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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.
Aren't our kids worth
a little investment?
Kevin Clarke
Kara Blain's prekindergarten class has separated into four groups. A few of the boys focus on a plastic playhouse in the center of the schoolroom. Some other kids practice free-form gymnastics in the play area—their sneakers clunking against heads and chests with enough force to make adults wince but which seem to have no effect at all on these guys. Other kids circle a small table where they're hard at work on some coloring books.
Tatiana is using a plastic doll's brush to stamp out strips of Play Doh; Mark and Jocari argue over the ownership of a playhouse figure.
Beatrice is intent over an eyedropper, tapping out bursts of dyed water onto a coffee filter. She's part of a small group of girls similarly worrying over coffee filters, their bright pink smocks abstract reminders of crayon and fingerprint projects of the past.
The kids work and play together well—cheerful and eager for attention. Despite all the activity, no major disputes erupt—the classroom of about 25 preschoolers is an exercise in contained chaos.
Blain will only allow that today is a good day—some days are better, some worse—but even she admits most of the kids in this classroom have come very far. "It's amazing the difference just one year makes—their ability to get along, to share with other kids," says Blain. "A lot of these kids learn at home that if things don't go your way, you physically make things go your way."
She points out one 4-year-old who has hardly stopped talking in the last half hour, excited to have a visitor in the classroom. "Priscilla barely spoke a word when she first came here," Blain says.
The prekindergarten program at the Mary Crane Nursery School has a few modest ambitions: to teach its kids to value themselves and interact peacefully with each other and to get them comfortable with the pace and process of school—essentially to get preschoolers ready for that first big step into their future, the first grade.
"I think that most of them will be ready," Blain says, surveying her gang. "I have a couple who aren't as ready as I'd like them to be, but at least they had the opportunity here.
"The biggest thing at their age," she says, "is building their self-esteem and making them like school."
The kids at Mary Crane come from across the West Side of Chicago. But a good number come from the Lathrop Public Housing Development within which the school is located and where, according to Mary Crane's director, Mary Beltran, the median family income lurks around $7,000 per annum.
"Here you're talking about children being exposed at a very young age to gangs, to drugs, prostitution, people being evicted," says Beltran. "The families here have to worry about the basics," she says. As a result, early childhood "enrichment experiences" aren't too high on their agendas. "They're trying to survive, and they don't have the parenting skills to get kids ready for school."
These are the kids of some of the nation's poorest families. Media reports describe an increasingly bleak future for a lot of these children, but today their easy smiles and happy faces belie all of punditry's gloomy prognostications.
Certainly, these are children who will be facing a great many challenges over the coming years. Maybe some will turn out to be the much-denounced teenage mothers, some perhaps even the "superpredators" described with such fear and revulsion in television and newspaper reports, and some may fall victim to drug addiction or crime along the way.
But today they are just children with the whole world waiting ahead of them and nothing more to worry about than making a coffee-filter butterfly for Mother's Day, and they are bright and beautiful and a delight just to be around.
These small children don't know it, but they are actors in a vast experiment; they are a living lab working out the simple notion that small interventions early on in the lives of children can have tremendous repercussions in their later lives. Proponents say these interventions may be the key to interrupting generational cycles of abuse, poverty, and imprisonment; opponents say they are expensive and futile exercises in social engineering.
This is not simply a polite academic disagreement; it is a public-policy challenge. Eighty-five percent of the funding for Mary Crane comes from state and federal sources. In an era of increasing downward pressure on social spending, those government monies are becoming less reliable sources for intervention and prevention programs like Kara Blain's preschool class.
That's a mistake, say a number of advocates and child-developmental specialists. They argue that the relatively minor expense of early-intervention programs are trivialized by the mammoth social costs they can prevent.
Early-childhood interventions like Head Start are perhaps best known to the public. But as more is being understood about how the infant brain and child psychology develop, some are arguing that other intervention and prevention programs make just as much sense.
Why not a national program in parent training? What about early identification and intervention for children at risk of mental illness, child abuse, or behavioral problems? How about a meaningful recovery program for drug-addicted parents?
Though all of America's kids could probably benefit in some degree from aspects of any of these programs, they could have the greatest impact on those children most at risk because of extreme poverty, hunger, or a history of neglect or abuse. These kinds of comprehensive interventions into children's lives naturally involve a pretty serious social investment, and the final tab for them would be difficult to calculate today.
What we do know today, though, is how much it costs to build more American prisons and to incarcerate greater percentages of American young people. What we do know today are the costs of the nation's multilayered remedial-education programs. What we do know today is the human tragedy of another generation of failure.
Here are four minor investments in the lives of the next generation of Americans that advocates say are not just cost- effective—they're the decent thing to do for children.
Education early on
Almost 30 years ago Craig Ramey began pioneering work in the field of early-childhood education with his work at the Abecedarian Project in North Carolina. Today he remains a leader in the basic science of child development and its practical application in the classroom. At the University of Alabama's Civitan International Research Center, Ramey continues his study of at-risk children, trying to nail down the "biological, intellectual, sociological mechanisms" that spell the difference between educational success and failure in a child's life.
Unfortunately for Ramey, contemporary society is always throwing its own sociopathic curves at the statistical curves he's carefully measuring. Every couple of years he gets cornered into adjusting his work to a new social aberration: How does low infant birth weight affect educational performance? Will infants born crack-addicted score lower on IQ tests? What affect does single motherhood have on academic achievement?
All the same, Ramey thinks he's learned some basic lessons that hold whatever curve a particular child is facing: intervention programs like the Mary Crane school do work, and they work best when they begin early—before 3 years of age—when they last longer, and when they offer children the most intense exposure to new skills and environments.
Ramey adds that programs that are "culturally appropriate" also work best. That pertains to one other component he suggests is necessary to a successful intervention program: parents and their children must be committed to its success and willing to participate. "People evaluate the relevance of a program with their feet," Ramey says. "If people aren't participating, then you've created the wrong kind of program. At their stage or station in life, are families willing to participate?"
Ramey is not satisfied with the scholarship of some critical studies of the long-term efficacy of a few Head Start programs, the most familiar form of early childhood education. He thinks more positive evaluations of Head Start's effect are likely in the near future.
His research on programs more akin to his Abecedarian Project, that is, those that reach children earlier, keep them longer both in terms of duration and hours in the school day, and which include a more comprehensive attempt to address the problems of the child's life outside of school, indicates more positive outcomes. Most current Head Start programs run only half days and are offered to children for one year, usually at age 4. According to research conducted by Ramey and other child-development experts, that's just not enough time to have a lasting impact on a child's academic performance.
Ramey's studies have followed at-risk children from birth to as old as 21. At every level he can track superior educational and developmental achievements among the children who took part in his early-intervention programs compared to demographically similar children who began schooling with no such early educational exposure.
"What we've shown is not only is there good, strong evidence of the prevention of intellectual and developmental problems while the programs are in force, but that there is good, strong evidence for long-term benefits." Early intervention students "show higher levels of cognitive performance, superior performance in both reading and math scores. . . . We've also shown dramatic reductions in children being placed in special education and the number of kids held back a grade." Ramey thinks that the basic components of early education intervention would improve the academic performance of virtually any child. But it is the 2 to 3 percent of children most at risk because of poverty, low birth weight, drug-addicted and single parents who are perhaps most in need of early intervention. Most of these children are concentrated in the poorest of America's urban neighborhoods like the Lathrop Homes.
The demographic factors that put children at risk can be easily identified. The cost-effectiveness of such programs can be well demonstrated even when they're restricted to the long-term savings in remedial-education costs.
But are most of the children who could benefit from early-childhood education like an improved and expanded Head Start or a preschool program like Mary Crane's currently being reached?
"Absolutely not," says Ramey.
"We'll have slots for 30 kids in September," Beltran says, looking ahead to next fall.
And how many kids will be left on the Mary Crane waiting list after those slots are filled?
"About a hundred," she says.
Enhanced day-care
The years before kids become old enough for programs like the Mary Crane Nursery School are no less critical to the future well-being of children.
For better or for worse, because of a collusion of diverse socioeconomic influences, most couples have moved away from the old model of the American family. If June Cleaver ever existed in our imagined past, today she'd be among the legion of U.S. working moms, attempting somehow to balance the often contradictory demands of job and family.
These days many American couples have little choice but to consign their infants to day-care soon after parental leaves expire (that is, if they were lucky enough to get such leave in the first place). To Harry Chugani, a pediatric neurologist at Children's Hospital of Michigan and professor of pediatrics at Michigan's Wayne State University, too many of those infants are being delivered to the care of poorly trained, indifferent, or overwhelmed day-care workers at precisely their most critical developmental moment.
While it would be ideal for each child to be cared for by an attentive, loving parent, the days when at least one parent stayed home to provide all the nurturing and attention required by infancy's developing brain seem to have become economically unfeasible for many. If that be so, says Chugani, wouldn't it make a wise social investment to ensure that all American infants were being placed where some guided, substitute nurturing and attentiveness could be provided, what he calls an "enhanced day-care" program?
Chugani suggests such enhanced day-care could be opened in churches and community centers throughout the nation, perhaps tapping into each community's retired labor force to ensure the kind of small student-to-teacher ratio that success requires.
"There is an opportunity that is missed even in the regular, ideal, well-to-do people's homes—certainly missed in underprivileged homes. There is a very important window of opportunity that is not being taken advantage of." This window closes very quickly, beginning before birth and shutting tighter with each passing year, when trillions of an infant's neurons are developing, waiting for experience to stamp out its pattern on them.
By exposing infants to a variety of positive early experiences, Chugani explains, parents and child-care workers do more than encourage the development of an infant's intellect, they participate in a kind of "hard-wiring" of the still-growing infant brain, in the development of its "positive circuitry." Infants who enjoy the cooing attention and interaction that promotes this positive circuitry, he argues, will have fewer educational and emotional problems in the future and psyches "wired" to focus on the positive aspects of human life and relationships.
And those kinds of enhanced encounters should continue throughout early childhood. Training in the arts, particularly music, and second languages should begin no later than 5 or 6, says Chugani, when a child's mind is most receptive to this kind of intellectual development. "Whoever dictated that second-language training should only start in high school?" he asks, marveling. "It's ridiculous."
At the least, not taking advantage of this literally once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to participate in the physical and emotional development of the infant mind means that the true human potential of many American children will never be explored. "There are geniuses who are never realized," says Chugani. "They are among us; they got all the right genes for it; they didn't get the right exposure."
And what happens to the infants who don't get the "right exposure," don't have the positive experiences, or worse, who are, like the children at the Lathrop Homes, exposed "to gangs, to drugs, prostitution, people being evicted"?
"The opposite works just as well," Chugani says. "The same rules apply [with negative exposures]. If you are exposing children to aggression, you are in fact reinforcing and building connections to serve those kinds of behaviors."
Infant intervention
Stephen Mandler is a psychiatrist with a unique practice, but one whose importance is only beginning to be understood. Mandler's patients are too young to worry over Freudian theory, and if he's successful, they'll never have to.
At the Menninger Clinic in Topeka, Kansas, Mandler works with infants from 0 to 3, trying to resolve problems in the relationships between new parents and their children before they become lifelong patterns of miscues and miscommunications, patterns of anger, frustration, and often failure. Noting that most of the people who end up in America's criminal-justice system are adults suffering from untreated mental illness or people who were abused as children, Mandler believes his work could be the kind of intervention that prevents a raft of future social ills. But he complains it has proved difficult to promote the importance of his "infant psychotherapy," or, for that matter, of addressing the astonishing level of untreated mental illness in the U.S. in general.
"We see the gains [from intervention] ten years from now; there's no immediate payoff, and it's difficult to get attention [for this problem]. . . . A depressed mother can't focus on the needs of her child, but we don't see that as a problem until the kid gets to school and gets diagnosed with ADD [Attention Deficit Disorder]."
That inattention is not without its costs, as Mandler suggests. According to one report, in 1992 there were over 400,000 students with Serious Emotional Disturbance (SED) in U.S. schools enrolled in special-education programs. The same report adds, however, that figure only represents a fraction of the 8 to 12 percent of all American school children who exhibit some symptoms of emotional disturbance who could probably have benefited from an intervention program.
Kids with SED have the highest rate of high-school absenteeism and course failure, earn lower grade-point averages, and drop out of high school at twice the rate of the general school population. It's no surprise that, as a result, few continue to college. Young adults diagnosed with SED as children are less likely to be married or employed than their peers and more likely to have been arrested.
A big part of Mandler's work involves teaching parents how to be parents and not their parents. "You have to look at it in terms of generations. Your parenting style in general will reflect your experience as a child, regardless of your education. If you were neglected as a child, you won't be able to identify cues in an infant or child that are essential. They're going to have needs or wants or issues, and you're going to miss them."
These problems are especially true, he says, among teenage mothers, often no more than children themselves. "They often interpret crying as anger or rejection—their baby not loving them—not that their baby is hungry or in pain." That kind of misinterpretation can lead to the so-called Shaken Baby Syndrome, when frustrated parents shake their crying infants so violently they cause hemorrhaging in the neck and brain, even death.
Mandler steps in between parents and the child with a particular emotional or behavioral problem that's making parenting difficult—so difficult frequently that a tragic cycle of parental frustration and infant abuse begins. He says that five to ten sessions of play therapy and observation with parents and their infants are often all that is required to prevent a lifetime of misery for both.
He tells the tale of one single mother with twins. Her common-law husband was not the boys' father and at best was indifferent to their progress. For her own part, she was overwhelmed by the demands of caring for the two infants, who plagued her with hours of unceasing crying.
Mandler says this patient became so desperate she would often lock herself in the bathroom with the shower running to drown out the noise of her children's crying. When she began to fear that she would abuse her children, she sought help from her social worker and was referred to Mandler. He began working with the couple, unraveling the mother's own history of child abuse—one that included being left alone to care for her twin brothers.
Mandler also discovered that this young mother allowed her infants to cry from hunger because a child-rearing book advised her only to feed them every five hours. "I worked with her and her boyfriend to teach her that the babies weren't angry and screaming at her, they were just hungry, and that she should feed them more often, not just every five hours like the book said. And the boyfriend began to understand why she was so stressed."
Mandler says there has been a tremendous improvement in this family's home life as a result of his work. "These two babies now will have a much better chance as they grow older," Mandler says. Four lives altered most likely for the best "in just five or 10 sessions. I think that's pretty cost-effective."
However else the U.S. determines to invest in its children, Mandler joins other child-development experts in urging that parent training become a broader component of American life. "I don't think that the ultimate answer is to get more infant psychotherapists; that will just help control things," Mandler says. "There needs to be a broader program for all parents."
For his part, Mandler guides a sort of self-help group for new fathers where they can share experiences and strategies and learn some basic child behavior and child-rearing theory.
It's the kind of program Mandler thinks can be replicated in communities across the nation—parent support groups that take the place of family networks which may no longer be in place. "It's very helpful to have this sort of grandmotherly advice and support . . . but when people go home with a new baby these days, the grandparents are often in another city.
"In the old days, mothers could at least expect to spend several days in the hospital after delivery, and the nurses would talk to them and give them some basic pointers about child care, showing parents how to hold the baby and talk to the baby. These days the mothers are forced out of the hospital right after delivery."
Even the smallest of parent training can go a tremendous way to improving a child's mental and physical well-being. Mandler notes one study comparing parents who spent just 15 minutes talking to their doctors about proper baby care with those who didn't get even that small chance. A year later, the "15-minute children" were demonstrably healthier than their counterparts.
Preventing the worst
Child abuse in the United States manifests itself in a depressing variety of ways. Certainly one of the most devastating to children is the abuse and neglect that results because of the drug addiction of a parent or guardian.
On Chicago's near West Side, a unique group home has been established in a one-time convent. Catholic Charities' "Forever Free" program offers housing to 15 mothers who are recovering from substance abuse.
What distinguishes this home from similar programs is that these mothers get to live with their children while they recover. Counselors here explain that having the kids with them relieves their clients of the primary concern of how their children are being cared for and allows them to focus on their treatment; the mothers will tell you that they simply could not imagine living any other way.
"This place is blessed," Jacqueline Holman, 26, says. "They have brought me a long way." That's not hard to believe when Holman finishes describing her life as an alcohol and drug abuser, as a mother more interested in where she could find more crack to smoke than what was happening to her children in her absence.
That's a picture that's hard to jibe with the one she presents today surrounded by her three kids in the Forever Free playroom. "I wasn't taking care of them," she says. "I really had no feelings of care for them. I had no feeling for nothing but drugs. . . . I lived to use and I used to live."
Romping around the playroom, shouting greetings at a visitor, and rolling across the top of a couch for a closer look, her children show no suggestion today of the neglect they must have endured. But the pain they've suffered still worries Holman. She's grateful that while she gets the treatment she needs, the Forever Free program also provides counseling for her children, helping them understand what happened to their mother and adjust to the new life she is trying to build.
"The younger ones were too little to remember a lot of it, but I worry about my oldest, my daughter. She's still going through a lot of pain."
Holman's low point came when she saw a vision of her children's future that was a replay of her own past. "In my worst addiction," Holman remembers, "when I was striking them and yelling at them all the time and just leaving them alone when I went out for drugs, I remembered my mother leaving me when she would go out drinking and how I felt when she just left me alone with my little brother."
She decided then that was one family pattern she was going to break.
Forever Free is described as a "wholistic" program in its brochure, and it lives up to the word. Mothers not only are enrolled in a variety of programs aimed at beating their addictions, they also return to school for GEDs or to develop work skills through other Catholic Charities programs, and they attend a full series of parent training. Family counseling here includes not just their children but the adult members of the mothers' immediate families so that they don't return to the same family environment which might have contributed to or driven their addiction in the first place.
"These mothers come to us with nothing," says Forever Free's director, Josephine Abi-Rached. "You should see them when they come here: they have no clothes, they haven't eaten, they don't even have ID. We have to do a whole lot of work with them; we have to teach them how to be parents."
"I was scared and my kids were scared," Holman says, recalling when she first arrived. "But they gave us so much love and support . . ." Holman smiles and shakes her head.
Mothers graduate from Forever Free into follow-up programs; Catholic Charities continues to support them for as long as two years as they find work, get their own apartments, and basically reenter mainstream life. Like other intervention programs, nothing at Forever Free happens quickly or inexpensively, but Abi-Rached can't imagine how this work could be done any other way if it is going to be successful at all.
The bottom line
Unfortunately, in an era of diminishing government budgets, a growing resistance to social spending, and a continuing focus on short-term results, comprehensive programs like these, which require patience and whose complete impact is difficult to quantify, become more difficult to defend. But if cost-effectiveness is to be the primary guide for future public investment, the proponents of these programs feel there is little to argue against them.
Every $3 spent on early childhood education, advocates say, saves the government $6 in remedial education costs.
And what would the working parents of the Lathrop Homes do without the Mary Crane Nursery School? "Who knows what they'd do," Mary Beltran says. "A lot of them don't have extended families [who could watch their children]. They'd be on welfare without this program."
All Jacqueline Holman can add is that without Forever Free, "I'd probably still be out there [using drugs], and my kids would be with DCFS [the Department of Children and Family Services]."
Eighty percent of the mothers who have graduated from Forever Free are living independently and still doing well as long as four years later. The other 20 percent who have had drug or alcohol relapses are still connected to the program, still getting help. All of their graduates have been reunited with children who were in foster care. There are 15 mothers currently enrolled in Forever Free today. Abi-Rached says she has a waiting list of 200 more.
The cost-effectiveness of intervention programs seems to be beyond serious dispute. A report from the Center for the Future of Children calculates that one early childhood-education program, the Perry Preschool Project in Ypsilanti, Michigan, cost $12,356 per family but yielded social benefits in reduced education costs, employment compensation, welfare, and criminal-justice expenses of over $108,000 per family (These results were determined by comparing the adult "outcomes" of Perry school children with a control group of demographically similar children). In 1995, the federal government spent $3.5 billion on Head Start. That's serious cash, but it was still only enough to enroll 30 percent of 1995's eligible children in the program.
The question persists: why, in a country with enough wealth and will to bankroll billions on weapons systems that don't even work, does it remain politically treacherous to argue the value of a comparatively minuscule investment in the lives of children?
In 1995, it cost $4,345 to send a child to Head Start for one year. The cost to house an inmate at a minimum security prison for one year was about $24,000 (and nearly $75,000 at a maximum-security facility). Why does it continue to be so difficult to decide which investment is the worthier to make?
Specialists in child development like Stephen Mandler say they know how to identify the children who are most at risk and they know what it takes to help them. All that remains is to have the will to try.—END
© 1999 by Claretian Publications
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