Defending Our Children
Phillips, Maxine
A familiar scene. Tired mother returns from work. Picks up two-year-old from day-care center. Arrives home to find eight-year-old and ten-year-old locked in mortal combat. Separates them and...
...If you don't, you're not supposed to try to join the club...
...Dissent thanks the New-Land Foundation and the Menemsha Fund for their support of this special section...
...Two more target the living room, where one peels off to help the ten-year-old with homework, and the other engages the eight-year-old in a discussion of her favorite television shows...
...Society treats almost every aspect of child-rearing as a completely personal experience, as if the quality of children's lives had no bearing on the quality of our citizenry, our work force, our life together...
...Improving the lives of children at any point along the continuum is worth doing...
...212 • DISSENT...
...She's at the end of her rope...
...Rushing to the phone, she dials 911-PARENTS, and within minutes a brightly colored Parentmobile turns into the driveway...
...Change of scene...
...The fourth enters the kitchen, ready to fix dinner, while the fifth runs the bubble bath and leads the mother off for a back rub...
...Two-year-old whines...
...How American Children Are Doing KIDS COUNT Benchmark National Trends Over the 1980s State Trends Percent low birth 3% WORSE 35 states worse weight babies Infant mortality rote 22% BETTER 51 states better* (per 1,000 live births) Child death rate 18% BETTER 48 states better' ages 1-14 (per 100,000 children) Teen violent death rate 11% WORSE 34 states worse ages 15-19 (per 100,000 teens) Percent all births 14% WORSE 42 states worse that are to single teens Juvenile custody rate 10% WORSE 32 states worse ages 10-15 (per 100,000 youths) Percent graduating high school 0% NO CHANGE 28 states better Percent children in poverty 22% WORSE 40 states worse Percent children in 13% WORSE 44 states worse single-parent families Reprinted from KIDS COUNT DATA BOOK©1992, Center for the Study of Social Policy...
...It's something you take up if you have enough money, time, and resources...
...So why not do it?—M.P...
...Out jump five para-parents, equipment ready...
...Storybook in hand, one scoops up the two-year-old...
...Fight continues in living room...
...If parents share one characteristic other than that, it is worry—worry that the precarious web of supports they have built for their families will crash, worry about how their children behave in public or perform in school, worry that they don't know what they're doing, and even if they did, that they don't know how they're going to do it...
...In the following articles the authors focus on a few areas in which changes would make an enormous difference in the lives of all our children...
...David Rosner and Gerald Markowitz remind us that some of the seemingly intractable problems we face in foster care had not-so-distant historical roots in racist practices...
...Goes in kitchen to start supper...
...Ultimately, though, as Nancy Amidei says, it does not matter which area you choose to focus on...
...However, in the United States parenting is considered a hobby, similar to pet ownership...
...If anything "goes wrong" with the children, parents take the blame, whether because they were absent fathers, overinvolved mothers, too strict, too permissive, drug-addicted, had too many children of the wrong race and class, the list is endless...
...Separates them and screams at everyone...
...SPRING • 1993 • 211 DEFENDING OUR CHILDREN But if, as Nancy Amidei proposes, there finally exists a national consensus that our societal treatment of children is shameful, then it is the maligned parents and others connected to children who must shape the political will to save our children's lives...
...The true part is that parenting is one tough job, for which the proper ratio of adults to children is three adults to one child...
...Fortunately or unfortunately, many people have joined the club, and, as Marshall Berman describes in his essay, they struggle against all odds to make sure that their children will have a better life than they did...
...In this, one of the most intimate of relationships, it is certainly true that the personal is political...
...It is they who must find the time for the hard work of political organizing that must be done on top of their paid work and their unpaid child-care labor...
...Herb Kohl urges educators to ally themselves with parents to defend decent public education and abolish stigmatizing categories that impede education...
...Pure fantasy, but when parent advocate Patty Wipfler tells the story, her audiences clearly wish otherwise...
Vol. 40 • April 1993 • No. 2
