Reshaping Reading Instruction In U.S. Public Schools to Support the 60% of Children in America who are Coping with Adverse Childhood Experiences and Potentially Life-Long Traumas
It is a national problem in the U.S. that the “Science of Reading” state laws do not address the needs of traumatized children learning to read and write.
Children’s health in the U.S. has steadily declined across multiple indicators between 2007 and 2022, including a rise in mortality, chronic physical, mental, and neurodevelopmental conditions, and a rise in physical and emotional symptom domains.
To mitigate the impact of the dire circumstances in which a large percentage of American children live, there is a demonstrated and pressing need for all sectors of U.S. society, from federal and state legislators to teachers and parents to establish interventions to reduce the adverse childhood experiences of America’s children.
The mortality rates in 2022 among US infants and those aged 1 to 19 years were 1.9 and 2.3 times greater, respectively, than other high-income countries. Forrest et al, published in JAMA online, July 7, 2025, report that the ratio between firearm-related mortality at ages 1 to 19 years between US youth and the peer-country average grew from 10.5 in 2007 to 19.6 in 2022.
New data also provides evidence that between 2022 and 2024 the decline in children’s health in the U.S. has accelerated, while in 18 other high-income countries children’s health has improved. Forrest and his co-authors state, “The health of US children has worsened across a wide range of health indicator domains over the past 17 years. The broad scope of this deterioration highlights the need to identify and address the root causes of this fundamental decline in the nation’s health.”
Adverse childhood experiences are associated with lifelong health harms, M.V. Aslam, et al, report in the American Journal Of Preventive Medicine, 2024. An estimated 62.8% of U.S. adults had past exposure to adverse childhood experiences (range: 54.9% in Connecticut; 72.5% in Maine). It is of vital importance that state legislators attend to this data and amend state laws accordingly.
The high prevalence of adverse childhood experiences, including life threatening traumatic events are experienced by American elementary school children. This unacceptable circumstance should raise red flags for legislators who have passed “science of reading” laws in 42 states, and in states considering legislation like Senate Bill S338 in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, which ignores the adverse childhood experiences of approximately 59% of children in Massachusetts public schools.
Approximately 77,000 (updated) elementary school children in Massachusetts have had adverse childhood experiences. These number will seem astoundingly high to many legislators, but it is backed by peer reviewed research and confirmed by the list of hazards and numbers in the summary list that follows.
It’s not a partisan issue to accommodate the learning needs of children who have had adverse childhood experiences. It is a circumstance that challenges the very humanity of every legislator in America and especially the legislators in the Massachusetts House and Senate who are considering bills at this time that do not take into consideration the high number of children in their state that have had adverse childhood experiences.
Massachusetts House and Senate literacy bills have the potential to increase the lifetime impact of the traumas that so many children have experienced, which research has shown are associated with debilitating adult mental health conditions, premature mortality, and chronic diseases including cardio-vascular conditions and diabetes.
Public schools and teachers can make a huge difference to the health, well-being and academic development of children by ensuring them positive learning experiences that take into consideration their adverse life experiences. We will focus on what school administrators and elementary school teachers can do in the last third of this post.
There is substantial scientific evidence across multiple fields – medicine, neurology, psychology, linguistics, anthropology, and sociology –– that “science of reading” state reading laws interfere with and disrupt children’s attempts to respond to their adverse childhood experiences by mandating “fidelity” to maladaptive reading instruction that can have negative life-long consequences for many children.
“Science of reading” state laws lock in place Direct Instruction approaches to teaching reading that block the possibilities of children who are traumatized from participating in literacy learning experiences that can help them heal. Commercial reading programs that declare allegiance to the “science of reading” include McGraw-Hill’s Reading Mastery, Wonders and Smarty Ants, HMH Into Reading, DIBELS, reading programs aligned with Lexia’s LETRS, with Amplify digital “game world” (their word) capitalizing too.
The societal assault on children in the U.S. is so dire that it is literally a matter of child survival that we alter course, ditch the lucrative billion-dollar prescriptive reading programs and reshape the reading curriculum to focus on reading and writing pedagogical practices that enhance the resilience of all children. It can be done.
Scripted explicit phonemic awareness and phonics exercises increase the risk that children will not develop the problem-solving capabilities they will need to respond to what the U.N. has called the “staggering” increase in anthropogenic hazards, including the technological infrastructure failures, environmental collapse, climate destabilization and hazards that children will need to address and overcome in their lifetime.
UNICEF’s 2020 Innocenti Report Card 16,
Children in the U.S. are ranked close to the bottom on measures of health, skills, and happiness in the 2020, UNICEF Innocenti Report Card 16, entitled, “Worlds of Influence: Understanding what shapes child well-being in rich countries.”
Innocenti analyzes children’s experiences against the backdrop of their country’s policies and social, educational, economic and environmental contexts. The report includes a wide range of high-income nations including Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Japan, and the United States, as well as many European countries and some upper-middle-income countries like Chile and Colombia.
The U.S. has one of the highest child poverty rates among industrialized nations. Innocenti research found that the U.S. has poor outcomes in child physical and mental health compared to other wealthy nations.
An Innocenti table of 39 countries places the United States at 36th in overall ranking. American children are ranked 32nd in mental well-being, 38th in physical health, and 32nd in skills.
American children are at the bottom of the Innocenti tables because the definition of “skills” in the other high-income countries participating in the Innocenti Report is different from the definition of “skills” common in the U.S., especially as it applies to the “science of reading,” which contends children cannot learn to read without direct instruction in phonemic awareness, phonics, and decoding pseudo-words.
Innocenti states, “It’s critically important that we don’t forget that there are other important skills that we want children to develop as we push towards improving numeracy and literacy.” The Innocenti message is that children’s health and well-being must be taken into consideration and a part of their learning of skills.
Children in the U.S. have more adverse and traumatizing life experiences than any other country in the EU (European Union) and OECD (Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development), which is the reason for their low ranking on the Innocenti Tables.
In the U.S. extreme stress events are endemic, and the “science of reading” is exacerbating children’s vulnerabilities at a time when they are already experiencing the intensification of life-threatening risks.
The 2020 Innocent Report makes clear that children’s mental well-being, physical health, and academic development are inseparable. The “science of reading” perseveration on the idea that phonics instruction must be explicit is plain wrong and will be taken up in multiple “science of reading” Substack posts. The treatment of reading instruction as a set of discrete skills that must be explicitly taught, either ignores or mocks the science-based understandings of many literacy scholars whose research and books have been denigrated and rejected as “not acceptable” or “not relevant” by NCTQ.
The findings of empirical science and the actual lives of abused and hurt children support the research finding that the “science of reading” separates children’s hearts and minds, and that many children are suffering because of the lack of recognition or a response to their adverse childhood experiences.
Innocenti holds the key, because it makes it impossible for the U.S. to deny that 60% of children in the U.S, have had adverse childhood experiences and that some have experienced life-long traumas. Even more concerning is the fact that the percentage of children coping with adverse childhood experiences live in poverty, and many children are also struggling with structural racism and economic discrimination.
The Role of Reading and Writing in the Life of a Traumatized Kindergarten Child
Nicola is included here to emphasize the profound responsibility of federal and state law makers and people in every sector of U.S. society to respond to the suffering of so many of America’s children.
Nicola is a white child living in rural poverty. She entered kindergarten at a time when I was working on a project with teachers in multiple schools helping them to document children’s reading and writing – essentially, the teachers learned how to document children’s learning by developing the skills of an ethnographer.
Nicola had been sexually abused by her father from the time she was two years of age, and when she was four her father had thrown her down a flight of stairs causing long-term injuries to her knees.
Once, when her teacher was at a conference, the substitute teacher was a young man with a ponytail who reminded Nicola of her father. Nicola was terrified. She hid in the far corner of the classroom playhouse, and with a black marker she wrote on her face, and all over her arms, and legs. Among the marks she made were the letters of the alphabet that she knew. Nicola was so distraught her mother was called, and she took Nicola home where she stayed until her teacher returned to school.
I spent many days observing in Nicola’s classroom. At the beginning of the school year and through the fall Nicola was a solitary child but, on each visit, there were observable changes and by spring Nicola was participating in projects with the other children in her class.
It is important to note here that at the beginning of the school year Nicola’s writing was pre-alphabetic, nevertheless, at a time when she rarely spoke, she used her written notes to communicate with her teacher.
Nicola’s life had been so traumatic that a group of teachers from project schools met on Saturdays throughout the year to support Nicola’s teacher. I participated in these meetings. We listened to her teacher as she described Nicola’s outburst and studied the contexts in which they occurred, and we celebrated the first time Nicola smiled and even laughed and documented what was happening at the time.
We found that as Nicola became less withdrawn and less fearful, she also became a more a confident reader and writer. We recognized that Nicola’s sense of self was fragile, but we found evidence of her emerging sense of well-being that seemed to be connected to her emerging capacity to express her feelings and communicate through writing.
Our understandings came from studying her drawings and writing that we spread out on the big table that we stood around, and from listening to Nicola’s teacher as she shared with us her observations of Nicola as she drew and wrote them. We spent hours deciphering the messages she wrote, privileging the meaning she brought to these texts.
In her written communications we documented the emergence of letter like forms and sound symbol relationships in her writing and noted the emergence of conventional patterns in her spelling of words. We also analyzed the functions of Nicola’s communications and documented the literacy practices that she demonstrated that she understood and used.
We all knew that it was unlikely we would change what was going to happen to Nicola at the end of kindergarten. We talked about it at meetings. All we could do is hope that Nicola would be more resilient because of her kindergarten teacher’s support and understanding and that her resourceful use of writing to communicate and heal would not be extinguished.
In the last weeks of Nicola’s kindergarten year, Nicola was “screened” for first grade. Nicola’s teacher wrote a report that reflected the extraordinary progress Nicola had made in kindergarten and she submitted it and she asked that the extraordinary progress that Nicola had made would be taken into consideration.
The complexity of Nicola’s communicative skills and evidence of her high cognitive functioning were unquestionable. The teachers who had documented Nicola’s reading and writing development and who had collaborated with her teacher in analyzing her writing held their breath.
Some teachers cried when they heard Nicola had been placed in a self-contained special education classroom that used Orton-Gillingham, which is a highly structured reading program developed in 1935 that uses a direct, systematic, and multisensory approach, integrating visual, auditory, and kinesthetic learning to help students with dyslexia. Nicola was not dyslexic.
For a child who was using reading and writing to communicate her anger and grief there could not have been a worse placement. After a few challenging weeks in the special education classroom to which she had been assigned, Nicola’s mother removed her from the school, and mother and daughter left the state with no forwarding address, possibly for their safety reasons.
The following graphic of Nicola’s social activity and embedded literacy practices provides an example of the complexity of the lived experience of a traumatized child. The graphic also underscores that children’s early reading and writing productions cannot be reduced to direct instruction in “reading skills” that discount the lived complexity of reading and writing in children’s everyday lives.
An account of the teachers’ social, emotional, and academic support of Nicola is presented in “Early Literacy Development and Mental Health of Young Children” (Taylor, 1993). which I will post on Substack soon.
There is Well-Researched Evidence That The Outcomes For Children Are Significantly Worse In Unequal Rich Countries
The Spirit Level: Why More Equal Societies Almost Always Do Better by Kate Pickett and Richard Wilkinson (2009) dispels any doubts or arguments about the impact of adverse childhood experiences on children’s health, well-being and academic development. The book is described as highlighting the “pernicious effects that inequality has on societies: eroding trust, increasing anxiety and illness, (and) encouraging excessive consumption.”
Pickett and Wilkinson present eleven different health and social problems: physical health, mental health, drug abuse, education, imprisonment, obesity, social mobility, trust and community life, violence, teenage pregnancies, and child well-being outcomes. Pickett and Wilkinson clarify for us that the obscenely large gap in the U.S. between the ultrarich and everybody else is a major factor in children’s low achievement in underfunded and neglected public schools.
The documentation Pickett and Wilkinson present rejects the legitimacy of pronouncements about explicit synthetic phonics fixing the poverty gap and dispels any irrational thoughts about phonics and of state reading “miracles.” Phonics which is an essential aspect of learning to read and write has been lifted out of context and become a tool of the Right – a political ploy to maintain the disparities that favor and protect the structures that provide a minimum education for children that guarantees they remain poor.
All schools can support the health and well-being of traumatized children as well as increase the opportunities for them to successfully learn to read and write. What follows is a summary list of the hazards children experience that are endemic to U.S. society, but virtually every sector of U.S. society looks away and remains invested in controlling how children are taught to read in U.S. public schools.
The Life-Threatening Hazards that are part of American children’s Everyday Lives that are Ignored by “Science of Reading” State Laws and by Massachusetts House Bill 4683 and Senate Bill S338
It is vitally important that parents, teachers, the public, and especially policymakers are aware of the vast range of hazardous condition that are part of American children’s everyday lives
1. The U.S. Child Mortality Rate is the highest in the industrial world.
2. Children and teens killed by gunfire in the united states is a public health crisis.
3. The U.S. has had 57 times as many school shootings as all other major industrialized nations combined.
4. Suicide remains the second-leading cause of death for children and adolescents in the US.
5. The Bureau of Justice Statistics reports that nearly half (47%) of the approximately 1.25 million people in the state prisons are parents of minor children, with state and federal prisoners reportedly having an estimated 1,473,700 minor children in 2016.
6. JAMA reports that In 2022 alone 100,000 children in the U.S. lost a parent to a fatal drug overdose or gun violence.
7. 1,000,000 Children Lost A Parent Or Both Parents In The Last Two Decades To Drugs And Gun Violence
8. 1 In 5 kindergarten children are experiencing anxiety and depression risking damage to the architecture of the developing brain
9. Harvard University Center for the Developing Child states, “Toxic stress, which is the result of strong, frequent, and/or prolonged biological responses to adversity, can damage the architecture of the developing brain and increase the likelihood of significant mental health problems that may emerge either quickly or years later.”
10.More than 154,000 New York City public school children in the 2024-2025 school year are homeless – which is 14% of the children in NYC public schools. This is a significant increase from the 2022–2023 school year in which 119,320 New York City schoolchildren in the NYC public school experienced homelessness – which was 11% of the children.
11.Homelessness in NYC has reached the highest level since the Great Depression of the 1930s. Housing instability, as measured by eviction filings, was associated with significantly increased risk of death.
12. Children who experience ICE Raids are at risk of long-term health problems and negative educational outcomes
13.The American Immigration Council reports that large-scale raids by ICE impacts school attendance, negatively impacting the lives of children, and their social, emotional, physical, and academic development.
14.Many children end up in the child welfare system following the detention or deportation of a parent, and there are limited mechanisms to safeguard the parental rights of parents who are detained or deported.
15.There are no updated statistics but the American Immigration Council reports that that 17.8 million children in the United States had at least one foreign-born parent, including parents who were naturalized citizens, lawfully present immigrants, or undocumented immigrants, as of 2019.
16. Estimates of 8.2 million children or higher are exposed to Intimate Partner Violence and Other Family Violence Each year.
17.Studies indicate that more than 1 in 9 (11 percent) children are exposed to some form of family violence; 1 in 15 (6.6 percent) are exposed to IPV (Intimate Partner Violence), and 1 in 4 children (26 percent) are exposed to at least one form of family violence during their lifetimes.
18.Pediatric Deaths From Fentanyl Have Risen 3,000% Since 2013 and Childhood Drug Overdose Deaths Have Increased Exponentially.
19.JAMA reports that 8,986 children and adolescents died between 1999 and 2016 from prescription and illicit opioid poisonings. During this time, the mortality rate increased 268.2%. Yales School of Medicine qualifies this data reporting that since 2013, pediatric deaths from fentanyl have risen 3,000%.
20.Chronic absenteeism increased from 15 percent in the 2018-2019 school year to 30 percent in 2021-2022.
21.Screen Time Negatively Affects Neurological Development. JAMA studies report that consistent associations have been observed between screen time and the communication and problem-solving domains of young children. Associations have been documented between screen time and language development, problem-solving, and personal and social skills.
22.Children’s first exposure to pornography is reported to be as young as 7 - 11 years of age. Children are exposed to damaging images of violent rape on social media, normalizing sexual harm, and negatively impacting their health and well-being.
23.There is a significant problem of sexual bullying and harassment through children and young people sending personal, intimate images to others; this can have profoundly distressing consequences.
24.Official reports and position statements from the American Psychological Association (APA) and the American Academy of Pediatrics concludes that the evidence here shows that exposure to sexualized and violent imagery affects children and young people and that there are links between violent attitudes and violent media.”
25.Artificial Intelligence (AI) is a significant factor in child sexual exploitation. The Cambridge Centre for the Study of Existential Risk considers AI to be an existential risk. Research on the harms of AI manipulated media—like mis- and disinformation, deepfakes, and other AI-generated deceptions – remain largely unknown.
26.There is sufficient evidence to state that AI generated images are being used to harass, humiliate and bully elementary, middle, and high school students.
27.AI generated sexually explicit and violent images of children and youth have been documented, but there are no laws, rules, or regulations to stop the harm to children’s mental health and physical safety.
Verification of the Urgent Need for State Legislatures to reject the “Science of Reading ” Laws is Provided by Children in America who have had Adverse Childhood Experiences
None of the state literacy laws take into account that 1 In 5 kindergarten children in the U.S. are experiencing anxiety and depression. There is no mention that pediatric deaths from fentanyl have risen 3,000% since 2013 and childhood drug overdose deaths have increased exponentially. Or, that 1,000,000 children lost a parent or both parents in the last two decades to drugs and gun violence.
Which brings us back to the Massachusetts State Legislature which is considering two literacy bills, both tainted by the lobbying of Mass Reads and NCTQ. The House bill No. 4672 described as “an act relative to teacher preparation and student literacy” has passed the House unanimously and has moved to the Ways and Means Committee. The Senate bill, S338 is still with the Education Committee. There is time to amend both bills. If one U.S. State responded to the plight of children who have been traumatized, other states might be persuaded to follow.
The Massachusetts State Legislature has an opportunity to ameliorate the adverse effects of toxic stress experienced by children in Massachusetts public schools by considering amendments to S338 that ensure that the reading “skills” instruction that traumatized children receive is based on the definition of “skills” recognized in the 2020 Innocenti Report and that reflects the definition of “skills” within the EU and OECD.
The European Commission Neset-Eenee 2025 Analytical Report states, “When school begins, teaching children to decode and recognize words is important, but so is print-related play, reading storybooks and talking about books”
The European Commission analytical report is entitled “Effective practices for literacy teaching.” Colin Harrison is the lead author. The following quotes are from the open access report:
Governments need to be more prepared for change and shock. Given the challenges to education systems of a volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous digital world, governments should stand ready to adapt their policies and practices to sudden and often drastic changes (p. 11).
Stories, songs and conversation are just as important as phonics. It is important for every teacher to understand how enormously valuable it is for children who are learning to read to sing songs, to hear stories and poems read aloud, and to participate in conversations about what they have heard. Crucially, stories introduce children to other worlds, to other children, and to other cultures, and stories invite them to find a place for themselves in those worlds. Literature develops the imagination, and as the events in a story unfold, the cognitive side of reading is also being developed (p. 13).
Harrison and his co-authors emphasize that “the education systems of every European country will be dealing with the outcomes of COVID-19 school closures and social lockdowns for the next two decades.” They also state, “Given this context, it is even more vital for governments to recognize that their education systems can make a massive contribution to reducing the negative impacts that will continue to affect their schools, by implementing these recommendations.” They write that children’s “life chances may have been diminished by these events.”
The recommendations that I am including for you to consider have been developed over more than fifty years of research and work with marginalized children, many of whom have had adverse childhood experienced. They are supported by UNESCO’s Innocenti Reports and by the 2025 European Commission NESET-EENEE analytical report.
It is an undeniable fact that in the U.S. children’s life chances are diminished not only by COVID but by poverty and by all the adverse life experiences presented above. It is imperative that we engage in and actively contribute to forward strategies to accelerate a change in the ways children learn to read and write in public schools to prepare them for a dangerously uncertain future. We must include and elevate all people in U.S. society if all our children are to become resilient and resourceful, and have a healthy, meaningful future in which their complex capacities to read and write will provide pathways to deep knowledge and greater understandings of the problems that must be solved.
Trauma early in children’s lives can be addressed in public schools by creating caring learning environments in which reading and writing are integral to all learning activities
Reading and writing are tools teachers can use to reach and support children who have suffered traumas so grave that many of us cannot even imagine what has happened to them. It is hope that the Massachusetts legislature will step up.
Bessel van der Kolk (2003) states, that extreme events can “permanently alter the perception of danger and the regulation of internal homeostasis.” He writes:
Trauma early in the life cycle, particularly when it is recurrent and when it occurs in the context of an inadequate caregiving system, has pervasive effects on cognition, socialization, and the capacity for affect regulation (p. 321).
Uncomplicated activities like reading, conversing, and watching television require extra effort. The loss of ability to focus, in turn, often leads to problems with taking one thing at a time and interferes with re-adjusting their lives in response to the trauma (p.323).
Van der Kolk (2005) emphasizes the importance of “establishing safety and competence for children who have experienced complex traumas. He writes:
Complexly traumatized children need to be helped to engage their attention in pursuits that do not remind them of trauma-related triggers and that give them a sense of pleasure and mastery.
Safety, predictability, and “fun” are essential for the establishment of the capacity to observe what is going on, put it into a larger context, and initiate physiological and motoric self- regulation.
Before addressing anything else, these children need to be helped how to react differently from their habitual fight/flight/freeze reactions.
Only after children develop the capacity to focus on pleasurable activities without becoming disorganized do they have a chance to develop the capacity to play with other children, engage in simple group activities and deal with more complex issues.
The following recommendations for supporting children who have had adverse life experiences – which is a high proportion of children in the U.S. – have been reviewed by psychiatrists, early childhood specialists, and literacy researchers. Once again, the recommendations are based upon the findings of psychiatric and medical research and build on the advice of the National Child Stress Network.
There is a significant body of medical research which supports the proposition that children who have adverse life experiences can become more resilient if teachers are encouraged to:
1. Focus on creating caring learning environments in which reading and writing are integral to all learning activities
2. Recognize the importance of the languages that children speak and respect their heritage and national identity.
3. Promote children’s health and well-being by providing them with opportunities to sing, dance and play musical instruments.
4. Create classroom environments in which children can write daily to regain a sense of hope through writing activities that have meaning in their everyday lives.
5. Ensure children’s experiences of reading and writing create a sense of accomplishment and have an opportunity to build self-worth.
6. Support children’s participation in reading and writing projects and activities that combine meaning driven learning with the development of their understandings of alphabetic principles especially sound-symbol relationships.
7. Accept their pre-alphabetic productions and systematically document the emergence of sound-symbol relationships.
8. Enhance academic learning through reading and writing activities across the curriculum and by ensuring reading and writing are constitutive of science and math projects.
9. Minimize the amount of time children spend in meaningless decontextualized scripted reading programs that have no scientific validly but are the signature of the “science of reading” state laws.
10.Welcome families and encourage parents and caregivers to actively participate in the life of the school through events that incorporate reading and writing in all activities including art, music, theater, dance, science, and literature.
It is important to emphasize that teachers are not therapists, but there is much that educators can do to support the children they teach. Every attempt should be made to take care of the whole child, every child, and make U.S. public schools a joyful place for children to be.
If the Massachusetts State Legislature wants to rise in the Innocenti rankings, then there needs to be a transformation in the definition of “skills” in Senate Bill S338 so that Massachusetts leads the nation in caring for children and by so doing excels when compared with other high-income nations.
Remember, Innocenti stated “As we push towards improving numeracy and literacy, it’s critically important that we don’t forget that there are other important skills that we want children to develop.”
In reading and writing classrooms, Nicola teaches us that even young children’s pre-alphabetic communications can help traumatized children to heal. But in U.S. States that have passed “science of reading” laws, there are few, if any, opportunities for children to write to express their grief or share their joy. And so, many children continue to struggle to engage with the tasks set before them that ignore their life experiences.
It is important that all those public and private spheres that have formed alliances and signed-on to the “science of reading,” and the mainstream media that has promulgated “science of reading” myths and lies, do not ignore, deflect, or obfuscate the indisputable fact that at least 60% the children in U.S. public schools have had potentially traumatizing adverse childhood experiences.
The five-year quantitative and qualitative forensic analysis leaves no doubt that the adverse life experiences of so many of America’s children is inextricably linked to the jolts and kicks that American democracy is experiencing. It is a matter of survival – children’s survival and the survival of democracy – that the highest priority is given to caring for America’s traumatized children. This might be the only way, the only way children in America will have the opportunity of a safe passage through their childhoods to become readers and writers who are resilient, resourceful, and ready for the shocks, jolts, and kicks that they will inevitably experience because of the social and political dangers, technological threats, and interconnected global risks of the 21st century. It is a matter of national security that we care for America’s children.
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