Hunger is a hard thing, and I want to say at the start that I do not write about it lightly. I have been hungry now and then in my life, not for long, and I remember it. I would not wish it on anyone. Least of all a child.
So let me begin where every decent person begins. Feeding a child is the job of the child’s family. Not the school’s, not the county’s, not the government’s. A mother and father who put food on the table are doing the most basic and holy work there is. I believe that, and I think most of my readers believe it too.
During the school year, plenty of children I know of eat breakfast and lunch at school. I have made my peace with that. School is where they are, and it would be strange to keep them from eating. But every summer someone proposes that the state or the schools keep feeding those children after the last bell, through June and July and August, so that no child goes without while school is out. I understand why people want this. I want to explain why I cannot support it.
If a family cannot feed its children in the summer, then the family has a problem, and the family is the one who has to solve it. That is what it means to say feeding a child is a parent’s duty. A duty you can hand off to the government when it gets hard is not a duty. It is a preference. The moment the state steps in with a sack lunch, the parents learn that someone else will do it, and the child learns the same thing, and neither of them ever quite unlearns it.
My neighbor once offered to mow my lawn while I was laid up with my back. I thanked him and said no. It took me the better part of a month to get it done myself, and the grass was a disgrace by the end. But it was my lawn and I mowed it, and I would make the same choice today. Some things are worth doing badly if they are yours to do.
I know that a summer is a long time for a child. I know some will be thinner in August than they were in May. I have prayed about that, and I have not changed my mind. A child who goes hungry in a family that is trying is not abandoned. He is being raised. A child who is fed by a program has been taken, one meal at a time, from the people who should have fed him. That conviction will go with me when I vote for the Republican for Senate this fall. From what I can tell, the other side would see to it that the lunches keep coming all summer, and I have explained why I cannot want that.
I would rather a child be hungry in his own home than full in someone else’s care. I have thought about it a long while.
I would.
D. M.