They help feed children, and clothe them. They help keep a roof over the heads of children. They give them health care, dental care, and in many instances, child care. They provide education and use this perch to help promote their moral and blessed standards on the next generation of voting Americans.

And yet, good parents and an ill-equipped government accept the role of parenting with a different perspective. Parents wean their children so that they can become independent and become successful in this difficult world. They do this intentionally. They punish and praise, they instruct and they nurture.

The government, despite all its well intentioned efforts to replicate the parental role, is sadly both ill-equipped and too lacking in common sense to pull it off. While it is great at offering suckle, the problem with governmental parenting is that it does not know how to wean--its recipients encouraged to suck at the public teat for generations.

This instance in Detroit is but another example of an ill-advised government takeover of a role once reserved for parents; an effort that holds as a primary goal an attempt to both legitimize and perpetuate its status there. It uses children whose parents are perfectly capable of buying them their own food as pawns in a campaign for other children to learn the feel-good status of depending on the taxpayers for their calories.