TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/100890/1008109.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 23.9 KB | 445 lines

                                                                                NATION, Page 42

COVER STORIES

Shameful Bequests to The Next Generation


America's legacy to its young people includes bad schools, poor
health care, deadly addictions, crushing debts -- and utter
indifference

By NANCY GIBBS -- Reported by Julie Johnson/Des Moines, Melissa
Ludtke/Boston and Michael Riley/Washington


    George Bush knows how to talk about children. With a sure
sense of childhood's mythology, of skinned knees and candy
apples and first bicycles, he campaigned for office in a swarm
of jolly grandchildren and promised justice for all. In this
year's State of the Union address, he mentioned families and
"kids" more than 30 times -- the electronic equivalent of
kissing babies on the village green. "To the children out there
tonight," he declared as he built to his finale, "with you rests
our hope, all that America will mean in the years ahead. Fix
your vision on a new century -- your century, on dreams you
cannot see, on the destiny that is yours and yours alone."

    Forget the next century. Just consider for a moment a single
day's worth of destiny for American children. Every eight
seconds of the school day, a child drops out. Every 26 seconds,
a child runs away from home. Every 47 seconds, a child is abused
or neglected. Every 67 seconds, a teenager has a baby. Every
seven minutes, a child is arrested for a drug offense. Every 36
minutes, a child is killed or injured by a gun. Every day
135,000 children bring their guns to school.

    Even children from the most comfortable surroundings are at
risk. A nation filled with loving parents has somehow come to
tolerate crumbling schools and a health-care system that caters
to the rich and the elderly rather than to the young. A growing
number of parents with preschool children are in the workplace,
but there is still no adequate system of child care, and
parental leaves are hard to come by. Mothers and fathers worry
about the toxic residue left from too much television, too many
ghastly movies, too many violent video games, too little
discipline. They wonder how to raise children who are strong and
imaginative and loving. They worry about the possibility that
their children will grow wild and distant and angry. Perhaps
they fear most that they will get the children they deserve.
"Children who go unheeded," warns Harvard psychiatrist Robert
Coles, giving voice to a parent's guilty nightmare, "are
children who are going to turn on the world that neglected
them."

    And that anger will come when today's children are old
enough to realize how relentlessly their needs were ignored.
They will see that their parents and grandparents have left them
enormous debts and a fouled environment. They will recognize
that their exceptionally prosperous, peaceful, lucky
predecessors, living out the end of the millennium, were not
willing to make the investments necessary to ensure that the
generation to follow could enjoy the same blessings.

    The natural case for taking better care of children would
be made on moral grounds alone. A society cannot sacrifice its
most vulnerable citizens without eroding its sense of community
and making a lie of its principles. But having been left behind
by a decade of political shortcuts, child advocates have adopted
a more practical strategy. "If compassion were not enough to
encourage our attention to the plight of our children," declares
New York Governor Mario Cuomo, "self-interest should be." Marian
Wright Edelman, the crusading founder of the Children's Defense
Fund, goes further. "The inattention to children by our
society," she warns, "poses a greater threat to our safety,
harmony and productivity than any external enemy."

    Spending on children, any economist can prove, is a bargain.
A nation can spend money either for better schools or for larger
jails. It can feed babies or pay forever for the consequences
of starving a child's brain when it is trying to grow. One
dollar spent on prenatal care for pregnant women can save more
than $3 on medical care during an infant's first year, and $10
down the line. A year of preschool costs an average $3,000 per
child; a year in prison amounts to $16,500.

    But somehow, neither wisdom nor decency, nor even economics,
has prevailed with those who make policy in the state houses,
the Congress or the White House. "We are hypocrites," charges
Senator John D. ("Jay") Rockefeller IV, who is chairman of the
National Commission on Children. "We say we love our children,
yet they have become the poorest group in America." Nearly a
quarter of all children under six live in households that are
struggling below the official poverty line -- $12,675 a year for
a family of four.

    In some cases the abandonment of children begins before they
are even born. America's infant mortality rate has leveled off
at 9.7 deaths per 1,000 births, worse than 17 other developed
countries. In the District of Columbia, the rate tops 23 per
1,000, worse than Jamaica or Costa Rica. Fully 250,000 babies
are born seriously underweight each year. To keep these infants
in intensive care costs about $3,000 a day, and they are two to
three times more likely to be blind, deaf or mentally retarded.
On the other hand, regular checkups and monitoring of a pregnant
woman can cost as little as $500 and greatly increase the
chances that she will give birth to a healthy baby.

    Every bit as important as prenatal care is nutrition for the
child, both before and after birth. "Of all the dumb ways of
saving money, not feeding pregnant women and kids is the
dumbest," says Dr. Jean Mayer, one of the world's leading
experts on nutrition and president of Tufts University. During
the first year of life, a child's brain grows to two-thirds its
final size. If a baby is denied good, healthy food during this
critical period, he will need intensive nutritional and
developmental therapies to repair the damage. "Kids' brains
can't wait for Dad to get a new job," says Dr. Deborah Frank,
director of growth and development at Boston City Hospital, "or
for Congress to come back from recess."

    Congress understood the obvious benefits of promoting infant
nutrition in the 1970s, when it launched the Special
Supplemental Food Program for Women, Infants and Children. WIC
provides women with vouchers to buy infant formula, cheese,
fruit juice, cereals, milk and other wholesome foods, besides
offering nutrition classes and medical care. It costs about $30
a month to supply a mother with vouchers -- yet government funds
are so tight that only 59% of women and infants who qualify for
WIC receive the benefits. "A power breakfast for two businessmen
is one woman's WIC package for a month," says Dr. Frank. "Why
can't public-policy makers see the connection between bad infant
nutrition, which is cheap and easy to fix, and developmental
problems, which are expensive and often difficult to fix?"

    The theme of prevention applies just as forcefully to
medicine. This year the U.S. will spend about $660 billion, or
12% of its GNP, on medical services, but only a tiny fraction
of that will go toward prevention. For children the most basic
requirement is inoculation, the surest way to spare a child --
and the health-care system -- the ravages of tuberculosis,
polio, measles and whooping cough. During the first 20 years
after the discovery of the measles vaccine, public-health
experts estimate, more than $5 billion was saved in medical
costs, not to mention countless lives. And yet these days in
California, the nation's richest state, only half of
California's two-year-olds are fully immunized. Dallas reported
more than 2,400 measles cases from last December through July,
eight of them fatal, including one child who lived within six
blocks of an immunization clinic.

    Even parents who recognize the importance of preventive care
are having a harder time affording it for their children. Most
Americans over age 65 are covered by Medicare, the federal
health-insurance plan under which the elderly -- rich or poor
-- are eligible for benefits. Children's health programs, in
contrast, are subject to annual congressional whims and budget
cutting. Fewer and fewer employers, even of well-paid
professionals, provide health benefits that cover children for
routine medical needs. This means that health costs are the
responsibility of individual parents, who make do as best they
can, often at considerable sacrifice.

    Some states and community groups are trying to help. Two
years ago, Minnesota pioneered the Children's Health Plan to
provide primary preventive care for children. The plan costs the
state about $180 per child, but parents pay only $25: in the end
everyone saves. Schools in Independence, Mo., established a
health-care package to provide drug and alcohol treatment and
counseling services for every child in the district. Cost to
parents: $10 per child. In Pittsburgh 12,000 children have
received free health care through a program crafted by churches,
civic groups, Blue Cross and Blue Shield.

    But too many kids are denied such care, and that starts a
chain reaction. "You can't educate a child unless all systems
are go, i.e., brain cells, eyes, ears, etc.," says Rae Grad,
executive director of the National Commission to Prevent Infant
Mortality. A national survey in 1988 found that two-thirds of
teachers reported "poor health" among children to be a learning
problem. This is why Head Start, the model federal program
providing quality preschool for poor children, also includes
annual medical and dental screenings. But once again the money
is not there: only about 20% of eligible children are fully
served by the program.

    Head Start and similar preschool strategies improve academic
performance in the early grades and pay vast dividends over
time. President Bush has promised enough funding to put every
needy child in Head Start, which Congress says will require a
fivefold increase by 1994 from the present $1.55 billion a year.
Both the House and the Senate have approved higher funding
levels, and lawmakers will soon meet to reconcile differences
between the two bills. But as the deficit mounts, the peace
dividend sinks into the Persian Gulf and the savings and loan
crisis chews into basic budget items, politicians may have a
hard time approving funding increases for a constituency that
does not vote. Senator Orrin Hatch of Utah, a proponent of
costly child-care legislation, says the outcome of the budget
negotiations is "going to be terrible for kids."

    Likewise, American society has, in the past generation,
abandoned its commitment to providing a world-class system of
secondary education. Education Secretary Lauro Cavazos himself
calls student performance "dreadfully inadequate." From both the
inner cities and the affluent suburbs comes a drumbeat of
stories about tin-pot principals who cannot be fired,
beleaguered teachers with unmanageable workloads and illiterate
graduates with abysmal test scores. If they can possibly afford
to, parents choose private or parochial schools, leaving the
desperate or destitute in the worst public schools. Teachers,
meanwhile, are aware that they are often the most powerful
influences in a child's life -- and that their job pays less in
a year than a linebacker or rock star can earn in a week.

    Across the board, people who deal with children are more
ill-paid, unregulated and less respected than other
professionals. Among physicians, pediatricians' income ranks
near the bottom. In Michigan preschool teachers with five years'
experience earn $12,000, and prison guards with the same amount
of seniority earn almost $30,000. U.S. airline pilots are
vigilantly trained, screened and monitored; school-bus drivers
are not. "My hairdresser needs 1,500 hours of schooling, takes
a written and practical test and is relicensed every year," says
Flora Patterson, a foster parent in San Gabriel, Calif. "For
foster parents in Los Angeles County there is no mandated
training, yet we are dealing with life and death." The typical
foster parent there earns about 80 cents an hour.

    Worst of all is the status of America's surrogate parents:
the babysitters and day-care workers who have become essential
to the functioning of the modern family. In the absence of
anything like a national child-care policy, parents are left to
improvise. The rich search for trained, qualified care givers
and pay them whatever it takes to keep them. But for the vast
majority, child care is a game of Russian roulette: rotating
nannies, unlicensed home care, unregulated nurseries that leave
parents wondering constantly: Is my child really safe? "Finding
child care is such a gigantic crapshoot," says Edward Zigler,
director of Yale's Bush Center in Child Development and Social
Policy. "If you are lucky, you are home free. But if you are
unlucky, well, there are some real horror stories out there of
kids being tied into cribs."

    The U.S. economy has long been geared to two-income
families; many families could not afford a middle-class
life-style without both parents working. The real median income
of parents under age 30 fell more than 24% from 1973 to 1987,
according to a study by the Children's Defense Fund and
Northeastern University. But social programs rarely reflect
those economic realities. Growing financial pressure all too
often translates into fewer doctors' visits, more stress and
less time spent together as a family. Between 1950 and 1989,
the divorce rate doubled: 1.16 million couples split up each
year. That makes the need for reliable support services for
children all the greater.

    In place of responses came rhetoric: a 1986 Administration
report on the family titled "Preserving America's Future" called
for a return to "traditional values," parental support of
children and "lovingly packed lunch boxes." Time and again,
Washington has failed to address the needs of working parents
-- most recently in June, when President Bush vetoed the
family-leave bill on the ground that it was too burdensome for
business. The bill would have allowed a worker to take up to 12
weeks a year of unpaid leave to care for a newborn, an adopted
child or a sick family member.

    That is abysmal compared with what other industrialized
nations allow. Salaried women in France can take up to 28 weeks
of unpaid maternity leave or up to 20 weeks of adoption leave,
though they are less likely to need it since day care, health
care and early education are widely available in that country.
In France, as well as in Belgium, Italy and Denmark, at least
75% of children ages 3 to 5 are in some form of state-funded
preschool programs. In Japan both the government and most
companies offer monthly subsidies to parents with children. In
Germany parents may deduct the cost of child care from their
taxes. "Under our tax laws," observes Congresswoman Pat
Schroeder of Colorado, "a businesswoman can deduct a new Persian
rug for her office but can't deduct most of her costs for child
care. The deduction for a Thoroughbred horse is greater than
that for children."

    If the troubles children face were all born of economic
pressure on the family, then wealthy children should emerge
unscathed. Yet the problems confronting affluent children are
also profound and insidious. Parents who do not spend time with
their children often spend money instead. "We supply kids with
things in the absence of family," says Barbara MacPhee, a school
administrator in New Orleans. "We used to build dreams for them,
but now we buy them Nintendo toys and Reebok sneakers." In the
absence of parental guidance and affirmation, children are left
to soak in whatever example their environment sets. A childhood
spent in a shopping mall raises consumerism to a varsity sport;
time spent in front of a television requires no more
imagination than it takes to change channels.

    At Winchester High School in a cozy Boston suburb, clinical
social worker Michele Diamond hears it all: the drug use, the
alcohol, the eating disorders, the suicide attempts by children
who are viewed as privileged. "Kids are left alone a lot to
cope," she says, "and they sense less support from their
families." Pressured to succeed, to "fit in," to be accepted by
top colleges, the students handle their stress however they can.
Some just dissolve their problems in a glass. In nearby Belmont,
a juvenile officer finds that parents shrug off the danger. When
their kids are caught drinking, he notes, "they say, `Thank God
it isn't cocaine. It's alcohol. We can handle that.'"

    All too often it is cocaine, the poisonous solace common to
the golf club and the ghetto. It is not only the violence of the
drug culture that threatens children; it is also the lure of the
easy money that turns 11-year-olds into drug runners. "Alienated
is too weak a word to describe these kids," says Edward
Loughran, a 10-year veteran of the juvenile-justice system in
Massachusetts. "They don't value their lives or anyone else's
life. Their values system says, `I am here alone. I don't care
what society says.' A lot of these kids are dying young deaths
and don't care because they don't feel there is any reason to
aspire to anything else."

    Violence in the neighborhood is bad enough. Violence in the
home is devastating. Reports of child abuse have soared from
600,000 in 1979 to 2.4 million in 1989, a searing testimony to
the enduring role of children as the easiest victims. In New
York City, half of all abuse reports are repeat cases of
children who have had to be rescued before, only to be returned
to an abusive home.

    When two-year-old "Rebecca" accidentally soiled her
underwear, her mother and the mother's boyfriend were not
pleased. So they heated up some cooking oil, held Rebecca down
and poured it over her. Then they waited a week or so before
Rebecca's mother, unable to stand the stench of the child's
legs, which were rotting from gangrene, took her to the
hospital. After a month's stay that saved her legs, Rebecca was
able to move to a foster home. From there she went to live with
her paternal grandmother, who had plenty of room: all four of
her sons were in state prison.

    Around the country there are hundreds of thousands of other
children who scream for help from overburdened teachers,
understaffed social service agencies, crowded courts and a
gridlocked foster-care system. To dismiss child abuse as a
personal, private tragedy misses the larger point entirely. If
children are not protected from their abusers, then the public
will one day have to be protected from the children. To walk
through death row in any prison is to learn what child abuse can
lead to when it ripens. According to attorneys who have
represented them, roughly 4 out of 5 death row inmates were
abused as children.

    A reordering of priorities toward protecting children would
include far higher funding and staffing of Child Protective
Services, the organization that investigates charges of abuse
and can move to rescue children before the damage is
irreparable. But even that would do little good if there is no
place to put them. No solution will be possible without an
overhaul of the foster-care system, which in many cities is on
the verge of collapse. All too often, children are separated
from siblings and shuttled from group homes to relatives to
foster families, with no sense of the safety, security or
stability they need to succeed in school and elsewhere. "If we
don't have money for adequate care," says Ruth Massinga, a
member of the National Commission on Children, "removing
children from their homes is just another devastation."

    Failure to make treatment available to drug addicts who seek
it will ensure yet another generation of addicted babies and
battered kids. In Los Angeles the number of drug-exposed babies
entering the foster-care system rose 453% between 1984 and 1987.
A survey of states found that drugs are involved in more than
2 out of 3 child abuse and neglect cases. Children born into a
family of addicts are left with impossible choices: a life with
the abusers they know, or a life at the mercy of a system filled
with strangers -- lawyers, judges, social workers, foster
parents.

    It is a common mistake to assume that all abuse is physical.
The scars of other forms of abuse -- like unrelenting verbal
cruelty -- can be just as apparent when children grow older,
unloved and self-hating. "You can tell kids you love 'em," says
April, a runaway in Hollywood. "But that's not the same as
showing them. Broken promises is really what tears your heart
apart." For April there is not much difference between insult
and injury. "Beating kids will hurt kids. Sexual abuse will hurt
a kid. But verbal abuse is the worst. I've had all three. If
you're not strong enough as a person, and they've been telling
you this all your life, that you can never amount to anything,
you are going to believe it."

    There have always been children who are survivors, who
overcome the odds and find some adult -- a teacher, a
grandparent, a priest -- who can provide the anchors the family
could not. Toure Diggs, 18, grew up in a rough neighborhood of
New Haven, Conn., and is now enrolled at Fairleigh Dickinson
University. Since his parents separated three years ago, Toure
has tried to help raise his brother Landis, who is 7. In the end
Toure knows he is competing with the lure of the street for
Landis' soul. "You got to start so young," Toure says. "It's
like a game. Whoever gets to the kids first, that's how they are
going to turn out."

    Schools in particular have come to take that role very
seriously, which accounts for the debate over how to teach
values and self-discipline to a generation whose boundaries have
been loosely drawn. But other institutions are slowly waking up
to the implications of writing off an entire generation. The
business community, in particular, wonders where it will find
a trained, literate, motivated work force in the 21st century.
The Business Roundtable, with representatives from the largest
200 companies, has made support for education its highest
priority in the '90s. In Dallas, Texas Instruments helps fund
the local Head Start program. Eventually, more and more
companies may make parental leave a standard benefit, regardless
of the messages coming from Washington.

    In Des Moines business leaders are sponsoring a program
called Smoother Sailing, which sends counselors like "Sunburst
Lady" Toni Johansen into the city's elementary schools. National
studies have shown that such support helps improve confidence,
discipline and attitudes about school. With the extra funding,
the city has been able to provide one guidance counselor for
every 250 students, in contrast to a national average of one for
850.

    But there will be no real progress, no genuine hope for
America's children until the sense of urgency forces a
reconsideration of values in every home, up to and including the
White House. Polls suggest the will is there: 60% of Americans
believe the situation for children has worsened over the past
five years; 67% say they would be more likely to vote for a
candidate who supported increased spending for children's
programs even if it meant a tax increase.

    When adults lament the absence of "values," it is worth
recalling that children are an honest conscience, the perfect
mirror of a society's priorities and principles. A society whose
values are entirely material is not likely to breed a generation
of poets; anti-intellectualism and indifference to education do
not inspire rocket scientists. With each passing day these
arguments become more apparent, the needs more pressing. Where
is the leader who will seize the opportunity to do what is both
smart and worthy, and begin retuning policy to focus on children
and intercept trouble before it breeds?