Parenting & Family Quote by Charles Foster Bass

Policy language can sound like compassion while quietly narrowing a kid's future to whatever a bureaucracy thinks is realistic. Charles Foster Bass reaches for that reassuring register here: "Independent Living", "prepare", "successfully manage". It reads like a tidy ladder out of chaos. The real intent is managerial. This is government speaking in the dialect of outcomes, trying to convert vulnerable childhoods into measurable adult functioning: job, college, self-sufficiency.

The subtext is where the politics live. "These children" is a distancing phrase that marks a population as a case file rather than neighbors with names; it implies a problem to be solved, not a community to be invested in. "Designed by state and local governments" signals control and standardization, suggesting that the appropriate response to trauma, poverty, or foster care is a program, not a broader redistribution of resources or power. It also shifts responsibility: if the system offers a program and the individual later struggles, failure can be read as personal rather than structural.

Context matters because "independent living" has a specific U.S. policy history, often tied to youth aging out of foster care and the anxiety that they'll become unemployed, unhoused, or justice-involved. Bass is speaking into that fear, offering prevention through training. The rhetorical move is pragmatic and defensible, but it carries a quiet austerity: the goal isn't belonging or flourishing; it's compliance with adulthood as a checklist. Even "enter the workplace" comes first, framing citizenship through productivity. College is an option; employability is the baseline.