There is now substantial evidence that the Mother and Baby Homes and Industrial Schools were driven partly by commercial interests. While they brought savings to the State at the time they have cost the State a lot of money in later years.
This brings me to a parallel between decades past and what happens nowadays that, once again, is too obvious to ignore.
The reality is that the current tendency to medicate children makes profits for the pharmaceutical industry.
Of course, there is no evidence (that I know of anyway) to say that there is a direct link between the profit that the industry makes and the time-saving convenience of placing the solution outside the family.
Rather, I believe, we tend to sleep-walk down the path of least resistance, believing the myth that it is less expensive to buy medicine and medicate, than hire and train workers to engage in genuine long term enquiry and support with all the family, in a holistic way, and struggle for a solution that will be truly win-win for all.
People like me have built careers in the helping profession so I know from experience how tempting it is for practitioners to go along with the mainstream and look externally for solutions to acute behavioural and emotional problems, (and even poor performance in school or other areas) rather than build a relationship over a long time so that dialogue can be entered into to tease out the problem systemically.
But – and to conclude these posts on Historical and Modern Parallels – the question I ask is, like the Mother and Baby Homes and Industrial Schools, while pharmacological solutions appear a lot less expensive now, will they be far more expensive in the long term?