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Seeing as how this site leans conservative, I wonder if anyone here has a better solution? Personally, I lean pretty left on this one. You don't have connections that don't exist. I lean more towards government workers as what you need to solve this problem is people rather than cash. If current social workers are ineffective, then they either need better training, more manpower, or more competent people who would be attracted by improved working conditions and wages.
An institution that would care for children when the mother was unable or unwilling to care for them, perhaps even finding the children permanent homes and families when necessary. They could also provided housing and work for the mother, perhaps in some sort of laundry.
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Not on short timescales. This is the sort of thing you need thick community bonds to make work. If one were interested in conserving society, I'd first look at getting people out of rentals and into real homes so they put down roots. That means stabilizing house prices, ensuring proper order, addressing illegal immigration so the demand side brings houses back into affordability, etc.
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This, to me, seems to be the proper tactic too. However, it's hard not to notice that "throwing money or government workers at them," as proposed by "progressives," doesn't look anything like this, but rather, involves just doing what we were doing already, but MORE. At a minimum, to get better training for social workers would require something like starting psychology, sociology, criminology, over from scratch or close to it, scrapping most current methods, due to being non-credible due to the process by which they were developed (i.e. non-scientifically). This would have to be, likely, a multi-decade project that really should've started 10 years ago, but now would be the 2nd best time to start, and the longer that gets delayed, the more innocent mothers and other people in need of these government services will suffer.
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I don't really have a better solution at this time aside from some kind of charity that would take in kids and vulnerable women and protect them from the worst of the lower-classes. But I'm pretty sure that runs into some heavy regulation. Just like there would be 100x more daycares if you didn't need a crazy certification process with a background check for every worker, site reviews to make sure you have enough space and enough 'safe' play equipment and what not.
The problem when you let the 'Government' handle it is that the Government is already trying to turn kids gay in public schools, telling girls that abortion, childlessness or single-motherhood is great, men in general are bad, especially ones that don't like tax increases and gay shit...
If there was some kind of Hitler Youth you could sign up kids to for part-time or full-time, that'd be great, to an extent, probably suboptimal compared to good Christian parents, but we are very far off from that.
Women's shelters exist. You have to put up with a hefty dose of radical feminist ideology, but they're there. Likewise there was probably a local church which would have had members who would take the baby for a few days while she got checked out- although she'd almost certainly need to call more than one.
That might be one temporary emergency solution, but while I imagine the woman in question could have hypothetically found help, it's kind of a gamble.
There aren't that many women that suffer a mental episode around/after pregnancy, and I imagine the default population for women shelter are women inbetween housing, with complicated domestic violence situation, perhaps some kind of LGBTQ or other identity-related family crisis.
A lot of places that are helpful for people in difficult circumstances are not really designed to accommodate the very young children who are their dependents.
Making it easier for the average Joe to offer (cheap) childcare around the clock as a service would probably do wonders for plenty of families or single moms who have to make complicated choices between a job, certain type of housing, whether or not to stay with an abusive partner or relative...
Women's shelters will generally allow small children to be brought as dependents, although there's been some controversy in the past over hypothetical battered women unwilling to leave their teenaged sons behind.
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