DO AMERICANS REALLY LIKE CHILDREN?

By Kenneth Keniston

Chairman & Executive Director,

the Carnegie Council on Children, New Haven, CT

Reprinted from Today's Education: Journal of the National Education Association
 

I wish to pose a question that has preoccupied me for the last couple of years: Do we Americans really like children?

After considerable reflection, I suggest that the answer is: Yes, our sentiments are to be taken as evidence. Yes, we do like children, even love them --if the test is in the values we profess and in the “way" we cherish, celebrate, and pass on from generation to generation. However, I am prepared to assert that in spite of our tender sentiments, we do not really like children. We do not as a nation really love them in practice, and I am sure that all of you will agree that what we do must finally provide the evidence that answers the question.

Why is it that we, as a nation, allow so much inexcusable wretchedness among our children in practice, while at one and the same time we, as individuals, nurture and profess such tender and loving and solicitous sentiments for our children?

Broadly, I think that the answer is this: Our sentiments for children have been rendered ineffective by the stronger influences and forces of the economic system that have grown up willy-nilly among us.

I have been preoccupied with the subject of American children since I joined the Carnegie Council on Children three years ago. The Council has been attempting to understand the unmet needs and problems of American children and families. Such is the assignment that sent me looking for answer to the question, Do Americans really like children? Now let me give you a bit more detail about the practices that impel me to the negative answer I just offered.

Let me start by mentioning our scandalously high infant mortality.  Our rate is the fifteenth among 42 nations having comparable data, which is almost twice the rate of Sweden. Infant mortality rates for American whites are much higher than the national average, and mortality rates of nonwhite infants born in America's 20 largest cities approach the rates in urban areas of underdeveloped countries. We are among the very few modern nations that do not guarantee adequate health care to mothers and children.

Next, let me mention malnutrition. A United States Department of Agriculture survey shows that between 1955 and 1965, a decade of rising  agricultural productivity, the percentage of diets deficient in one more essential nutrients actually increased. Millions of American children today remain hungry and malnourished.

So it goes: our sentiments of caring to the contrary.

We say that children have a right to the material necessities of life and yet of all age groups in America, children are the most likely to live in abject poverty. In fact, one-sixth of them I live below the officially defined poverty line. One-third lives below that level defined by the government as "minimum but adequate". And we are the only industrial democracy that lacks of a system of income supports for families with children. In this area, we are an underdeveloped nation.

Our school system, of course, is supposed to equalize opportunity for all children poor and rich. Yet, on a variety of standard achievement tests the absolute gap between rich and poor and between black and white students as well, is greatest at the twelfth grade level. Far from equalizing opportunity, our school system augments the inequalities with which children enter schools.

Why are such things so? I have suggested that the answer lies in our economic system. Let me examine this suggestion in the context of three problems, which I will call the depopulation of the family, the intellectualization of the child, and the perpetuation of exclusion.

The depopulation of the family is a label for what others call the disintegration of the family, the death of the family, or the rapidly changing family. I personally believe that American families are alive and kicking, though struggling against enormous disintegrating pressures.

It is a simple fact that last year for the first time in our history more than half of all mothers of school-age children in two-parent families worked outside the home, mostly full-time.

Another trend is the disappearance of non-parental relatives from families. In 1949, about 50 percent of single parent families with children under six were headed by a relative other than the mother or father. By 19__, this proportion had dropped to 20 percent.

Let me cite a final statistic: In 1960, about l out of every 20 women giving birth was not married; by 1972, this ratio had increased to l out of every 8. Taken together, these statistics mean that more and more children are spending more and more time in homes empty of people to look out for them.

What has replaced the people in the family? For one, television has become a kind of flickering blue parent for many children. Indeed, this technological babysitter occupies more of the waking hours of American children than any other single influence --including both parents.

A second replacement is, of course, the peer group. Other unrelated children play a larger and larger role in socializing the young. The third replacement for the child's family members includes school, preschools, and the various child care arrangements that must be made by working parents. And, finally, growing numbers of children simply receive no care at all. These we call latchkey children. They stay alone in empty houses, often locked in, while their parents work. For those who run loose, the street is their playground. Although many factors have helped transform the American family from the largely self-sufficient unit it once was, the forces of our economic system are the most fundamental of all. Indeed, our very perception of the family --and the dramatic change in that perception --can be traced to shifting economic imperatives.

In colonial times, the family functioned simply as a single production unit. But this changed with the emergence of, first, a national agricultural market and, second, the industrial epoch. Soon the family was redefined as a nurturing oasis set apart from the workaday world, a retreat to which the man of the house repaired at day's end. And a funny thing happened to Mother along the way to industrialization. She now became the guardian of the hearth and the primary socializer of the children.

Meanwhile, and also back in the 19th century, we developed the first universal public school system to replace many of the family's traditional functions. From the start, this school system was explicitly justified in economic terms by early advocates, such as Horace Mann. School was a way to provide trained workers and to socialize all children further into American values.  And what happened to Mother after her exaltation? Was she free to remain at home and fulfill that heroic role? No way. In great numbers, she pioneered the entry of women into the paid labor force.

Mothers went to work back then for the same reason that most mothers do so today --they needed the money. The highest rates of female participation in the labor force occur in families of average and below average income.  The entry of mothers and other women into the occupational system seems to me irreversible. In many cases, it is desirable. To my knowledge, no one on our Council believes women should not have the same opportunities for productive work that men have.

Our effort is not to condemn but to try to understand. Certainly, we have come to understand that the economic forces at play on us are sharply at odds with our sentiment that children should receive consistent care and nurturance in and from the family.  If families in America are to become more than dormitories, quick-service restaurants, and consumption units, we must look, not to the negligence of American parents, but to the pressures of the economy for the main explanation. And if this is allowed to happen --and it is happening at a hastening rate --what does it say about our real attitude toward children?

Now I move to another subject and ask this: While we have been depriving our children of what they might obtain from a complete and vital family, what have we been doing to them at school? Lately we have been accomplishing what I call the intellectualization of the child I believe we are witnessing a growing emphasis upon the IQ-as–a-brain; upon the cultivation of narrowly defined cognitive skills and attitudes; and, above all, upon the creation, through our preschools and schools, of a race of children whose value and progress are judged primarily by their capacity to do well on tests of intelligence, reading readiness, or school achievement.

Although children are whole people --full of fantasies, imagination, artistic capacities, physical grace, social inclinations, cooperation, initiative, industry, love and joy --the overt and, above all, the covert structure of our system of preschooling and schooling largely ignores these other human potentials in order to concentrate on cultivating a narrow form of intellect.

Our inordinate  preoccupation with intellectual development and our presumption that it can be-handily  measured have not only short-changed the general population of children in our schools but have also tended to hamper such efforts as we have made to give special help to those children needing it most. I am thinking of those programs, such as Head Start, that were

launched in the 1960's after our rediscovery of poverty and racism. And I am thinking of our subsequent evaluation of those programs or--to keep it specific--of Head Start.

Most of us know that evaluators examined the results of Head Start and deemed it "gravely wanting simply because it failed to raise--permanently--the IQ-scores of the children in the program. Well, the fact is-- according to the testimony of its architect, Julius Richmond --that Head Start as originally conceived had many purposes, among which the raising of IQ scores and the developing of reading capacity were only secondary. This program was intended, more fundamentally, to give power to parents, to broaden the experience of children in non-cognitive ways, and to provide them with many services such as health and dental care. It would seem that the critics were impelled to overlook these other factors by the veritable obsession of our society with cognitive development and with standard tests as a measurement of the educational well-being of the young.

The fashionable theory underlying much of the valuation of Head Start attributes the plight of those children to something called "cultural deprivation. It is certainly easy to see that the term culturally-deprived has come to be just another euphemism for poor and black. And if seems clear to me, at least, that the reason some families cannot provide their children with intellectual stimulation at breakfast and cultural riches at dinner is that they are blighted by and bogged down in poverty.

Now I, for one, see poverty as a manifestation, not of our cultural system, but of our economic system. So I suggest that it is extremely odd to speak of cultural deprivation as the primary problem facing destitute families, whether in inner-city ghetto or in impoverished Appalachian hollows. The cost of not properly identifying the root causes is manifold. In the case of Head start, we often stigmatized those whom the program was intended to help.

I have emphasized Head start, however, to underscore the tendency in our society arising from our obsession with cognitive development, with test scores. It is our tendency to rank and rate children, to reward and stigmatize them, according to their ability to do well in the narrow tasks that schools (or we psychologists) believe can be measured quantitatively.

This tendency to rank and rate is to be found at every level of education.  The ability to do well on tests is a primary determination of the child's progress and position in the world of school and, to a large degree, later on in the world of adults. We talk a great deal about the other human qualities of children, but when push comes to shove, the child who has learned to master test-taking gets the goodies --promotions special tracks, educational credentials. Indeed, our schools are so-structured that without the ability to get good "objective-test scores" or high "grade point averages”, a child is condemned to almost certain failure. Ironically, this fact lives next door to our professed devotion to the qualities we say we value: physical vitality, caring, imagination, resourcefulness, cooperation, moral commitment.

Why is this? Once again, I would not blame teachers or parents, but would point to the pressures of a modern technological economy, to our assumptions about measurement, and to the tracking and selection procedures for our occupational system. Ours is a highly developed technological society in which we have adopted, usually without knowing it, the implicit ideology of what has been called "technism”.   This ideology places central value on what can be measured--with numbers-- assigns numbers to what cannot be measured and redefines everything else as self-expression or entertainment. The development of so-called objectives measures (which are, in fact, not at all objective) of IQ and performance is an expression of this broader propensity. 

Thus, we measure the effectiveness of education by whether or not it produces income increments, not by whether it improves the quality of life of those who are educated.  We have allowed quantitative standards, so central to our economic system and our way of thinking about it, to become the principal yardstick of our definition of our children's worth.

A related characteristic of our highly developed technological economy is its need for some mechanism to sort individuals into various occupational slots. By the time a poor, black, handicapped, or uncared for child reaches fourth or fifth grade, a consistent position in the bottom track of the grade has become an almost inescapable adult destiny. The intellectualization of the child reflects the school’s role in classifying and sorting the labor force. 

Now let me turn specifica1y to the problem of the children born in the cellar of our society. Our sentiments in their behalf are always touching; our treatment of them is heartbreaking. The tragic truth is that this one-quarter of all American children today are being brought up to fail.  This figure is an estimate, but we believe it to be on the conservative side. I am talking about children who are being deprived of the opportunity to realize a significant portion of their human potential. One out of every seven children in America is nonwhite, and these children must somehow cope with the persistent institutional and psychological racism of our society. One out of every three children lives below the minimum adequate budget established by the Department of Labor and must face the multiple burdens of poverty.

One out of every 12 children is born with a major or minor handicap, and all of these children face the stigmas and social disabilities that accompany any handicap. One out of every 10 children has a learning disability.  Approximately one-quarter of all American children do not receive anything approaching adequate health care, nor did their mothers before they were born --whence our disgraceful infant mortality rates. Millions of children live in sub-standard housing. Millions attend deplorable schools. The process by which children are disabled in our society is no mystery. Physical vitality, emotional caring, resourcefulness, and moral commitment in the child are undercut.

The process is cumulative. Inadequate prenatal care of mothers increases the chances that children will be born dead, defective, or sickly. Early malnutrition decreases the chances for robust physical vigor. Inadequate health care increases the chances of illness or transforms minor illness into permanent handicaps. The child born of poor, non-white, handicapped, or of emotionally-drained parents faces steeper odds against survival to adulthood.

Children of poverty are denied those needs that most Americans consider fundamental. They live in a world more dangerous by far than that of the prosperous. It may be a ghetto world of broken stair railings, busy streets, lead paint, and prowling rats or a rural world where families cannot maintain the minimal levels of public health considered necessary a century ago. Such a world turns off initiative and strips children of the eagerness that more fortunate youngsters can bring to learning. And it teaches many children that the best defense against a hostile world is constant offense --belligerent aggressiveness, sullen anger, deep mistrust, and readiness for violence.

Such children are systematically trained for failure. They learn that the best strategy for coping is never to venture out, to take no risks, or to be constantly on the attack.  This pathetic sense-of-self and this view of the world is in fact an accurate perception of the messages our society gives these children.  Success stories --the poor boy who made it, the Blacks who are a tribute to their race, the handicapped who made contributions to society --reassure us now and then that the poor do get ahead. But such stories are exceptional.

The fact of exclusion would cause us no grief if we were as dedicated to gross inequality, if we were eager to waste human potential.  But once again I am only reminding you of realities that sharply contradict our sentiments and values.

The themes that dominate our socia1 and political history sing with our commitment to equality and -fair play. Nothing in our constellation of basic values even hints that our society should impose special burdens upon special children. How, then, can we understand the perpetuation of exclusion?

One answer put forward for almost two centuries in America, that those at the bottom belong there because they lack virtue, industriousness, or talent. But no thoughtful person can accepts unjust explanations. And here I suggest, once again, that the exclusion is not the result of individual inadequacy or immorality but rather of how our society works, the way it has worked for more than a century.

Let me point to one cold and significant fact: The wealth and income in this nation has not changed materially in 150 years.  It has not been changed by our general promises of equal opportunity, by our efforts at schooling, by general increases in our national prosperity, or by all of our efforts to reform and change and uplift those at the bottom of society. And thus it seems to me that the key explanation of exclusion in the nature of our economic system and of our unthinking accepts the ideology that buttresses it. Our system, as it has worked, has a large pool of drudges--and we have provided them. By the customs and laws and policies that perpetuate exclusion, we have created individuals and families driven by economic need to accept menial, dead-end, low-pay, insecure, hazardous, and boring work.

There are menial and boring jobs to be done in every society.  The question, therefore, is not whether such jobs exist; the question therefore, is not whether such jobs exist; the question is whether they are to be filled by paying decent wages to those who do them impelling them or by impelling them to be done by those desperate souls we keep in chronic need.

  We must acknowledge how well our system has worked, given its goals.  It has made us the most prosperous and technologically advanced nation in world history.   Materially, we have profited, but we must realize that the profit has been reaped at costs that do not appear on corporate ledger sheets. These hidden costs consist of the misery and despair and hunger and want of that vast segment made up of those of us whom I called the excluded.

In the long run, the price of exclusion is enormous—not only in dollars laid out for the remedial services, prisons, and mental hospitals, but also in the anguish and pain exacted by social tension and unrest and discontent.  And, finally, this nation that pays a moral and human price, simply by tolerating a system that wastes the potential of many of the next generation.

In each of the three problems discussed—the depopulation of the family; the intellectualization of the child; the perpetuation of exclusion—I have  suggested that the search for causes leads us not to blame the individual but the workings of that economic system, which for better and worse,  pervades our national existence. And now let me conclude simply by stating and underscoring my belief that if these problems mentioned have are to be effective1y solved, we must start to change the workings and assumptions of our economic system.

I believe that the beginning step is to recognize the way in which families and children have become the victims of our system. But even this first step is not going to be easy, for we Americans have been profoundly influenced by a tradition of individualism that makes it hard for us to perceive the larger causes of social ills.

Since our very founding we have emphasized the freedom of the individual, the opportunities of the individual, and the responsibilities of the individual. And, historically, we have also invariably tended to credit primarily the individual for his or her place on the social ladder.  And this of course, has given rise to our long custom of blaming those of us who have wound up suffering financial or social or moral perplexities. Out of that perception has come the long --and unsuccessful --history of our efforts to cure our social ailments by reforming and uplifting those individuals whom we have viewed as short on character or morality.

I believe it is time to see that there are certain social and economic forces that none of us individually can resist. And I think it is now indispensable for us to see that mill ions of American children and their parents who suffer unmet needs should not be blamed for crippling situations that are in fact caused by us all within this system.

No doubt individualism can and should continue to be a cherished value of this society. But it seems to me that it is time for us to behave like a family of related people rather than like a collection competing individuals. It is time for old-style individualism to give way to old-style sense of community.

All that this would entail, in fact, would be for us to translate those abundant and tender statements of ours into practice.  Then it might be said that we really like chi1dren.