A DEPARTMENT OF CHILDREN AND YOUTH

Our kids will come first

One of the pillars of my campaign is a plan to establish a United States Department of Children and Youth. There are several reasons why I think it’s needed.

When our government was founded, women had no voice in the public realm. And raising children was thought of as “women’s work.” Mothers were the main voices for our children, and when women had no voice then neither did our kids.

But we do have a voice now, and we need to speak up much more for our children. I think America’s children are the main collateral damage of the malevolent strain of soulless, vulture capitalism that has come to dominate our economic system over the last fifty years. Not old enough to vote, children have no political leverage. Not old enough to work, they have no economic leverage. They have no power to advocate for themselves, and that is our job. It is an aspect of social maturity, whether we are parents or not, to stand up for the nation’s young.

As President, I would want a massive transfer of resources into the lives of small children. We know things about early childhood that we didn’t even know a few years ago, and ninety percent of a child’s brain development occurs before the age of five. If we want a country that thrives ten years from now, we need to put a lot more resources into the lives of children under the age of ten today.

If I am President, we will.

The truth is, there are millions of children in America who are traumatized before pre-school. I have met principals at elementary schools who told me they have students on suicide watch. At public schools throughout America, there are now “trauma rooms.” Trauma-informed education is now a mainstream notion. We need to ask ourselves, why is childhood in America such a trauma for millions of our children?

Hungry children cannot learn, and we have millions of them. Traumatized children will not do well in school, and we have millions of them. Seattle Public School System has sued the tech giants behind TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube and Snapchat, for targeting their products to children. There is now a known causation, not just correlation, between children spending too much time on social media and their inability to sleep, focus, and learn (Can any adults in the room relate to that?).

Our children in far too many ways are being set up not to win, but to fail.

People with experience of America’s foster care system, child welfare system, and children’s health and nutritional system - not to even mention our educational system - report widespread dysfunction bordering on breakdown. Imagine a President who puts those things on top of her list of things to address. If and when I’m President, we will radically change direction. Our kids will come first.

Certain things are going to happen when there’s this Mother in the White House, for no other reason than Mama said so. If any person or business is harming our kids - whether it’s through carcinogens in their food or toxins in the air they breathe - that person or business is going to have to answer to me.