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Interesting Idea, Terrible Presentation
R. Alex Whitlock
I'm all about figuring out new ways to deal with social ills as long as they work. The idea advocated by Rivka seems to yield
very positive results:
It's a simple concept: "high-risk" prospective parents get visited at home by a nurse, beginning as early in pregnancy as possible and continuing until the baby is two years old. The nurses provide prenatal care, support, advice, and parenting education. It's a voluntary program, but more than 90% of parents approached recognize a good deal when they see one.
In a 13-year follow-up of the program, researchers found that it reduced child abuse and neglect by 79 percent. Treated mothers (most of them teenagers) had 33% fewer additional pregnancies. The kids, at age 15, were not only less likely to commit crimes (as cited in the first paragraph), but had 58% fewer sexual partners. As someone who has read a lot of intervention studies, let me assure you that these numbers are phenomenal. They're almost unheard-of. This is a program that works, and it has snowball effects long after the active intervention is over.
It's too bad that she opened the post up with something that immediately made me hostile to the idea. I'd be interested in learning more about the program, but preferrably not from someone whose primary motivation seems to be to deride conservatives for his idea of what our reaction to it would be.
Observations
They bring it on themselves sometimes, though. I remember a conversation I had long ago with a local conservative pol after we both had sat through some presentations on some very successful programs for keeping kids from becoming criminals. I mentioned the (thoroughly documented) cost-effectiveness of such programs vs. cost of incarceration -- to say nothing of the cost of building prisons, which N.C. then was doing a LOT of -- and the pol replied, "Yeah, yeah, I've heard THAT crap before."
That particular pol was involuntarily retired -- in a primary, yet -- not terribly long thereafter.
While a number of conservatives may in fact oppose it on such grounds, it's analogous to saying that liberals naturally oppose religiously influenced prison reforming programs because they hate religion. Well, of course some liberals do hate religion, but it's an idiotic way to start an argument.
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