The funding needs for helping parents spot concerns and address them while they are small could be easily found if we would promote the Drug Court program in Missouri. http://www.modrugcourts.org/showpage.php?page=5

Let’s spend freely the less money on situations that carry less traumatic and costly consequences (Parents as Teachers & Drug Courts) instead of high cost incarceration with terrible recidivism returns!

I fail to see how this bill to the tax payers is so “stiff”. I see it as preventative maintenance, which most people see as being much more cost-effective than reacting to a problem that has grown much larger over many years.

We should cut the military’s budget *first*.

PAT does have group programs much like you described. My youngest son went to one just yesterday. They don’t have them often, because of budget cuts (again, fine with me), but they do have them.

PAT was never intended, planned, or proposed to be a welfare program. You advocate making it one, and I disagree. Cut the whole program if you want, but don’t make it just one more thing my tax dollars get to support but which I can’t use for my children.

PAT’s program is about assisting parents and watching children learn and develop as they grow. It is absolutely not suited to just do as a group setting in a short- eriod of time. At these ages, children can be very different with just small differences in ages. The educator does not give the exact same presentation to a 3-month old’s family as they give a 4-month old’s. The purpose is to help parents with good advice and follow the child as they get older to monitor their progress.

You, nor anyone else, has any idea whether families “would get more out of the experience” of a group setting than from a home visit.

I hate to be defending a social program, and I really don’t care if its budget is cut and it is scaled back dramatically or eliminated. But before you advocate “evolving” it into a better program, you need to fundamentally understand what it is about.