I am writing to bring some perspective to the silly, yet strangely serious debate over welfare reform and orphanages. The proorphanage justification generally involves 1) a recitation of the evils inflected on children by neglectful and-or abusive parents, who also happen to be on welfare, and 2) a conclusion that these children would be better served in institutions. There has also been a spate of articles generally stating that many fine people were raised in orphanages and hence that orphanages aren’t necessarily bad at raising children, or at least not as bad as neglectful parents who receive welfare. Unfortunately, these arguments both miss and obscure the real questions we should be addressing.

If we are now going to put children into institutions, we will need specific guidelines as to which families to break apart. If these guidelines are the same as the abuse and neglect definitions, why are we not simply talking about expanding the role of Department of Human Services Child Protective Services and the foster-care program? If they are not intended to be the same, which is apparently the case, then which bureaucracy will set and enforce them?

Let’s be clear that the orphanage proposals seem to involve creating and paying for new state institutions that will house children whose parents have been on welfare for more than two years, regardless of 1) the availability of jobs, 2) the extent of parental effort to find alternatives to welfare, or 3) the degree to which such parents are good at parenting. Most welfare recipients I know are every bit as good at being parents as I am and are struggling against great odds to find or keep jobs that will both pay enough to keep them off the system and provide medical insurance for their families.

The expanding welfare roles would become manageable, even on current state finances, if we had a national health care system and could create enough jobs to cut the unemployment rate from around 6 percent to below 3 percent, the level it was before the War on Poverty. But the health care reform debate has slithered off into a swamp of complexity and detail, while the one thing we definitely won’t let our government do is actually create jobs.

The orphanage debate issues should be job creation in our service economy, health care, child abuse and neglect, and the cost factors and psychology of institutional vs. family settings. Instead, our new wave of politicians seems to want government to do what it does worst: decide which families to split apart and then either create or contract for new institutions to accomplish tasks which we have arbitrarily decided private citizens are not capable of performing. Judson Esty-Kendall Glenburn