Our Children as Victims
Phillips, Maxine
Reports and Analyses Maxine Phillips OUR CHILDREN AS VICTIMS ho among us would insist that our children repeat the miseries—real or imagined— of our childhoods? Why, then, do we tolerate other...
...Although the real after-tax earnings of families in the first three income quintiles has declined since 1977 and the earnings of families in the fourth quintile have grown by less than 1 percent, the real after-tax income of the richest 1 percent of the population has jumped by 110 percent...
...From 1980 to 1985 immunization levels for infants and toddlers eroded significantly...
...And the children are very much here — yours , mine, theirs, ours...
...The federal government has suspended data collection, but it is estimated that only 50 to 60 percent of two-year-olds in low-income urban neighborhoods are immunized appropriately...
...Meanwhile, the federal share of AFDC payments, which was $8.8 billion in 1987, is less than 1 percent of the annual federal budget...
...Where did those "savings" go...
...America...
...Most of them are not married...
...As their ability to support even a small family erodes, young men are less likely to marry...
...In 1960 a CEO made forty-one times what a factory worker made...
...Most of the statistics in this article are taken from two publications of the Children's Defense Fund: Children 1990: A Report Card, Briefing Book, and Action Primer...
...We're doing all we can to protect our own children from inadequate schooling, violence, the prevalence of drugs, the pain of failed relationships...
...By 1988 the figure was ninety-three times the salary of a factory worker...
...Between 1973 and 1987 the median earnings of all young family heads (adjusted for inflation) dropped by 24.1 percent...
...A decade later, minimum-wage employment left a family of three about 30 percent below the federal poverty level...
...But the results are plain...
...And fewer and fewer of these children are getting help...
...Why, then, do we tolerate other people's children suffering more than most of us will ever do in a lifetime...
...At the moment, we don't see much hope for changing the lives of OPCs or the lives of the self-satisfied and self-righteous crooks who have robbed so many of their childhoods...
...Federal help for elementary and secondary education fell 22 percent from 1979 to 1988...
...The statistics tell the story: • The United States ranks behind eight industrialized countries in child poverty rates...
...The United States, with 7 percent of its infants born at low birthweight (under 5.5 pounds), ranks 29th among 37 countries, behind Spain, France, Hungary, Austria, Canada...
...And just maybe that hope can be justified...
...Some 45 percent of black and 39 percent of Hispanic children live below the artificially low official poverty line...
...The United States ranks last among nineteen nations in its infant mortality rate, and nonwhite infants are more than twice as likely to die as white ones...
...The savings and loan bailout will run anywhere from 160 to 500 billion dollars...
...Low birthweight babies are twenty times more likely to die and forty times more likely to be disabled than other infants...
...Federal funding for low-income housing has been slashed by more than 80 percent since 1980...
...Well, from 1978 to 1988 the income redistribution from the poor and the middle class to the rich was $61 billion...
...Although the majority of poor children are white, the numbers for nonwhite children are particularly grim...
...Substance abuse by parents is resulting in growing numbers of very young children entering an already overwhelmed child welfare system...
...In the 1988 international assessment of math and science achievement conducted by the Educational Testing Service, American thirteen-year-olds ranked last, behind the United Kingdom, Spain, Ireland, Korea, and three Canadian provinces...
...Since 1973, out-of-wedlock birth rates have doubled...
...About 135,000 children a day bring guns to school...
...Children's Defense Fund, 122 C Street N.W., Washington, D.C...
...One in four homeless people in cities is a child...
...Almost two-thirds of all mothers in the work force are raising their children alone or have husbands who earn less than $15,000 per year...
...We shouldn't have to read a book to know what's in store for a society that tolerates the story these figures tell...
...Of course, not everyone's wages went down...
...SPRING • 1991 • 193 Our Children as Victims There have already been several deadly measles epidemics, and public health experts fear an outbreak of polio or pertussis...
...These were mostly men who lost decent-paying jobs in the industrial sector...
...The answers lie in a tangle of history, psychology, economics, culture...
...This means that a black child born in inner-city Boston has less chance of surviving the first year of life than a child born in Panama, North or South Korea, or Uruguay...
...These numbers can and do fill books— briefing books for legislators, policy books for planners, textbooks for students...
...In 1987 black fifteen- to nineteen-year-old males were ten times more likely to be shot and five times more likely to be killed by other violent means than white males of the same age group...
...Each day 501 girls younger than 18 become parents...
...The yearly cost of eliminating poverty would be about 55 billion dollars...
...20001, (202) 628-8787...
...Every night an estimated 100,000 children go to sleep homeless...
...For too many of us, these are OPC—Other People's Children...
...In 1979, full-time, year-round work at a minimum-wage job pulled a family of three out of poverty...
...In 1987 HIV infection was the ninth leading cause of death among one- to four-year olds...
...Between nine million and twelve million children younger than eighteen have no health insurance...
...And the story they tell is of a rich society that has written off a large number of children...
...Homicide is the leading cause of injuryrelated deaths among children younger than one, surpassing motor vehicle accidents...
...A Children's Defense Budget...
...194 • DISSENT...
...One in five American children lives in poverty...
...To bring a child into the world is an act of hope...
...and S.O.S...
...By 1987, as the holes in the "safety net" widened, it was down to 59.8 per hundred...
...In 1973 the number of poor children receiving AFDC (Aid to Families with Dependent Children) was 83.6 per hundred...
...Half of American seventeen-year-olds do not have reading, math, and science skills that would allow them to perform moderately complex tasks such as summarizing a newspaper editorial or calculating decimals...
...As the earnings of young men fell, so did their marriage rates, by one-third...
Vol. 38 • April 1991 • No. 2
