Child Advocacy Quotes

As helpers, we often feel the need to see our impact in tangible, measurable ways. We allow negative language into our head about the “broken system;” we look through a lens of “it doesn’t matter, I can’t make a difference”. These ideas are surely contributing to our burnout.

Helping a child today will help prevent a broken adult tomorrow.

As a pregnant urologist,… I was often asked by hospital workers and physicians if I was going to circumcise the baby. I always answered a simple “no” immediately, without adding the unnecessary caveat that I already knew I was carrying a girl. Knowing that in some parts of the world circumcising girls (female genital mutilation) is as common a practice as circumcising boys, I wanted to use this to spark rethinking every chance I had. When the questioner would find out I knew I was having a girl and tried to use that to explain my choice to not circumcise, I told them, “I wouldn’t circumcise if the child were a boy, either.

In all death penalty cases, spending time with clients is important. Developing the trust of clients is not only necessary to manage the complexities of the litigation & deal with the stress of a potential execution; it's also key to effective advocacy. A client's life often depends on his lawyer's ability to create a mitigation narrative that contextualizes his poor decisions or violent behavior. Uncovering things about someone's background that no one has previously discovered--things that might be hard to discuss but are critically important--requires trust. Getting someone to acknowledge he has been the victim of child sexual abuse, neglect, or abandonment won't happen without the kind of comfort that takes hours and multiple visits to develop. Talking about sports, TV, popular culture, or anything else the client wants to discuss is absolutely appropriate to building a relationship that makes effective work possible.

I now know that surrendering, allowing, and “BE-ing” is far more productive than grasping for control. I don't know why one child is born with autism and another isn't, or why some children have to fight cancer and some don't. I have lived long enough to know that life is not fair, never will be fair, and we shouldn’t expect it to be.

My instincts and experiences warned me that children in foster care should not have to figure out the system alone. Navigating social services and CPS custody by myself was akin to swimming in peanut butter. There had to be a better way, and I concluded it was better with a supportive CASA. There is no excuse for a child to face the foster care system alone in this era. If you know of a child swimming in peanut butter—be their jelly!

Talking about religion becomes irrelevant when your partner is being raped or your child is dying from a disease you can cure. The old phrase applies that if we are to prove ourselves good then we must not do nothing. We must not let illness prosper when we can cure it. We must not allow abuse when we can stop it and we must not give in to a disease that may be mind numbing and leads to violence. This is an advocacy not of reason alone but faith in each other, hope for our future, and love in accomplishing these goals without sacrificing self, but rather growing self and calling ourselves to self-giving, not self-sacrifice.

John Oldfield, managing director of the WASH Advocacy Initiative, which is dedicated to solving global water challenges, explains it this way: “The best way to control population is through increasing child survival, educating girls, and making knowledge about and availability of birth control ubiquitous. By far the most important of these is increasing child survival.

they talked to many working-class mothers who were totally invested in giving struggling children their best shot, even if that just meant keeping them in a mainstream high school program. Being a vigilante is of course easier for moms of means, but they’re a minority. The stereotype further buries the uncompensated labor of those working-class mothers who add full-time child advocacy to their list of jobs. Blum points out that single mothers find a special lack of support and extra judgment in a culture that still treats two-parent families as normal. All types engage in maternal bureaucratic vigilantism, but what happens to kids who don’t luck into having Erin Brockovich for a mom?

99 percent of the world's warzones are the legacy of white, western imperialism. Until you get your head around this simple fact, your views, your opinion, your advocacy, all are worthless to the peace struggles of these "westsploited" nations. In the modern age no other country has wrecked more nations than America. Like father, like son - first it was England, then it's its rebellious runaway child America. That's why China is such an enemy in the westwashed narrative of the world - because when one nation has somewhat maintained an autocratic control over the planet since the 1800s (under the banner of "Manifest Destiny"), it would never want that control be undermined by another budding power - particularly when that power is far superior in infrastructure. Sure, the state of China tries to influence every move of its people, that's the first unwritten rule in the handbook of "democracy" - but Uncle Sam has been manipulating the moves of every single state for over two hundred years. Now tell me, which state should you be more cautious of? No country is free from human rights violation, but America's share in global transgressions is right at the very top. America is the top exporter of humanitarian crisis in the world, and as such, US is the least qualified nation to be the moral guardian on anything. It doesn't matter whether you are white, colored or martian - denial never solves nothing. To treat a disease we must first acknowledge the disease. And what is the disease? Is it white people - is it whiteness? No - whiteness is not the disease, but white imperialism is. And how do you treat this disease? You gotta strip yourself of all the privileges of skin, and make yourself one with the world - you gotta denounce the privilege of your whiteness and embrace the responsibility of your humanness. Only then, shall there be peace in the world - only then, shall there be integration - only then, shall there be a civilized world to begin with.

Foster children are much more likely than other children with similar problems to be prescribed multiple medications that will have no impact on their symptoms. These medications, particularly the so-called atypical antipsychotics (medications like Risperdal, Abilify, and Seroquel) can shorten life and have severe side effects, like weight gain great enough to increase risk for diabetes. The over prescribing and inappropriate prescribing of such medications to children in foster care has been so dramatic that the Government Accountability Office has issued a special report condemning it. Both the federal government and several states have sued Big Pharma for targeting foster care children, resulting in multi-million-dollar settlements. In the last few years, attention to these issues by legal groups, such as the National Center for Youth Law in Oakland, the press (an excellent example can be seen in the online series from the Mercury News by Karen de Sa), and advocacy groups such as Foster Youth in Action, has increased awareness of this problem. These investigations and advocacy are leading to some positive changes. For example, California passed legislation to monitor prescribing to children in foster care. But sadly, rather than joining in or even leading efforts to improve the quality of care for foster and adopted youth, most medical and psychiatric groups have resisted or even openly opposed these efforts. Change is hard, and it is hardest for those with the most to lose. As Annette Jackson and I wrote in 2014, “the academic or interest group most threatened by the innovations which challenge their existing frame of reference or perspective, will be the most vocal and hostile to the new ideas.

IN CLOSING, LET’S TAKE a brief look back at where we began: with 10 children who developed type 1 diabetes in 24 months within two miles of one another in the upscale suburbs of Boston. Rather than bemoan their fate, parents there organized and asked for an investigation to be conducted by the state, which is ongoing. Among those who have participated in organizing meetings are Ray Allen, the Celtics star, and his wife, Shannon, whose son, Walker, was the seventh child diagnosed there. “Shannon and Ray have turned out to be the most incredible advocates,” Ann Marie Kreft recently told me. “We have fabulous people on board who are spending inordinate amounts of their time on advocacy.” I asked her what they are advocating for. “I think we all agree that mandatory case reporting would be the ideal,” she said. “That would be the dream come true. I think we may be building up to that.” Rather than have to design a special survey every time an apparent cluster of type 1 cases emerges, mandatory case reporting, on a national level, would permit the CDC to automatically track cases as they emerge, to see not only the big national picture, but also local variations that could prove crucial in unraveling the riddle of why type 1 diabetes continues to rise, each and every year, by 3 percent. Presently, however, no national organization is advocating for mandated case reporting of type 1. Where is the line of protesters holding placards, marching outside the Atlanta offices of the CDC? Perhaps we need to look farther back, to the period before the diabetes pandemic began. In 1866, you might recall, the death rate from diabetes in New York City was 1.3 per 100,000 residents. If that rate held today for the 306 million residents of the United States, there would be 4,284 deaths due to diabetes each year. Instead, in 2006, there were 72,507 death certificates on which diabetes was listed as the underlying cause. The official national death rate from diabetes now stands at 23.3 per 100,000, according to the CDC — nearly 19 times higher than it was following the Civil War. And that doesn’t count the additional 200,000 or so deaths each year for which diabetes is listed as a “contributing” cause.

Breastfeeding is the natural human way of providing exactly that continuous stimulation to the child’s developing microbiome and immune system. Partial breastfeeding continued through the first year would ensure a greater likelihood of tolerance, ending the pointless but confusing wrangle over four versus six months as the better age for introduction to other foods. Strong medical advocacy in support of the WHO goal might just be enough to generate the societal re-structuring that would be needed for such breastfeeding to become possible for more than advantaged minorities.

The family is both the fundamental unit of society as well as the root of culture. It ... is a perpetual source of encouragement, advocacy, assurance, and emotional refueling that empowers a child to venture with confidence into the greater world and to become all that he can be. Marianne E. Neifert Dr. Mom’s Parenting Guide

Being a fat child meant knowing how to be own best advocate

What to Do Tonight Teach your kids that they are responsible for their own education. Kids should feel in charge, not that school is being done “to them.” Note this is very different from blaming kids who are struggling. If your child is not learning from his teacher, acknowledge this without blaming the teacher. “Mr. Cooper is doing the best he can. He just doesn’t know how to teach you the way you learn.” Encourage your child to think of what will motivate him to master the material being taught in the class anyway. Remind your child of the big picture, that grades matter less than the ways he or she develops as a student and person. Resist the pressure to push your child if he’s not ready, be it reading in kindergarten, algebra in eighth grade, or AP classes in high school. Create an advocacy group made of up teachers, parents, and kids to talk about what you can all do to make school a less stressful experience. Consider advocating for brain-friendly experiences in school such as exercise, the arts, and meditation.

Do I regret working 3000+ hours a year during the economic downturn, almost getting divorced, and almost missing the first 5 years of my child’s life? No.

Rather than seeking legal equality, MacKinnon argued, feminists should target instead the broader evil of social structures that “devalue” women. Accordingly, the feminists of the 1980s sought to resurrect many of the special protections for women that Ginsburg had opposed, from sweeping bans on pornography to child-rearing benefits for mothers but not fathers. The unexpected debate among feminists about whether Ginsburg’s advocacy hurt more than it helped women brings to mind Malcolm X’s attacks on Thurgood Marshall for being insufficiently black. It also explained some of the ambivalence within the women’s movement when Ginsburg was nominated to the Court.5