Term Papers on Investing In The Future

Term Paper Title	Investing In The Future
# of Words	986
# of Pages (250 words per page double spaced)	3.94

Investing in the Future

        Tobin Lichti
        Psych 101
        Jon Drummond
        TU 11:05

     Welfare and school reform are two of the most widely discussed issues in
politics today.  Many people are calling for reduction or elimination welfare
programs as well as programs that provide breakfast and lunch at schools.  They
argue that people should be able to provide for themselves and their children
with minimal government assistance, and spending other people's tax dollars to
assist the less fortunate only makes the problem worse.  The main problem with
this line of thinking is that it forgets about the children involved.  Children
have no control over what family they are born into. Many are born into
situations, such as single parent families, where the families have no way of
giving their children a good chance of developing into healthy, well adjusted
adults. Something must be done to break this cycle, because besides helping
children to develop to their full potential, government assistance "saves
society the costs incurred when intellectually and socially impaired children
grow up to be intellectually and socially impaired adults"(Collins 59).
     The need for some sort of assistance for many children became obvious to
me on a volunteer project I did in high school.  The summer after my junior year
I took a trip to San Antonio with about twenty other students.  We were divided
between two different projects, and I went to work in a summer day-care program
in an underprivileged area.  The day-care was for children aged infant to
eighteen, and on an average day about 175 children would come through.  They
only had two full time workers, and relied on volunteer groups that came through
about once or twice a month to help them.  They used to have more workers, but
lacked the funding necessary to keep anyone on permanently.  Many of the
children were dropped off before the center opened at 8:00 in the morning, and
the meals they received at the center were the only meals they got all day.
Almost all the children showed a great need for attention and affection.  It was
this experience that made me realize that many children grow up without a real
chance at a decent life.
     Helping children early is crucial. Much research has been done recently
on early childhood development, and there is much evidence that there are
windows of learning for the development of vision, feelings, language and other
things.  A window of learning means that there is a certain period of time in
child development when the brain "demands certain types of input in order to
create or stabilize certain long-lasting structures"(Nash 53).  This type of
research backs up the idea that helping kids as early as possible is very
important in order to insure proper development.  The problem that arises is
that there are many families, especially single parent ones, that cannot afford
to stay at home or provide their children with quality child care.  The current
welfare system does allow states to let the mother care for the infant for as
long as a year before they must seek a job, but m...

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