Rethinking Help for Children the Wic Program essays

Rethinking Help for Children the Wic Program essays The New York Times editorial, Rethinking Help for Children points out the insufficiency of a thirty year-old federal program to achieve its goals. The Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) food assistance program was established in the mid 1970s and intended to provide financial help to approximately 8 million individuals that includes about half of all American infants and one-quarter of children (NYT 2008). According to the criticisms highlighted by the article, the structure of the program provides food vouchers to low-income families, but those vouchers are usable mainly for high-fat and high-sugar foods that contradict some of the basic dietary principles that nutritionists have developed in the three decades since the inception of the WIC program. Under pressure from the Institute of Medicine, the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) updated WIC regulations to improve the nutritional value to recipients, but even those changes are insufficient, largely because budgetary concerns limit the program budget to increases that amount to a few extra dollars each month, per person, for better nutritional choices such as fresh fruits and vegetables (NYT 2008). The Functionalist Reaction and Remedy: In general, functionalists view society as an interconnected organism in which the whole is only as healthy as the overall health of all its parts; they also consider the needs of everyone in society as the responsibility of society to provide as a whole (Macionis 2003). Therefore, functionalist observers of the WIC situation would strongly criticize the OMB for failing to authorize sufficient funding to achieve the changes to the program In light of changes in nutritional philosophy since the 1970s, functionalist critics would insist on increasing the program budget in accordance with the nutritional needs of its recipients instead of adhering to a budget that only p...