A modest proposal: Raising children by barnyard standards
Jonathan Swift was an Irish clergyman and author. In 1729 he published a satire titled A Modest Proposal, suggesting that "surplus" children of the poor in Ireland be fattened to feed the rich. In a similar vein, an imaginary agribusiness executive today might offer our state the following advice about how to raise our children not for the table, but for full and productive lives. As CEO of Citizen Designs Inc., I am happy to submit this proposal for the efficient production of Illinois' children. We know that your state has been losing many of its young people to gangs, drugs, prison and unemployment. Your adults are nervous about going out at night. Your farms, businesses and civic institutions are threatened with failure if future generations are not prepared to carry on the essential functions of society. In order to attract new enterprises to the state, you need a creative, energetic workforce with the diverse talents and skills that keep communities healthy and whole. With our background in the livestock business, we understand the infinite care required to raise prime animals. We have combined that knowledge with research in child development so that we can supply the product your market demands. If you adhere to our program for the necessary period of time, you will get a bonus. You will find that in the generations ahead you can begin producing your own children according to the standards of Citizen Designs, without having to continue purchasing our services. You will be assured a steady supply of children capable of understanding the complexities of the modern world and working together to address them, children who will care for you in your old age as you have cared for them in their youth. We have adapted four basic farming principles to generate this advanced product line with remarkable results: Start with the cow and the bull. A child is part of a family. Nurturing by competent and caring parents is the first and foremost condition for child well-being. Clear the farmyard of junk and clean the barn. The family is part of a community and is likelier to prosper in a healthy social environment. Adequate local opportunities for education, employment and housing provide the infrastructure essential to strong family life. Monitor the herd and seek help at the first sign of disease. It is better to keep children and families well in the broadest sense than to try to cure them after they become sick. Preventive programs to help assure their healthy development and minimize their risk of illness should be started early and consistently maintained. July 1994/Illinois Issues/21 No single practice, however sound, guarantees success. If you rely on good feed, the calf may freeze; if the mother is damaged, her offspring will weaken; if the neighbor's grass is greener, animals may stray. Therefore, integrate all parts of your plan. Remember the African saying: "It takes a whole village to raise a child." Okay, enough of this spoof. You get the point. Rearing children is far more complicated than raising livestock. Yet too often as a society we tolerate conditions in the care and upbringing of our children which modern farmers would never accept for their animals. We need to compare what we know about child development with what we do, to clarify our values and sharpen our goals as a prelude to action. We need to make a public commitment to our future. We need to invest our personal time as well as our private and public monies to provide a range of community support for children and their families. This support should include health care beginning at conception and access to first-rate, full-day, year-round child care beginning at birth for the full development of all children. It should include an academically challenging elementary and secondary education, complemented by school-linked, community-based social services that help prepare students for economic self-sufficiency and civic responsibility. The things we know about childhood are enormous. All of us have been children. Many of us have had children and some of us are grandparents. Add to this personal experience the collective expertise of child care workers, pediatricians and teachers. We are a nation of child experts, but as a society we seldom apply our knowledge systematically to the challenges of effective childrearing today. As part of its recent Pulitzer Prize-winning series, the Chicago Tribune reported last year that scientists can now observe growth in the brain by counting brain cell connections in the early years of a child's life. With a major acceleration at birth, these connections multiply from billions to trillions through the first year; then, at puberty, they begin to die, deteriorating from disuse like firm muscles slipping into flab without exercise. Stimulated by the senses, cells and their linkages can increase by 25 percent or more. Thus, science confirms what lay observers have always known: children, given the opportunity, are learning machines, miraculous reflections of . human potential. Yet when it comes to using this knowledge to raise our children, society often seems torn by competing values and conflicting interests. Public opinion mirrors these divergent attitudes about the relative importance of parenting versus working, individual versus community responsibilities for child welfare, and consumerism versus conservation all of which affect the fates of children. Public policy reflects rather than resolves these tensions, favoring the quick fix and the jerry- rigged solution over an integrated, long-term response. Let us examine these ambivalent attitudes, which are sometimes traceable to either a lack of relevant information about the past in relation to the present or a lag between historic patterns and contemporary trends. Take the issue of motherhood. The traditional woman is often defined as a wife and mother who stays at home to raise her children. Yet history suggests that this tradition has enjoyed a shorter life in the United States than is generally recognized. Family patterns have changed dramatically over time in this country. John Demos, writing in Past, Present and Personal: The Family and Life Course in America (1986), notes that a major difference between family patterns in colonial times and today is that households then were largely working units. Both sexes and all ages except for the very young labored within close range to produce the necessities for survival. Children's duties grew as they matured.
Photo by Yael Routtenberg During the nineteenth century, as migration from farms to cities increased and as production shifted from cottage industries to factories, the earlier pattern declined. When the father's work became separated from the home, the mother's role became more narrowly focused on childrearing and housekeeping. Then, as now, changes bred nostalgia for the past and anxiety about the future, reflected i growing public concern about the disintegration of the family. 22/July 1994/Illinois Issues Since World War II, social and economic pressures have encouraged women to take full-time, paying jobs outside the home, not only to help support their families but also to "be somebody." For the welfare mother, these pressures may now take the form of laws requiring her to leave home and find work (however limited her prospects) while she tries to provide her children the same degree of attention society expects of other parents. Whatever their backgrounds, over half of Illinois women with children under age six are currently in the workforce, according to The Kids Count Data Book (1993). Working mothers are thus the rule rather than the exception in this state, and many of them report feeling the tug of competing expectations, whether as single parents seeking to enter the workforce or as overextended executives panicked about accommodating their youngsters' summer vacations. Family values and children's education have been closely linked in our history. In the early 1800s, as the transition in family patterns was getting under way, Americans accepted many European child development theories, resulting in formation of special schools for the very young. Infant schools were developed in order to "improve" the children of the poor
by removing them during the day from parental influence while freeing their mothers to work outside the home. Gradually, more affluent families also began to enroll their children. As early as 1840 roughly 40 percent of the 3-year-olds in Massachusetts attended such schools. Eventually, however, disputes over child development theories, turf problems between proponents of infant schools and advocates of education for older children, and competition for public funding slowed the growth of infant schools, according to Maris Vinovskis' survey of early childhood education in the winter 1993 issue of Daedalus. Thus, the movement toward widespread public preschool education declined in the United States during the last century. Universal preschool education for children from 21/2 years of age until the age for entry into elementary school is now a goal of most advanced industrialized nations in northern Europe. Resulting policies apply not just to the children of the poor, working mothers or problem parents. This educational opportunity is generally available on a voluntary basis to all children, funded by heavy governmental subsidies and modest parental fees geared to income level. In most countries, state- subsidized full-day or after-school programs are also maintained on a sliding fee basis for children of working parents. In France 95 percent of children aged 3 to 5 attend the Ecoles Matemelles, although only 60 percent of the mothers are in the workforce. Teachers are graduates with the equivalent of master's degrees whose education is underwritten by the government if they agree to teach for five years. Children who do not attend are generally found to have fallen behind their classmates developmentally by the time they enter regular school. Concern about the effects of poverty on disadvantaged children in our country resulted in federal funding for Head Start preschool programs in 1965. These programs, which have been in place for more than 25 years, have a track record. Through them, children from many backgrounds, cultures, races and income levels have participated in such activities as talking, listening, singing, storytelling and coloring. Data from these programs indicate that children increase their mastery of language and learning skills when they receive appropriate encouragement and support. In Illinois we now have state-funded preschool education. Together with Head Start, these programs serve about half of the state's 3- and 4-year-olds in poverty or at risk of developmental delay. As primarily half-day programs, however, they do not free parents to return to school, enroll in training programs or take jobs on a full-time basis. While there is general agreement among professionals about the benefits of comprehensive, multifaceted early education for all children, there is not yet consensus among politicians about the public's willingness to support such universal access. As a society, we also have not yet faced the fact that if mothers must work to help support their families, they need appropriate child care options. Child care and preschool workers are typically undertrained and underpaid. In Illinois they earn the minimum wage or less. Many remain below the poverty line even if they work 40 hours or more a week. Most receive only rudimentary training, and turnover is high. If we are to value our children, we should value their care providers. Time is a valuable commodity, and raising children well requires a lot of it. Time spent by parents with their children, however, has diminished substantially in recent years. One study by Felton Earls and Mary Carlson, reported in Daedalus (winter 1993), estimated that parents spent 10 to 12 fewer hours per week with their children in 1986 than in 1960. At the same time, related research findings confirm that supportive contact with parents and other adult role models remains crucial to the satisfactory development of young people, whether they are talented teenagers or troubled dropouts. A University of Chicago psychologist who interviewed hundreds of gifted adolescents found they responded best to the apprenticeship model of learning. This model, in which students work under adult mentors, was once common in earlier times but is now rarely available, according to Penelope Mesic, writing in Chicago (February 1993). Similarly, when unwed teenaged mothers who had dropped out of high school were asked what helped them decide to complete their secondary educations, most said that the receptive ear and active concern of one adult made the critical difference (Improving the Health of Adolescent Women in Chicago, 1993). These young women also cited the assistance of community agencies which urged schools to adjust non-academic rules that made child care arrangements more difficult. July 1994/lllinois Issues/23 The importance of providing youngsters with positive role models and keeping them in school is reinforced when we realize that a majority of prison inmates had been identified as troubled in school, often by third or fourth grade. Over three- fourths of incarcerated adults have not finished high school, according to the 1991 Survey of State Prison Inmates. Yet society seems less intent on preventing than on coping with the problem of rising prison populations. Taxpayers must spend $30,000 to $40,000 on each youth sent to the Illinois Department of Corrections. With the 1992 Sourcebook of Criminal Statistics reporting over 18,000 youth admitted in 1990 and projecting steady increases, it seems cheaper and more efficient to provide school-linked services for at-risk children, including tutoring, supervised community service and apprenticeship opportunities. In addition, we should give state's attorneys, school principals and police officers the power and discretion to administer fitting responses to minor misbehavior. A front-loaded juvenile justice system might deal with a first-time bicycle thief, for instance, by requiring victim compensation through community service and mandatory academic tutoring. It is no kindness to a child or a community to ignore juvenile misdeeds. The effort required for creating alternatives to inappropriate, expensive and harmful incarceration would reap enormous social dividends.
Every Illinois candidate for major office over the past two decades has made speeches touting education as the foundation fr maintaining our democratic institutions and economic viability. It is a profound irony of Illinois politics that despite the escalating rhetoric on this subject, the state's relative investment in education has steadily declined, while local property taxes and other fees have been forced to pick up the slack, according to The Inequity in Illinois School Finance (1991). There are communities where parents, teachers and volunteers work together to make education their top priority in deed as well as word. They tutor after hours, run extracurricular programs and meet one-on-one with students, whose attitudes and skills often improve markedly because of the added attention. But volunteer effort and school accountability cannot do it all. There are some schools in this state without running water for their biology laboratories, and others lack the most rudimentary physical education programs. Fully 145 of Illinois' school districts are on the watch list under threat of financial failure, in part because they are forced to rely on limited local resources. Although such facts of modem life as mass media, computerization, transportation networks and economic interdependence challenge the wisdom of stand-alone solutions, funding for Illinois's educational system remains more piecemeal and inadequate than funding in many other states, as noted in Significant Features of Fiscal Federalism (1993). If we believe in providing a more level playing field for our children as they prepare for adulthood, we face urgent choices about what steps can be taken to help lift people out of poverty and what costs we are willing to pay if we refuse to try. The well-being of families is the primary influence on children. If families have hope of a job, a stake in the community, they are less likely to self-destruct, with tragic implications for their youngest and most vulnerable members. While we cannot compute the full cost of income lost by not breaking the cycle of poverty, Jessica Billings reported in a 1991 article for the Illinois School Board Journal that dropouts from every class earn about $237 billion less during their lifetime than an equivalent class of high school graduates. This translates to about $70 billion in lost tax revenues. Businessman Peter Peterson observes in Facing Up: How To Rescue the Economy from Crushing Debt and Restore the American Dream (1993) that the American taxpayer provides $8 of support to the middle and upper classes for every $1 spent on the poor. The former sum includes the $78 billion in mortgage deductions in 1990, a form of housing assistance for the comfortably well off. Yet it seems that our society is unaware that we have already made such choices about our priorities and that these contrast starkly with the public policies of other benchmark nations. Americans increasingly emphasize immediate gratification through consumption and indebtedness rather than saving and investing for the future. The gap between the rich and poor among our citizens is widening. By comparison, David Sanger wrote in The New York Times last October that in most of the eight Asian nations with rapid economic growth, vast resources are being devoted to primary education. Furthermre, these countries have made sure that newly created wealth is shared by focusing on such necessities as construction of public housing and low-cost loans to industry. In these nations, government imposes discipline on its citizens. In the United States, we must discipline ourselves a more demanding role.
Newspaper headlines, political debates and television specials
offer unmistakable evidence of growing public concern about our children and our future. As we approach a new century
and a new millennium, we are poised on the ledge of a window of opportunity. Mounting public pressure offers us the chance to make substantial improvement in the policies, programs
and practices that purport to develop our most precious resource the citizens, leaders, workers and taxpayers of the next generation. If the implications of implementing this modest
proposal strike the reader as immodest, consider the costs of the alternative maintenance of a status quo that too often ignores the lessons of the past, compounds the problems of the present and compromises the prospects for a better future.
This is the second essay in a special series to be published during the next three years by Illinois Issues. The premise of the series, entitled "A challenge for Illinois: Shaping the future," is that our major institutions have an inadequate understanding of the profound changes that are challenging today's leaders. Consequently, our institutions are not addressing current issues effectively and seem incapable of looking to the future creatively. Illinois Issues has asked a group of distinguished Illinois leaders and thinkers, within their areas of expertise, to address how this problem is being played out in our major institutions such as business, education, philanthropy, the law, organized religion and the family. The series began in January with an essay by a noted historian who provided a historical perspective on the overall problem of how we misread the past. The essayist was Douglas Wilson of Knox College in Galesburg. Among the other writers working on this project are John Corbally, Dolores Cross, Susan Getzendanner, Martin Many, Sara Paretsky and William Clossey.
Several essays in this series - including this one by Stevenson - are funded by the Illinois Humanities Council. 24/July 1994/Illinois Issues
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