Never before in the history of America has one generation of children been less healthy, less cared for or less prepared for life than their parents were at the same age.
With those chilling comments, paraphrased from the opening pages of her new book, ”When the Bough Breaks” (Basic, $22.95), economist Sylvia Ann Hewlett launches an all-out indictment of how we, as a society, fail to adequately care for our children, and warns that continued neglect will drag down the entire nation.
We like to think of ourselves as a country that cherishes and protects our children, but the insidious truth, she says, is that for the last 25 years, ”American society has been tilting in an ominous new direction-toward the devaluation of children . . . the whole drift of our society, our government policies, and our private adult choices is toward blighting our youngsters and stunting their potential.”
We are almost at the bottom of the heap of industrialized countries when it comes to the care we collectively give our children, she says. Parents are squeezed by a shortage of time and money, the government has virtually taken a hands-off stance on legislation affecting child welfare and the private sector has penalized rather than rewarded workers with children.
”More than any other developed country, America expects individual parents to foot the child-raising bill from childbirth all the way through college; and more than any other rich country, America is facing profound and systematic child neglect. It is time to take some collective responsibility for the next generation.”
Hewlett, former director of the Economic Policy Council, a Manhattan think tank, is a numbers cruncher and has laced her outrage over the status of children with hundreds of statistics, all sourced in a lengthy index.
For example:
– In a single year, approximately 40,000 American babies die before their first birthday. The U.S. international ranking in infant mortality worsened from 6th in the mid-1950s to 20th in 1987.
– More than 20 percent of all children are growing up in poverty. One of every 5 children under 18 years old is poor (the official poverty line is $9,890 for a family of three).
– 330,000 children are homeless. Twelve million children are uninsured and have little or no access to health care.
– The suicide rate among teens 15-19 has tripled from 1960 to 1986, from 3.6 to 10.2 deaths per 100,000 teens that age.
– More than one-quarter of teenagers drop out of school. According to a study Hewlett quotes, these high school dropouts cost the nation more than $240 billion a year in lost earnings and forgone taxes; this figure, she points out, doesn`t begin to include the billions that dropouts ulimately cost in crime control, welfare and other social services.
Hewlett takes on two sacred cows of the American way-of-life in pinpointing the blame for the neglect of today`s children: the way we bring up our children and the disproportionate amount of benefits we give our elderly. ”Very deep in our culture is this notion that children are private property,” she said in a telephone interview. ”A private choice, a private joy, a private responsibility. Well, it`s an expensive hobby these days. Other nations have clued in on the notion that a child is a great national resource, a collective responsiblity. They see the linkage between national well-being and how the kids are doing.”
While we turn our backs on the need to do more, collectively, for our children, she says, we are increasingly becoming a society with open pockets when it comes to our elderly.
”The dirty secret of contemporary social policy is that we are spending our collective resources on the wrong generation,” she said. ”During the 1980s, the government spent five times as much money on the old as on the young . . . to a distressing degree, public policy is being used to transfer money from the needy young to the comfortable old.
”It may sound harsh, but the money spent on the elderly is basically an expense-a consumption item-whereas money spent on children is an investment.” She says that a ”strong case can be made for more and better benefits for the elderly poor,” but she questions the $25 billion of Social Security benefits that go to households receiving other retirement income of over $30,000 annually. She questions a society that spends $30 billion in Medicare payments for patients who are in the last year of life, which she says is more than the government spends on the health care of all American children.
”Why do we continue to devote so many resources to comforting us at the end of life while we pay a Head Start teacher less that $10,000 to prepare us at the beginning to life?” she asks, pointing out that Head Start serves only 25 percent of eligible children.
She answers her own ”why” question with the words ”self-interest.”
”While we cannot recapture our own childhoods, all of us anticipate being old someday.” She quotes an analyst as saying that ”if we passed through life backwards, adults would insist that conditions in childhood be made far more appealing.”
She has concentrated on statistics, she said, because she knows figures are the bottom line-and the bottom line is what counts, to the government and to the private sector.
”I knew that I had to show the cost-effectiveness (of providing more for children and families) or else I wouldn`t get to first base,” she said. ”I feel there are tremendous moral reasons for doing the right thing by our children-I mean, here we are, the richest nation in the world and we have over 300,000 children going to bed homeless, and that gives me enormous pain-but it`s hard to argue a case on a compassionate level. There`s enormous suspicion, `you`re a bleeding-heart liberal` sort of thing.
”So I`ve crunched numbers. For example, if you provide prenatal care, you`re going to have an immediate payoff. Women who don`t have prenatal care are much more likely to have preemies, low-weight babies, and it can cost as much as $100,000 to provide neonatal intensive care for one preemie infant. I had to show that it`s going to cost more to us as a nation not to provide for our children.”
The private sector, she says, is beginning to listen and respond to family needs-not because of altruism, but because of the realization that liberal maternity leaves, flex time and even on-site day care will ultimately translate into economic benefits.
”Nothing grabs corporate attention more effectively than hard evidence demonstrating that a family-friendly workplace more than pays for itself . . . women will comprise 62 percent of the new recruits to the work force over the next decade . . . companies now incur high costs when they fail to accommodate talented women who are trying to act responsibly at home as well as work.”
Hewlett concludes her statistic-packed book with a call for action, urging widesweeping steps ranging from mandated 24-week job-protected parenting leave, free access to prenatal and maternity care and mortgage subsidies. She calls for radical reform in our educational system, tax structure and divorce laws.
She even proposes a speech, televised prime time, in which a hypothetical president addresses Congress on the subject of ”How to Save Our Children”;
included in the speech are these words: ”Saving our kids is not just the compassionate thing to do and the moral thing to do; it also happens to be the fiscally responsbile thing to do. Doing what is right by our kids . . . produces a kinder and gentler nation.”
