On June 4, the Washington Post featured a front-page story criticizing the current round of welfare reform. The reformers, you see, want single mothers under the age of 18 to live at home with their parents. But, the Post’s Judith Havemann wrote, that just won’t work, and we should all forget about it, because of one Dakeyia Scott of Lansing, Mich.
Scott just turned 17 and has a one-year-old son, Davion. And poor Dakeyia just can’t live with her mother. She can’t. Why? “We have fights and arguments. Davion’s my child, and she acts like she’s the boss.” When Dakeyia and her mother live together, Dakeyia says, “she calls me names and stuff, that I’m so young. She makes me feel bad.” Dakeyia could think of no examples.
So now we have a new standard for parental abuse. A mother tries to exercise some authority over her teenager. And the mother tells the girl, who got pregnant when she was 15, that she is young and maybe not totally responsible. So Dakeyia is entitled to live apart from her mother, supported by the taxpayer. Okay, Havemann has convinced us: Cancel welfare reform.
