read more »
MItchell’s not actually on the right track, because she offers nothing to improve the tragedy of massive crime, unemployment, lack of available jobs, terrible performance by students. It seems no one in govt has the will to begin attacking the problems. First the penalties for committing these crimes must be increased to extremely severe levels, such as jail-time for carjackers that never ends until they pass GED and have a skill. Yes, more jails must be constructed. And instead of almost rewarding young unmarried women to have the baby, get free hospital care and AFDC money, incentives should be aimed… Read more »
It’s about time you disagreed with me. And it appears you are not alone.
Haha, let’s say we agree she’s on the “right track”, I’m just positing that she’s taken one step, of a grueling difficult mile race on a track. 24 years ago (age 41) i trained hard for months to break 5 minutes at our Howard County MD Meet of Miles, giant clock at the finish line, i ran 5:01 and the 4th lap was absolute torture.
First step & first lap, so easy they don’t really matter. 🙂
I really like the idea that criminals could formally reduce their prison time by getting formal education. Or even trades or CEU’s (continuing education credits). And then perhaps a work release program where a portion of their wages go to the victims and/or their families to help offset damages. I don’t know if this is currently done, but it should be. I realize that prison is supposed to be “corrective” but there is a justice/punishment aspect that is important, too. Balancing those needs are difficult. But if a criminal is willing to dedicate his life to education, work and being… Read more »
You bet! But there must be some available jobs not already filled by undocumented “migrants”.
I cannot imagine having raised my kids with just me. Or just my wife. Kids are an incredible amount of work, if you’re doing it right. And people without means cannot afford nanny’s or someone paid to attend to children. So, one parent households in Chicago leave their kids to CPS and then the neighborhood after school. Yikes.
It’s also funny that I would guess that everyone who criticizes the two-parent idea as not the problem was probably raised by two parents themselves, and are successful.
That’s what we call irony.
Yes, many elitists do criticize the two parent paradigm because they do not know what they are missing. I can assure you it is not an easy road – and even if you get through it – it often involves a lifelong commitment from the son or daughter to the parent (typically the mother). I went to the same fancy overpriced school as Pritzker. I attended on athletic scholarship though, and was a poor social outcast. I had two shirts with a collar, but had free athletic stuff. I scratched through an honors program I had no business getting admitted… Read more »
Fantastic, willowglen.
“Yes, many elitists do criticize the two parent paradigm because they do not know what they are missing.” I agree with everything you said except this. I too am from a rough-and-tumble kind of neighborhood and I too went to a fancy school (not quite as fancy as Fatty but on a poor kid’s partial scholarship in an era with fewer poor kids). Elites know the value of the two parent paradigm and they of all people live that way the most. The NYT nuptials are filled with elites marrying off their children and I myself have been to countless… Read more »
In stating that the elites do not know what they are missing, I meant to refer to the stress, anxiety, uncertainty and even abuse that often comes with non two parent homes. I agree with you.
It’s these kind of events that caused President Biden in 1994 to push his Crime Bill, which President Clinton signed, leading to a significant rise in incarcerations of mostly minority youth.
Well it certainly/ obviously wasn’t harsh enough.
Thank God somebody is talking about this again. It’s so obvious and totally ridiculous that you can’t talk about it.
Talk talk talk, and no action. Where does that go ?
The elephant in the room keeps putting on more weight.