Why does child abuse happen? A new public service announcement says most people think it’s a “bad parent problem,” but the ad suggests “the root causes may be different than you think.”

This message from Prevent Child Abuse America goes on to explain that child abuse is the result of families’ lack of financial resources — a problem that can be fixed with a variety of universal family support programs.

If only it were that simple. Sadly, this claim misrepresents research, and this script (which is recited by a series of child narrators) will only contribute to the misinformation about child maltreatment that seems to be guiding public sentiment and public policy.

According to Prevent Child Abuse America, the “new campaign seeks to break the harmful stigma that child abuse is solely a result of ‘bad parenting’ and instead highlights the broader social, economic, and environmental factors that contribute to family crises.” The child actors list the policies that would supposedly prevent abuse from occurring, including “affordable housing,” “access to healthcare,” “high-quality, affordable childcare,” “school breakfast and lunch programs” and “paid family leave.”

Yes, this sounds like a progressive wish list — and it is. But that’s beside the point. The ad’s cheerful children suggest that preventing child abuse hinges on keeping “families out of crisis,” yet the financial challenges faced by parents who abuse and neglect their children are deeply intertwined with a web of other social problems, not just economic hardship.

The most common conditions of maltreatment include parental drug and alcohol abuse, severe mental illness, domestic violence and the presence of nonrelative males in a home. The offending parents often grew up in abusive homes themselves. The ad’s framing also conveniently ignores abuse that occurs in middle-class and affluent homes.

These facts have done little to dispel the misconception among some critics that what child welfare agencies call “neglect” is just poverty. In this narrative, children show up to school without a winter coat or having not eaten over the weekend or report that their home has no heat. As the story goes, biased or uninformed teachers call a child protection hotline, and out-of-touch caseworkers deem the parents neglectful and remove their children.

In reality, when child protection is called, the problems are far greater than a mere lack of resources. And, importantly, most families referred to child protection are already receiving an array of benefits, including Medicaid, free or reduced-price school lunch and food assistance. But the same things that prevent parents from maintaining employment or housing — especially substance abuse and mental illness — often inhibit them from engaging in services, while also diminishing their ability to protect and care for their children.

Oversimplifying the causes of child maltreatment will only lead policymakers to offer ineffective solutions. Even if providing families with more financial resources would prevent some instances of maltreatment, these policies come at an enormous cost while also failing to address the risks faced by our most vulnerable children.

Resources are limited, and policymakers must make choices: Should we pay for school lunches for 72 million children a day or should we fund more and better-trained child welfare caseworkers? Should we fund affordable housing for everyone or should we provide more drug treatment options for parents suffering from addiction?

Assuming that poverty is the real problem has even led some jurisdictions like Washington, D.C., to offer cash payments to families involved with the child welfare system. When many of these parents have debilitating problems with substance abuse, what exactly do officials imagine that cash is going to go toward?

Prevent Child Abuse America has a budget of more than $10 million, including a current grant of $1.7 million from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. It’s entirely appropriate for advocacy groups to try to help families in poverty. But using federal funding to mislead the public into believing that housing assistance and free lunches are a cure-all for child maltreatment is absurd and, frankly, dangerous.

Emily Putnam-Hornstein is a professor at UNC Chapel Hill’s School of Social Work. Naomi Schaefer Riley is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. They lead Lives Cut Short, a project to document child maltreatment fatalities. They wrote this column for the Los Angeles Times.

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The two brightest nighttime stars available in the Minnesota and Wisconsin sky are Sirius and Arcturus. April is the only month of the year we can enjoy both of them at the same time in the early evening: Sirius in the low southwest sky and Arcturus in the low eastern heavens.

Sirius is the king of stellar brightness and is often referred to as the star of winter, although it’s visible every evening from late December into early May. As most stars do in our celestial dome, it migrates from east to west from night to night as Earth orbits the sun. This is Sirius’ swan song as it shines away in the southwest evening sky. By mid-May, it’ll already be below the horizon as twilight ends, as it begins its summer vacation. Incidentally, when you’re looking for Sirius in the southwest this week, don’t mistake Jupiter for Sirius. Without a doubt, Jupiter is brighter than Sirius, but of course, Jupiter isn’t a star. It just happens to be in that part of the heavens this spring.

(Mike Lynch)

Sirius is so bright because it’s one of the closest stars to the Earth, a little over eight and a half light-years away, with just one light-year, the distance light travels in a year, equaling nearly 6 trillion miles. That puts Sirius at nearly 50 trillion miles away. Astronomically, that is considered just down the street. Sirius’ brightness is also helped by its size, nearly 1.5 million miles in diameter. Our sun isn’t even a million miles across.

Meanwhile, Arcturus, the star of summer, is on the rise in the eastern sky. It’s by far the brightest evening star in the east this spring. You’ll notice that it has an orange glow to it. That’s because it’s considered a red giant star, a bloated star nearing the end of its life. It’s over 25 times the diameter of our sun. It’s also considered to be a nearby star at a little over 36 light-years away. Since a light-year is the distance light travels in a year, the light that we see from Arcturus tonight left that star just over 36 years ago when Madonna was in her prime. Eventually Arcturus will belch away most of its gas and will shrink down to a white dwarf star.

Arcturus is the brightest star in the constellation Bootes, which is supposed to outline a herdsman or plowman, but honestly, it much more resembles a sideways kite with Arcturus marking the tail. Just below Bootes is a very small constellation, Corona Borealis, the Northern Crown. It arguably resembles a crown or a tiara on its side. To me, I see it this time of year as a backward C.

T-Coronae Borealis (Mike Lynch)

Corona Borealis is the home of a potential “guest star.” At the lower left side of the backward C that makes up the northern crown is an extremely faint star, T-Coronae Borealis. It’s very close to the star Epsilon at the end of the C. There’s no way you can see that star with the naked eye. Even with a moderately large telescope, it’s extremely difficult to find. The big news about T- Coronae Borealis is that there’s a decent chance that it’ll suddenly dramatically brighten into a new naked star, at least temporarily. T-Coronae Borealis is also known as the “Blaze Star,” but it sure doesn’t blaze that often. In the last 150 years, it’s only blazed up for a few days back in 1866 and again in 1946, but many astronomers predict it could blaze again in the very near future.

So, what’s going on? T-Coronae Borealis, about 3,000 light-years away, is a double star system comprising a large red giant star and a dying white dwarf star. As the two orbit each other, the intense gravity of the white dwarf pulls gas off the red giant star. The details are complicated, but the white dwarf star can only acquire so much additional gas before it becomes extremely unstable and ignites in a brief flash of nuclear fusion on its surface, triggering what is known as a nova outburst. When this happens to T-Coronae Borealis, it could temporarily become as bright as Polaris, the North Star. But after about a week, T-Coronae Borealis will fade back to obscurity.

No one really knows for sure when T-Coronae Borealis will flare up but most astronomers think it’ll be soon. In fact, there were predictions that it would flare up last summer. I heard one wild prediction about a month ago that it would brighten up on March 27. Obviously, that didn’t pan out. I think someone was trying to create some overhyped headlines. My advice is to keep an eye on Corona Borealis. The Northern Crown might soon process another jewel very, very soon!

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The west side of Tanners Lake in Oakdale, formerly the site of two restaurants and a glass-repair company, will soon be home to a 126-unit apartment building and 12 townhomes.

The 3.25-acre lakeside project, just east of Century Avenue and north of Hudson Boulevard and Interstate 94, is being developed by McGlynn Partners and Boo Realty. Construction is expected to start soon, said Jim Boo, the owner of Boo Realty.

The project includes market-rate apartments and townhomes and a number of public attractions such as a boardwalk, patio, pier launch and lakeside amenity building, Boo said.

Key selling points were the area’s proximity to the headquarters of 3M Corp. in Maplewood, and the recent opening of the new Metro Gold Line, the $505 million 10-mile bus rapid transit line that runs between Woodbury and St. Paul, Boo said.

“We know there’s a need,” Boo said. “It’s a wonderful site with the connectivity and the lakeshore. It feels like what should be there, including the townhouses that are on the thinner piece of land. We tried to blend two different uses. It’s taking something that’s not performing and turning it into something that should be good for the community. We’re very cognizant of the connectivity and the water amenity, and we’re excited about it.”

City officials have worked for more than 15 years to redevelop the property. Plans for condos, a hotel, medical offices and different restaurants have all previously fallen through, said Andrew Gitzlaff, the city’s community development director.

“It feels good to finally get this going,” he said.

The two parcels that make up the majority of the site once housed restaurants Toby’s on the Lake and Blackie’s Eatery and Saloon. The city’s Economic Development Authority in 2008 received special legislative approval to form a redevelopment tax-increment financing district to purchase the former Blackie’s Eatery site on the north side for about $1.5 million and demolish the building, Gitzlaff said.

In 2014, the city’s EDA purchased the parcel to the south, the former site of Toby’s on the Lake, for $843,000. The total capital expenditure for both sites was approximately $2.4 million, including demolition, Gitzlaff said.

The Minnesota Department of Employment and Economic Development recently awarded the city of Oakdale $430,937 for soil stabilization and stormwater infrastructure on site. Officials anticipate the project will increase the tax base by $326,107 and leverage $32.1 million of private investment, DEED officials said. Matching funds will be provided by the developer.

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Oakdale owns a park, Tanners Lake Park, on the east side of the lake that features a beach for swimming. The lake has a 10 mph speed limit.

The city is contributing $4 million in tax-increment financing assistance for the project, but the developers will pay the city the full amount for the two city-owned properties, which is approximately $2.4 million, Gitzlaff said.

The project is targeted for completion in 2026, Boo said.

“We hope that within 18 months, we’re putting silverware in the drawers,” he said.

St. Paul is set to be a central excursion point for a pair of 50-plus-day river cruises in 2026, billed by American Cruise Lines as the longest such voyages on the market.

At 51 nights, the Great United States Cruise covers 14 states, including visits to three national parks. After heading from the Pacific Northwest to Glacier, Yellowstone and Grand Teton parks, travelers will fly to New Orleans for a complete Mississippi River cruise ending in St. Paul (or mostly complete; sorry to all the Lake Itasca fans out there), then fly from the Twin Cities to Boston for a New England experience. This cruise runs May 29 to July 19, 2026.

The longer Great American Fall Foliage Cruise, 54 nights, trades the national parks for a cruise of Alaska’s Inside Passage, then a cruise from St. Louis to St. Paul and an exploration of more of the East Coast, cruising from Portland, Maine, to Washington, D.C. This cruise runs Sept. 5 to Oct. 29, 2026.

Both itineraries also include a daylong stop each in Winona and Red Wing.

We did not make the cut, evidently, for the Spring Across America cruise in April and May, which begins in South Carolina and Florida and only explores the Mississippi between Memphis and New Orleans before heading to the Pacific Northwest and up to Alaska.

Prices for these cruises are not made available online; potential customers must request a custom quote. However, American sailed a similar itinerary, covering 20 states in 60 days, in 2024, and the per-person price for that journey ranged from $51,060 to $77,945.

The price is all-inclusive of meals, daily excursions, transportation between cruise segments and, for the Great United States Cruise, an “American Cruise Lines jacket and gear pack.”

The impetus for these extended itineraries, according to the cruise line, is the country’s semiquincentennial, or 250th anniversary, in 2026.

River cruising has been making a comeback in St. Paul in recent years, with luxury liners appearing to largely replace the paddle-wheelers of the past.

Run by the international company Viking River Cruises, the splashy Viking Mississippi set sail from St. Paul in 2022, the first luxury cruise liner here in about a decade. Until American Cruise Lines reinstated service here a few years ago, the company’s cruises had not stopped in St. Paul since 2018; its luxury ships made their final port-of-call instead in Red Wing.

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The company currently operates fleets of both modern cruise ships — most of which have been newly constructed within the past half-decade or so — and renovated traditional paddle-wheelers.

Meanwhile, paddle-wheeler stalwart American Queen Voyages stopped operations in St. Paul by 2019 and folded altogether last year.

The broader statewide tourism industry has struggled a bit over the past three years, though, after a brief COVID-induced outdoor vacation surge in 2021. Last summer’s tourism season was especially tough for businesses affected by major flooding along the Mississippi and St. Croix rivers.