Paid Parenthood: Cui Bono? (Special Book Review)

...So that the malnourished are not made to feel they have been singled out by the government, all citizens will be entitled to tax-supported nutrition...

...Unfortunately, such a program might well result in an increase in the number of ill-prepared teenage parents...

...Nowhere in the report is there any suggestion that the growing numbers of poor, pregnant teenagers who condemn their children to poverty and ignorance are making a cultural, rather than an economic, decision, or that the decision is one which society at large may reject, or at least not subsidize...

...They usually surprise themselves (and shock their childless friends) with their new concern for the child as victim of the criminal, rather than for the criminal as victim of society...

...The presidency, for good or ill, is the state, not the office...

...Now he finds himself, having served himself with zeal, naked to his enemies...

...Renaldo the bartender mixes a mean concoction called a "Boa Constrictor," a series of which we consume, listening to a pickup band of local musicians...

...Where is the individual child—human, citizen—in all this...

...Of course, it need scarcely be added that a man drawing on the spiritual strength of the nation is mistaken to eulogize a small-town hustler like Lance whose very physical appearance summed him up...

...Not to worry, the camp crew laughs...

...No Caribbean cruise, this...

...A benign mother eagle, in another cartoon, broods over her baby birds...

...For instance, most people whose instincts are sound will, as soon as they become parents, begin to hate the drug pusher rather than pity him...

...What has Carter done but talk and dissemble...

...To save the American family it seems necessary not only to abolish poverty, but also to equalize income...

...It requires, in fact, nothing less than a massive redistribution of income...

...It has found this institution to be suffering from poverty, ill-health, and social disorganization...

...What sounds radical to some now will, in the minds of those who absorbits ideas while young, be merely the "common sense" of a decade into the future...

...He has tutored himself in electoral tactics...

...His legislation, so broad and portentous in its concept, so inept and crude in its execution, has fallen to the floor in sticky disarray...

...Public opinion—even elite opinion—is skeptical of such programs as never before...

...Action, however, and particularly action allied with power, is a sensitive proposition...

...It will be Peruvian owned and operated, of course...

...It is apparent, first of all—and surely the Council knows it—that there has been a steady erosion of political support for "welfare state" programs, certainly for the idea of massive income transfers...

...Wright made Lima something of a second home, doing more for U.S.-Latin American relations than Rosalynn Carter could achieve in a lifetime...

...The style of both prose and illustration reflects its common source with "Sesame Street" and "The Electric Company" in the Carnegie Foundation...

...But they remain the stuff of folklore nonetheless...

...lizards devour insects...

...Why does the Carnegie Council not direct our attention to this task...

...For example, national health care will be dispensed through a network of community health agencies which, according to the Council, will also enhance "racial, class, and cultural integration...

...Carter has shot himself prodigiously over the landscape, still, a year into office, habitually referring to his campaign, still searching for the photo opportunity so important to his pollsters...

...Now, perhaps, what society seems unwilling to do for some of our children, it may still be willing to do—for all our children...

...The Council and the interests it represents —the academy, the foundations, the social welfare bureaucracy—say to the parents of America: "If only we had 'their' power and money, your children would benefit...

...Amazon Journal: A Tourist's Odyssey Iquitos, Peru—Twenty-one years ago Paul Wright took off from Southern California to ride his motorcycle to the tip of South America and back...

...He is well regarded as a major promoter of tourism to the region, and in his office here in Iquitos, the first major port on the Upper Amazon, he has employed several young Peruvians to work on his newly launched Amazon River Cruise and Amazon Safari Camp...

...But they've got the Holiday Inn trademark—just as in Lima there is a Sears store—and they're counting on a wave of adventuresome tourists...

...It should suffice to note that when parents lull their children to sleep with televisions in their bedrooms in order to buy time for their own, similarly anomic activities, no vital vision is informing family life...

...How long, indeed, can he endure and prevail...

...Carter, the eternal aspirant, has no sense of the presidency—what it is, what it means and can be...

...Its conclusions are presented as merely the widening and flowering of old Americanism, with a sort of Time-essay-level pop history lesson on previously controversial and now accepted ideas...

...How, then, does the Carnegie Council propose to diminish this instinct, which is to say, diminish the parent's natural resistance to a scheme that would give to the state many traditional parental and family responsibilities...

...He has the sort of ability that might serve the governorship of Georgia...

...The Council is "confident" that the "collective wisdom" of the nation's leaders will find a way to control the inevitable inflation...

...Changes in family organization and durability are said to originate in the economic system...

...An intra-Peruvian airline is named after him...

...The Council's recommendations, if accepted, will act to break down that personal sense of parental responsibility which is perhaps the last provision of nature for the protection of the species...

...Modern-day bureaucratic Fagins, however, resort to a subtler method of profiting from children, financially and otherwise...

...Finally I grow so weary I couldn't care if a real boa were nestled in my room...

...Is this not a social pathology which our society ought not further to promote...

...the Council believes that the stigma of even relative poverty is an unacceptable burden...

...It is the primeval Upper Amazon, still largely uncharted since the days when such hearty Kenneth E. Grubbs, Jr., is an editorial writer for the Orange County Register in California...

...Further, in the Council's view, there persist certain "myths" of equal opportunity and family self-sufficiency that retard the politicization necessary to improve economic and, therefore, familial well-being...

...He has, by so exaggerating the significance of the Panama Canal treaty, nearly insured its failure...

...If parents will not own their children, will not control and guide their physical, passional, intellectual, and spiritual lives, will the committee...

...When Fagin organized the children of London to pick the pockets of prosperous citizens, he enticed the youngsters with sweets and shelter, while oozing malevolence and greed...

...He decided the Latin continent was insufficiently serviced by the tourist trade, so he started his own company, Wright Way Tours, headquartered in Glendale, California...

...A lizard in your quarters is good for you...

...Cartography is imperfect: Down in Brazil, as recently as last year, they discovered a 400-mile river, one of the countless tributaries of the Amazon...

...The influence of this report will arise also from the appeal of its rhetoric...

...The Council's book is evidence that the cruel process continues, this time using not just a class, or a race, but all our children...

...It is thus likely that the Council perceives the need for a new rallying point, a new agenda for reviving old political enthusiasms...

...Some day Jimmy Carter and his brigade may reflect on the enterprise they have presumed, and shiver in apprehension...

...Yet a close reading of the book reveals less obvious, but ultimately more important, political motives...

...It is a child's sense of efficacy which, more than anything else, gives him the emotional stamina needed for the long haul...

...They were back in the filing cabinet, waiting for use...

...The American Spectator January 1978 11 Ironically, the message will be especially well received by many of the affluent—those whose children, despite orthodontia and psychotherapy, experienced in the 1960s a period of wrenching isolation from family, caused not by the absence of money, but by a massive spiritual blackout...

...European explorers as Alfred Wallace and Henry Bates braved the jungle territory...

...unequal distribution of wealth...

...Blended with the incomparable sounds of the jungle, the music and the laughter carry you off in an exquisite escape from the modern world...

...and now there are a few signs the bust cycle will be ending...

...Certainly no one would need to defer parenthood beyond the age of puberty in order to be sure he or she could earn a living first...

...arter has appealed to everyone and satisfied no C one...

...But why all this profound discontent with things as they are...

...His administration is a curious, pasted-up amalgam of Democratic bureaucrats, zealots, and Georgia wheeler-dealers, the latter probably best personified by the late Bert Lance, a man who managed to carry banking practices into even further disrepute...

...He's nowhere...

...It reflects, in part, the impulse of a portion of the educated American elite to commit an act of aggression against itself...

...He had been a political and financial fixer for Jimmy Carter, always ready with cash and contacts, and so became Carter's "closest" friend, a man the President claimed to know "as if he was [sic] my own brother...

...Simply put, the Council believes that the family has already lost control of its own affairs, but to all the wrong people—to agribusiness, drug companies, commercial television networks, nuclear and chemical industries, and multi-national corporations...

...It is a repository of the national will, of symbols, of national dignity, and—in varying degrees—of passions...

...When I say that Carter is ahistorical I consider him in this way: Let us imagine that the art of government is a fortunate combination of events...

...they measure distance by the four days' time spent on the river...

...There are reminders of the long-gone rubber boom (Wright's building was designed by Eiffel himself...

...With similar intentions, latter-day entrepreneurial Fagins cheerily sell Corny-Snaps by offering children lumps of sugar...

...The plans for income redistribution are accompanied by large-scale federal programs for the delivery of services...

...And for very good reason...

...Kenneth E. Grubbs, Jr...

...Suzanne H. Woolsey, Daedalus, Spring 1977...

...The sight is almost enough to make me rejoin the Constrictor camaraderie...

...Dependency, no matter how benign, is the opposite of efficacy...

...Probably not a hundred Americans have come to this area as tourists...

...In the section on guaranteed jobs, a cartoon Uncle Sam rolls up his sleeves to go to work...

...From this it follows that the values of privacy, autonomy, and individuality—the very qualities that allow the individual to resist the state—are also obsolete...

...Working outside the home and caring for children is difficult, to be sure...

...the "social and economic" influences on children's attitudes...

...Will the counselor...

...It is the institution of policy, the direction of institutions...

...The recipient of the cash grant—or the government-provided wage—will have his expenditures preselected for him in a variety of ways...

...Would it not be more sensible to reward and reinforce, rather than discourage through taxation, our society's most productive, most trouble-free arrangement of family life—the two-parent family which defers and limits childbearing commensurate with income, and divides child care and income generation (in whatever fashion) between the parents...

...Its failure to do so is not accidental...

...Over the past century, all manner of entrepreneurs and adventurers have blazed through the area, making it possible for the tourism industry to establish a solid foothold...

...Take the 11-member Carnegie Council on Children...

...10 The American Spectator January 1978 Under the plan, any parent, married or single, who wants to remain at home to care for a child can become a federal employee and receive a wage...

...And it has devised a sweeping political remedy for all of these afflictions...

...An older instinct—the protection of one's children—forcefully asserts itself against those who would subordinate the interests of children to ideological causes...

...Under these circumstances, childbirth could become a substantial growth industry, as any citizen physically capable of fathering or bearing a child could obtain an otherwise unavailable income...

...Since the Council ascribes virtually Constance Horner teaches literature at Georgetown Day School in Washington, D.C...

...Indeed, All Our Children is so apparently impeccable in its intentions, and so establishment classy in its origin and tone, that it will doubtless glide effortlessly into college courses, church discussion groups, social action conferences, and school libraries, there to become a new source of conventional wisdom...

...All Our Children will find a receptive audience among people who sense that something is amiss in our family lives...

...Established in 1972 by the Carnegie Foundation and directed by MIT psychologist Kenneth Keniston, the Council has spent the last five years and $2.5 million examining the American family...

...but even considering the stress on family life such a choice entails, it at least presents children with a picture of adult life in some vital, active connection to the world...

...What has he done but enshrine the juvenile views of his staff into the government of the United States, government by undergraduates...

...caste system as it influences occupational opportunities...

...And the Carnegie Council, in its insistence that the family can be renewed neither by parents nor children but only by the state, gives parents —rich and poor, black and white—nothing but subliminal encouragement to fail...

...But to turn childrearing into a new regulated industry is no mean task...

...they seldom are the subject of artistic imagination, or allegory...

...In spite of anti-poverty spending and legalized abortion and contraception, unemployed, unmarried teenagers are having children at unprecedented rates...

...They still use sweeteners, though of a rather different sort...

...The people who will be most enthusiastic in their support of the Council's proposals are precisely those who ought to know better...

...The Council unequivocally rejects piecemeal solutions to particular social problems (mere "reformism") in favor of a new system of universal entitlements—a nationalization of children...

...In fact, we do not know for certain that our cruise down to Leticia, Colombia, is the 350 miles commonly estimated...

...Constance Horner Paid Parenthood: Cui Bono...

...I decide to retire to my hut early...

...It is often not so much what is done but how, or, in Harold Macmillan's phrase, not necessarily action but the appearance of action...

...the central role of a U.S...

...Believe it or not, they're building a Holiday Inn down here...

...We still revere individuals, we still have villains in politics, events still have a collective impact that is more pervasive than we might suspect...

...And that cat's mourning just outside the camp perimeter—it sounds like a lullaby...

...A decade ago, deprived minorities were the focus of, and the justification for, large-scale social programs...

...B. Bruce-Briggs, The Public Interest, Fall 1977...

...Parents are thus asked to enlist on Professor Keniston's side of what is, at bottom, an intraclass struggle...

...and the civil-rights movement for the handicapped...

...But now he has moved out of the realm of returned telephone calls and rolled-up shirtsleeves...

...An unmarried mother paid to stay at home with her children is presenting them with a vision of dependent adulthood...

...It is true that affairs of state have been reduced to scientific proportions...

...Pulling back the bed sheets, I'm met by a six-inch lizard that leaps out into the kerosene lantern light...

...In the meantime, the Republic lay in Bert Lance's pudgy fingers...

...American foreign policy is now personified by Andrew Young...

...Richard Wright, in his recently published autobiography, has some harsh things to say about well-off whites who use blacks and the poor to support their own, socially self-destructive impulses...

...In addition, the Council is running an ambitious promotional campaign and planning further publications which, within the year, will include books on the following subjects: patterns of child care and public policy...

...There is something in it for everyone—from the directors of community health agencies (whose projected statewide budgets would rival those of many state governments) to the special teachers of legally unexpellable children whose violent behavior unsuits them for the classroom...

...all failures of family health and happiness to aspects of "the system," rather than to the intellectual, social, or moral qualities of individuals, its remedy is, naturally enough, a change of system...

...Nowhere in the report is there any suggestion that a 40 percent unemployment rate among black teenagers may be related, in part, to the cultural style of their upbringing...

...Most parents tend to show a preference for child care in or near the home, often by the extended family still intact in the lower class and among the poor, a fact overlooked by the geographically mobile upper-middle-class people who make government policy.' Moreover, as of 1975 four out of five American children were cared for by their mothers during the day.f Yet the Carnegie Council perceives a "problem" of such urgency that it wishes to pay people to be parents—because it ascribes the problems of poor people to families at large, and defines "poor" to mean almost everyone...

...Will the medical team...

...Just as these Carnegie-developed Children's Television Workshop programs attempt to make reading as jazzy as Road Runner, All Our Children gives us quasi-socialism as sweet as World War II patriotism...

...It wishes to hold power—hence the design of the system it recommends—and to use that power to destroy the still predominant values of its own class, which it despises...

...Where was Niebuhr, where was Dylan Thomas...

...For all the Council's calls for family independence, the effect of its recommendations would be (probably intentionally) to enhance an already awesome dependency and passivity in the relations between families and the state...

...According to All Our Children, the "pressures" on the American family arise from a maldistribution of wealth, unevenly delivered health care, and corporate irresponsibility...

...The Council's program is already garnering support from an impressive coalition of social-service agencies and businesses...

...At the Amazon Safari Camp, Wright's people have erected a cluster of thatch-roofed lodgings, and put in a bar and a restaurant...

...He's been transformed into a recipient of services, so that the dispensers of services can be employed and the directors of the dispensers of services can wield power, power over all our children, who are all of us...

...One explorer, Captain Faucett, got lost in the jungle, never to be seen again, and became a local legend...

...Iquitos, smack in the middle of the Peruvian jungle and approachable only by airplane or boat, has seen better days...

...No matter the Council's claim that it seeks to buttress the role of parents: The implementation of its program will serve mainly to erode the authority and example of parents, who alone can protect children from Society and State...

...Already a professional journal for teachers of young children calls it " a foundation and springboard for...analysis of public policy as it impacts on children's lives...

...A special book review essay of All Our Children: The American Family Under Pressure by Kenneth Keniston and the Carnegie Council on Children (Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, $10.95...

...12 The American Spectator January 1978...

...The Council's ambitious plan suggests a guaranteed family income of 50 percent of the median income for a family of four (probably to be distributed through an income-tax credit system), as well as government-guaranteed, "meaningful" work for heads of households at wages of half the average for industrial workers...

...Why has the Carnegie Council concluded, in effect, that existing programs, worth billions of dollars, are not ample...

...The Council's answer is convenient: The idea of family self-sufficiency is, in our time, a myth...

...It is one motion in reaction to another, and the action is presumably informed by a sense of the past, the failures of the past, and the promising future to which a knowledge of the past inevitably looks...