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Children
The following article originally appeared in Salt of the Earth. It is posted here for private use only. It may not be reprinted in whole or in part without the permission of Salt of the Earth magazine.
Who's minding the children?
The high cost of neglecting America's kids
Glenn Ellen Duncan
LAST HALLOWEEN, CELEBRITY RACE-CAR driver Rocky Moran had driven several small children home from trick-or-treating in their southern California neighborhood, when suddenly a gang of nine teenage boys pulled him out of his family's minivan and severely beat him in front of his terrified young children.
Moran sustained numerous bruises to his face and body and a dislocated shoulder from the beating. In a separate attack that evening, the same band of roving teens left a middle-aged lawyer with a broken rib and ankle. Sheriff's deputies told reporters that in recent months they had logged numerous other acts of violence in the community where the Halloween attacks occurred—six assaults with a deadly weapon, one robbery, two commercial burglaries, 10 residential burglaries, 14 grand thefts, 12 petty thefts, 20 instances of malicious mischief, one possession of an explosive device, and one threat of terrorism.
But this crime wave was not happening in one of Southern California's notorious gangland neighborhoods; it was happening behind the wrought-iron gates of the exclusive, multi-million-dollar Coto de Caza community, one of affluent Orange County's most elite neighborhoods. Moreover, the teen suspects in the Halloween beatings were said to attend the prestigious Santa Marguerita Catholic High School.
"A lot of these kids aren't cared for—they're just given a lot of money," points out Orange County psychologist Bruce Christle, a former police officer who now counsels juvenile delinquents from rich and poor backgrounds alike.
"Often they hate their parents and go on the rampage when they feel no sense of real community, no sense of belonging," Christle says. Coto de Caza may have a private golf course, tennis courts, and riding stables, and its kids may live in 6,000-square-foot mansions and sometimes even drive Ferraris, but these youths are "not essentially any different than kids in the barrios," he concludes.
ACROSS THE CONTINENT, at New York City's Covenant House, executive director Sister Mary Rose McGeady, D.C. paints a similar portrait of neglect among teen runaways. In 1994, Covenant House sheltered some 30,000 runaways, each with his or her own uniquely tragic story. But a shy, 16-year-old boy named Jerry seemed to say it all for McGeady.
"I asked him if he didn't want to call his parents and let them know he was okay," McGeady recalls. "And he responded, 'Sister, my father doesn't have time for me. He'd rather give me $5 than five minutes.'
"I've thought about this so much and that is really the reality we are dealing with nowadays: parents are so busy with so many other things—working, trying to hold it all together, pursuing their own goals—that they just don't have time for their kids," McGeady says.
BUT AS RECENT TRAGIC NEWS EVENTS have shown, the problems confronting America's current generation of children go way beyond rich kids acting out in criminal ways, beyond ignored and confused teens running away.
"How can any American read about an 11-year-old buried with his teddy bear because he killed a 14-year-old and then another 14-year-old killed him and not think, 'My God, where has this country gone wrong?'" the new speaker of the House, Rep. Newt Gingrich, asked during his first speech before the U.S. Congress in January. Gingrich was widely castigated in the media for proposing the return of orphanages for kids living in extreme poverty and neglect, but some children's advocates, while not enthusiastic about the orphanage idea, nevertheless are grateful that the plight of America's children has at least made the evening news.
Indeed, recent newspaper headlines have been filled with chilling tales of victimized children in America. A couple abandoned their four children for two weeks and flew off on a Mexican vacation. A 5-year-old Chicago boy was pushed out of an 18-story apartment window by two 10-year-olds because he refused to steal for them. A young mother drowned her own two beautiful little boys because she said she didn't think her new boyfriend would want them. A 9-year-old girl was forced to perform oral sex with a 12-year-old in a classroom while the teacher, unaware of what was happening, read a book to the class.
BEYOND THE SENSATIONAL NEWS HEADLINES, however, the actual picture of how children are treated in the United States is far more grim—because the problem is more pervasive than most people realize. In 1990, the National Commission on Children declared that "never before has one generation of American children been less healthy, less cared for, or less prepared for life than their parents were at the same age."
The statistics are quite horrifying:"Children are the most abused sector in our society," says Edgar Villamarin, director of programs for Catholic Big Brothers in Los Angeles. The 500 local agencies of Big Brothers/Big Sisters of America currently serve some 60,000 fatherless children (aged 7 to 18) nationwide.
- 22 percent of the 71 million children in the U.S. now grow up in poverty—up from 14 percent in 1970;
- 50 percent of children now come from divorced families;
- The number of children reported to state Child Protective Services as being abused or neglected has more than tripled from 1975 to 1992 (with 2.9 million reports and 993,000 substantiated child victims in 1992);
- An estimated 42 percent of fathers fail to see their children after divorce and more than 60 percent of fathers fail to pay any child support;
- Between 40 and 50 percent of teens now live with mainly working, single mothers;
- 27 percent of all teenagers drop out of high school; in some inner-city areas, the dropout rate exceeds 40 percent;
- Across the nation, Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) scores have dropped by 70 points since 1963;
- 30 percent of all U.S. babies are now born to unwed mothers, and among black babies the figure is roughly 66 percent;
- In 1992, 15 percent of all murders, rapes, and assaults in the U.S. were committed by teenagers.
"We neglect our children in this country all over the place," Villamarin adds. "For parents, for social-policy makers—for all of us—children should be our number-one priority, but they aren't."
The culture of neglect
INDEED, AS CHILLING AS IT MAY BE for America's parents and policymakers to hear, the number-one cause for the social ills now afflicting America's children is simple, old-fashioned . . . neglect.
"Rich kids, middle-class kids, poor kids—all deal with risk and neglect on a scale unimagined in previous generations," claims economist and children's advocate Sylvia Ann Hewlett, in her best-selling book, When the Bough Breaks: The Cost of Neglecting Our Children.
"Problems of poverty, divorce, out-of-wedlock births, absentee parents, latchkey kids, violence, and drugs are no longer confined to the ghetto."
Hewlett and other advocates of children place the blame, logically enough, squarely on the shoulders of America's adults. Somewhere along the line, they say, adults decided that it was okay to put their own interests—their freedom, happiness, and fulfillment—above the interests of their children.
DURING THE 1960S, '70S, AND '80S, the so-called "me generation" pushed for a number of dramatic social changes in the United States—from no-fault divorce to greater sexual freedom to women's reentry into the workforce —that were to benefit a variety of adult groups. These social changes would, their proponents insisted, make people —meaning adults—much happier.
And by and large, they often did. Middle-aged men were able to trade in their wives for younger women. Women were able to pursue interesting, challenging careers. And both sexes were able to indulge their sexual appetites without fear of social stigma. It became commonplace to mock the old-fashioned idea of parents staying together "for the children." Better to divorce, it was said. Unhappy married couples make lousy parents anyway.
But the social-science data is now incontrovertible that while divorce, two-income families, and sexual freedom have often made adults feel happier and more fulfilled, they have, overall, greatly harmed children.
"OVER THE PAST TWO AND A HALF decades Americans have been conducting what is tantamount to a vast natural experiment in family life," says Barbara Dafoe Whitehead in an in-depth look at the issue of children in the April 1993 Atlantic Monthly, entitled "Dan Quayle Was Right."
"Many would argue that this experiment was necessary, worthwhile, and long overdue. The results of the experiment are coming in, and they are clear. Adults have benefited from the changes in family life in important ways, but the same cannot be said for children." For example, says Whitehead, children of single-parent families are six times more likely to be poor than children of families with two parents. Nearly one quarter of all children of single parents will be poor for seven years or longer. And children of "disrupted families," Whitehead adds, have dramatic psychological problems that "persist into adulthood."
"We are malignantly neglectful of our kids," says Cincinnati child psychologist and author Dr. Ray Guarendi. "We pursue ourselves so much that our kids suffer. We have created the perception, for example, that nowadays you have to have two parents working to make ends meet."
WHILE MANY LOWER-INCOME FAMILIES must have both parents working just to put food on the table, Guarendi concedes, "in many households people don't have to do this but they do so because we've elevated our material expectations way up beyond the level of comfort our parents enjoyed."
The problem with this, he says, is that both parents working means "we're forced to skimp on giving our kids all the things that are optimal for raising good children—time, self-sacrifice, commitment, supervision."
The politics of childhood
HAND IN HAND WITH DRAMATIC CULTURAL and social shifts in American society there have been equally dramatic political shifts. It is perhaps not surprising that a nation which gives abortion and contraceptive providers such as Planned Parenthood hundreds of millions of dollars each year in taxpayer funds—an act which, one way or another, says that babies are a bad idea—would not spare very much money for children outside the womb. And that is precisely the case. Unlike the pro-natalist policies of France and Germany, where parents actually receive monetary rewards for children, the United States has dramatically cut tax and other financial supports for children over the past 30 years.
As child-advocacy groups have long pointed out, if the per-child deduction on U.S. income-tax forms were the same today as it was in the 1950s, families could deduct $7,500 for each child instead of the $2,050 allowed today.
Indeed, the U.S. federal tax burden on families with children has gone from 4 percent of household income in 1950 to 12 percent in 1960 to 24 percent in 1990. That's in addition to state income taxes, property taxes, sales taxes, hidden excise taxes, "user fees," and so on.
Where has all this money gone? Not to children.
VIRTUALLY ALL OF THE MONEY IN nondefense entitlement spending in the federal budget goes to programs for . . . adults. Social Security recipients get $300 billion. Medicare enrollees get $150 billion. Federal retirees get $62 billion. Farmers get $12 billion. Even though the elderly make up only 12 percent and children one quarter of the total U.S. population, fully half of the entire federal budget—or roughly $500 billion—goes to entitlement programs for the elderly, whether they need those programs or not.
No expense is spared the voting senior-citizen lobby: automatic cost-of-living increases in Social Security, free medical care, Meals-on-Wheels for shut-ins, and so on. In contrast, children's programs now receive less than 5 percent of the federal budget. While the U.S. spent $150 billion on Medicare for the elderly in 1994, it spent only $6.1 billion on child nutrition.
And while the newly elected Republicans have vowed never to touch Social Security and other elderly entitlements, the first item on their cost-cutting agenda was welfare for children. It's not surprising, therefore, that while the poverty rate among the elderly has declined dramatically in the past 30 years, the poverty rate among children has skyrocketed—from 14.9 percent in 1970 to 21.9 percent today.
No time for kids
EVEN MORE IMPORTANT THAN MONEY, say experts on children, is time. Children in America are being cheated out of time—time with their parents, time with people who give them unconditional love. Children can grow up poor and still make it. Growing up without enough love, however—without the hugs and stories, the listening—is much tougher.
Stanford economist Victor Fuchs estimates that between 1960 and 1986, American children in white households lost, on average, 10 hours of parental time per week and black children 12 hours. Fuchs attributes this decline largely to the entry of women into the workforce. In 1960, 30 percent of mothers worked outside the home; today, it is estimated that 66 percent of mothers are employed outside the home.
Obviously, for many women these days, working outside the home is not a choice but a necessity for family survival, and "parental time" implies a resource that is provided by fathers and mothers.
NONETHELESS, THE HARD REALITY is that women's departure from the home and into the labor force has had negative, albeit unintended, consequences for many children. The U.S. Census Bureau, for example, reported in 1991 that 8 percent of grade-school children aged 5 to 11 who had employed mothers came home to empty houses.
While feminists may legitimately ask why fathers should not have to be home at 3 p.m. to watch the kids, according to the Census Bureau the "mother's job characteristics are the most important factors in determining if a child is a latchkey kid."
What's more, the lives of the real-life "latchkey" children are not nearly as amusing as that of the inventive and wisecracking 8-year-old played by Macaulay Culkin in the 1991 hit "Home Alone." In real life, latchkey kids are twice as likely to smoke cigarettes, drink alcohol, or try marijuana, the journal Pediatrics reported in 1991.
COVENANT HOUSE'S SISTER MCGEADY thinks that part of the problem with parental neglect today is rooted in the fact that "Americans have very unconsciously shifted the care of their kids over to nannies and preschools and day-care workers and come to assume that their kids don't need as much attention at home."
This shift has led to a generation of teens who suffer from varying degrees of what McGeady refers to as "disconnect"— they don't feel connected to any adult who takes the time to nurture and guide them. That is why Covenant House's approach—literally making a "covenant" with "our kids" to love them and teach them self-reliance—appeals to so many of today's teens, she speculates.
The good news, McGeady adds, is that she is seeing many more parents trying to intervene in their children's lives and become better parents before the big problems arise.
"We are getting more and more calls on our 900-line from parents who just want help being better parents, who say things like, 'I don't know how to talk with my kids,'" McGeady says.
"If I could make one wish, I would start a parents' group at every church and synagogue in this country so that parents could get together and talk, affirm each other, and help each other become better parents."
What's more, parents themselves, if given the choice, would prefer to spend more time with their children. In fact, while $21.8 billion was spent on child care in 1991, the actual proportion of families using organized day care declined significantly in the late 1980s—from 40 percent in 1988 to 35 percent in 1991.
POLLS CONSISTENTLY SHOW THAT PARENTS, when asked what they believe is the best situation for their children, prefer having at least one parent care for young children and not institutionalized day-care facilities.
The actual statistics on child care reveal this. In 1991, the majority of all the children of working mothers under age 5—52.2 percent—were cared for either by their mother at work (8.7 percent), by their father or a relative in their own home (30.4 percent), or by another relative in the relative's own home (13.1 percent). Only 23 percent of children under 5 were cared for in institutionalized day-care facilities.
The national Murphy Brown debate
BUT WHILE THERE IS A GROWING CONSENSUS among public-policy experts, from conservatives to liberals, about what has happened to children in the past decades, the debate about the solutions is being carried out in the thick of America's so-called "culture wars."
Many hard-line feminists bristle at suggestions that their agenda has in any way harmed children. And some feminist leaders are quick to denounce concerns over the plight of America's children to be merely part of the conservative "backlash" to shame women back into the home. Such leaders remain openly contemptuous, for example, of those who worry about the long-term effects of day care.
"Research over the last two decades has consistently found that if day care has any long-term effect on children, it seems to make children slightly more gregarious and independent," asserts Susan Faludi in her influential book Backlash.
IN FALUDI'S ANALYSIS, PSYCHOLOGICAL studies and press reports about the negative effects of day care are merely part of a widespread media conspiracy to stigmatize working women. She casually dismisses concerns by parents that day care might somehow deprive children, especially infants, of needed contact with their mothers.
"Day care's threat to bonding between mother and child was another popular myth," Faludi writes. "But the research offers scant evidence of diminished bonds between mother and child—and suggests that children profit from exposure to a wider range of grown-ups, anyway."
If the issue of women working is not explosive enough politically, the new politics of divorce are even more so. American adults like having the option of divorcing when the spark dies out of their marriages. Feminists find it almost as liberating as men. That's why so many people react to proposals to restigmatize divorce and illegitimacy with nothing less than fury.
Nevertheless, the social-science data shows that, more than any other factor—more than money, social class, or education—the existence of two biological parents in the home is the single greatest predictor for childhood health and happiness.
THE LONG-TERM DATA ON CHILDREN of divorce suggest that divorce damages children not only economically, but also lowers the likelihood they will attend college, maintain a marital commitment themselves, or bond well with their own children.
"We worried about whether or not mom would receive her child-support check, whether our parents' date for tonight would become a breakfast guest tomorrow, whether our little sister would ever remember what it was like to have two parents under one roof," wrote one child of divorce, Lee Gold-berg, in a famous Newsweek essay.
"Part of being adult was not indulging the child in us that hungered for affection. Our generation, it seems, turned to sex for the affection we lacked at home. As we saw it, needing a hug wasn't very adult. Sleeping with someone was."
IN THE MOST COMPREHENSIVE LONGITUDINAL study of the impact of divorce on children to date, "The California Children of Divorce Study," psychologist Judith Wallerstein found that, five years after their parents split up, more than a third of the 131 children she tracked were experiencing moderate to severe depression. Ten years later, a significant number of the young men and women appeared to be drifting and underachieving.
"The emergency in this country—the issue that is affecting children the most—is the disappearance of marriage," says Michael Schwartz, a former public policy analyst for the Free Congress Foundation in Washington, D.C., who recently launched a new prolife advocacy organization.
"The problem is not that kids are hungry, or don't have shoes, or attend lousy schools. All these things are rooted in the fact that we now have a 30 percent illegitimacy rate and even higher divorce rate. The critical problem for children in this country now is that they don't have two parents in the home," Schwartz, a lifelong Democrat, says.
SCHWARTZ IS NOT SANGUINE, however, about how a society that has casually cast aside a social institution that took millennia to evolve could restore it.
"We have got to restore marriage, but obviously, there is no quick fix for this," Schwartz says. "For example, I think we have got to penalize illegitimacy, but we run some very real risks if we start denying AFDC [Aid to Families with Dependent Children] benefits to teenage mothers. This could very well lead to more abortions."
The media may present the traditional two-parent family as a seedbed for alcoholism, incest, and dysfunctional relationships, and celebrate the virtues of "diverse," "alternative" families, but the long-term social scientific data is not nearly as cheerful about stepfamilies.
A study by Canadian researchers Martin Daly and Margo Wilson found that preschoolers in step-families are, in fact, 40 times more likely than children living with biological parents to be sexually or physically abused. And a 1991 survey by the National Commission on Children found that, in real life as opposed to on television, both parents in stepfamilies are less likely to be involved in a child's school life or extracurricular interests.
The high costs of single parenthood
SINGLE MOTHERHOOD, MURPHY BROWN to the contrary, has especially high personal costs for the women who are left to be the sole breadwinner and nurturer—and for their children. At the Kids Place Care Center in Tacoma, Washington, program director Cora Ramirez sees firsthand the pain suffered by many children born to unwed teenage mothers.
"These are very, very angry young children—from the 12-month-olds to the 12-year-olds," Ramirez says. "Some of them are very resistant to being held and loved because they have never experienced these things before. Their mothers are children themselves and really don't understand how to be parents."
KIDS PLACE WAS LAUNCHED BY parishioners from St. Leo's Parish, including Ramirez, out of their desire to help single welfare mothers care for their children, get an education, and eventually become self-supporting.
The parishioners bought an abandoned church building four doors down the street from St. Leo's and converted it into a kid-friendly child-care center.
Since its inception, the center has provided full-time adult supervision, pre-school classes, two hot meals a day, and lots of affection in between for some 400 children between the ages of 12 months and 12 years.
Ramirez boasts that Kids Place "graduates" have gone on to test higher than other city children in preschool.
The bad news, that which makes "things seem to be hopeless," Ramirez says, is that only two of the mothers they've helped are now working in full-time jobs and able to support their children.
But in the quagmire of frightening stories and statistics about child neglect, and all the political rhetoric from both the left and the right, there are signs of hope.
MORE AND MORE PARENTS ARE MAKING big lifestyle decisions—from relocating to more affordable communities to launching home-based businesses to homeschooling or volunteering at their child's school—in order to spend more "quantity" time with their children.
Recent census data shows that more parents of young children are rearranging their work schedules and switching from day care to "fathercare" as well. Parents are also discovering that the "little things" they do in their daily lives to put their "kids first" can have a big impact.
As Sister Rose McGeady tells every parent she meets, "The time you spend every day talking to your small children will be like money in the bank when they reach the difficult teen years."
Time is the one currency the "privileged" kids in Coto de Caza, California, were shortchanged on.—END
© 1997 by Claretian Publications