Advice | We Americans neglect our children
Individually, we adore and spoil our children. We take them from football practice to music lessons and then organize their playdates with meticulous fanaticism.
Yet we collectively abuse America's children, especially by the standards of other wealthy countries. If we formulate policies for children as a whole, instead of pampering our own little angels, we are failing shamefully. We value children in the abstract, but as a society we tend to ignore their needs. Children have a better chance get hungry or live in poverty in America than in most of our peer countries, and they are also much more likely to die – from drugs, guns, accidents, and an inequitable health care system.
If the United States simply had the same youth mortality rates as the rest of the rich world, we would save the lives of at least 40,000 Americans age 19 and younger every year, according to Steven Woolf, a public health expert at Virginia Commonwealth University. In other words, an American child dies approximately every 13 minutes because we are not doing as good a job as our peers at protecting children.
And it's getting worse. An American child's chances of reaching adulthood have declined in recent years, Woolf told me.
This election year, these are issues that should be central to the battle between Democrats and Republicans. That is not the case, because children do not vote and are political orphans.
The consequences are not only felt by low-income children on the margins. A country as a whole cannot prosper if so many people are left behind. What distinguished the United States for more than a century and helped it become the world's leading economy was its strong mass education, which included widespread participation in high schools and universities, even though some European countries fared better with elite education. But over the past fifty years we have failed to support and educate children in general, while other countries have made progress.
We've tried to solve the problems on the back end, with the juvenile justice system or the criminal justice system, or with the warnings to be on the lookout for human traffickers. But we have very failed structures, such as foster care. Less than 5 percent of youth who have spent time in foster care graduate from a four-year college. Several studies suggest that up to 60 percent of human trafficking survivors have been in the system. But when was the last time a politician was asked how to arrange foster care?
I've been thinking about this because I recently participated in the Meeting about America's Kids and Families, hosted by Common sense media. James Steyer, the group's founder, wants to put children on the local, state and national agenda this year — perhaps a “million child march” on Washington? – so that political candidates are forced to answer questions about our indifference to the well-being of children.
During the final session at the summit, some of us talked about what an agenda for the child might look like. Here are my suggestions:
An early childcare program modeled after the one that exists in the US military. If our armed forces can establish a child care program with reimbursement based on their ability to pay, then so can the rest of the country. A government-backed early childhood program is saving both parents and children. About one child in six lives with a parent who has abused drugs in the past year, and some of these children may find a lifeline in a high-quality program like Education who also guides parents. Other wealthy countries spend, on average, about 29 times as much on child care per toddler as the United States.
An extensive refundable child tax credit to reduce child poverty. Most other wealthy countries have introduced monthly child benefits to lift children out of poverty, and the United States followed suit in 2021 with the refundable child tax credit. This was a huge success that helped reduce child poverty almost in half – one of the most successful policies of my lifetime. And then Republican opposition caused the program to expire at the end of 2021, and child poverty has skyrocketed again.
A new regulatory body that oversees technology companies and new media, just as the Federal Communications Commission oversees old media. Senator Michael Bennet of Colorado has championed this idea, and it has become urgent as TikTok and artificial intelligence play an increasingly important role in children's lives. Young people are already facing a mental health crisis seems correlated to the spread of smartphones and social media. I don't want to overregulate, but tech companies need oversight if they're making money off our children.
Improvements in primary and secondary education to have every child read and do arithmetic, complete high school, and, where possible, receive at least some high school, military, or technical training. American children are singularly incompetent at math in ways that hold our entire country back. If even Mississippi, with unconscionable child poverty, can focus on reading and significantly improve educational outcomes, then no state has an excuse for failing students.
The best measure of a society's future is how well it nurtures its next generation. So this election year, let's look beyond the political horse race and culture war to prod candidates about their policies toward children – and therefore the future of our country.