Cornell University psychologist Urie Bronfenbrenner evaluates the well-being of children by looking at all the interactions in their lives—at home and at school, in their families and peer groups, in their communities, and also at the hands of larger influences like the health care system, the media, and the economy. This ecological or environmental approach takes research out of the laboratory and into the world by linking the lives of children to the contexts in which they are led. This approach might also be described as the “child in the village” model of human development.
Using this model, Bronfenbrenner has predicted for years that problems we used to think happened only to “disadvantaged” children would confront us all before long. Economic and marital instability, combined with the hectic pace and many other aspects of contemporary American society, led him to conclude, as did other experts, that we face a silent crisis: “The present state of children and families in the United States represents the greatest domestic problem our nation has faced since the founding of the Republic. It is sapping our very roots.”
By now, the crisis is painfully apparent to us all. But the solutions that would remedy it are too often ignored, and the means of implementing them are too often withheld. At a time when the well-being of children is under unprecedented threat, the balance of power is weighted heavily against them.
Government has to do its part to reverse the crisis affecting our children, and to do so it cannot retreat from its historic obligations to the poor and vulnerable. Yes, we must work to balance the national budget, but we cannot afford, in the long run—or for much longer in the short run—to balance it on the backs of children. They do not deserve to inherit our debts, but neither should they be denied a fair chance at a standard of living that includes health care, good education, a protected environment, safe streets, and economic opportunity. Children, after all, are citizens too.
Let Us Build a Village Worthy of Our Children
A civilization flourishes when people plant trees
under whose shade they will never sit.
GREEK PROVERB
As I finished this book, my husband and I had just come home from a trip to Northern Ireland, where peace had returned after twenty-five years of violent sectarian conflict. For the first time in recent memory, children were able to live in relative safety and comfort as they went about their daily lives. Nine-year-old Catherine Hamill introduced my husband at a Belfast factory where Catholic and Protestant workers still enter through separate doors but work side by side. “My first daddy died in the Troubles,” she said. “It was the saddest day of my life. I still think of him. Now it is nice and peaceful. I like having peace and quiet for a change, instead of people shooting and killing. My…wish is that peace and love will last in Ireland forever.”
During our brief stay, we also met parents—both Catholics and Protestants—who had lost children to bombs and guns. Yet they had overcome their personal anguish to put aside ancient grudges and work to rebuild the larger community. They were determined to pass on to the next generation a legacy of peace rather than of fear, hatred, and mistrust.
The threats to the innocence, promise, and lives of American children are no less severe, and the “troubles” that confront us are no less daunting. As Sylvia Ann Hewlett, founder of the National Parenting Association, has observed, “In the contemporary world it is a hard, lonely struggle, this business of putting children first.”
I think we have no choice but to try. Children are like the tiny figures at the center of the nesting dolls for which Russian folk artists are famous. The children are cradled in the family, which is primarily responsible for their passage from infancy to adulthood. But around the family are the larger settings of neighborhood, school, church, workplace, community, culture, economy, society, nation, and world, which affect children directly or through the well-being of their families.
Each of us participates in several of these interlocking layers of the village. Each of us, therefore, has the opportunity and responsibility to protect and nurture children. We owe it to them to do what we can to better their lives every day—as parents and through the myriad choices we make as employers, workers, consumers, volunteers, and citizens. We owe it to them to set higher expectations for ourselves. We must stop making excuses for why we can’t give our children what they need at home and beyond to become healthy, well-educated, empathetic, and productive adults.
I’m often asked what I would like to see happen above all else in our country and in our world. There are so many things to pray for, so many things to work for. But certainly my answer would be a world in which all children are loved and cared for—first by the families into which they are born, and then by all of us who are linked to them and to one another.
Nothing is more important to our shared future than the well-being of children. For children are at our core—not only as vulnerable beings in need of love and care but as a moral touchstone amidst the complexity and contentiousness of modern life. Just as it takes a village to raise a child, it takes children to raise up a village to become all it should be. The village we build with them in mind will be a better place for us all.
Notes
Further, the rise in divorce: Between 1995 and 2000, the number of poor children fell more than 20 percent, from 14.7 million to 11.6 million children. However, in the last five years, child poverty has made up nearly half its 1990s decline. According to the Census Bureau, in 2005, 12.9 million children lived in poverty, that is more than one in six. (U.S. Census Bureau, Income, Poverty, and Health Insurance Coverage in the United States: 2005, August 2006.)
A long-term study of children: In 2002, a group of scientists discovered a gene that provides people with more resilience in the face of trauma, allowing them to better recover from adversity. They found that people who have one “short” segment of this gene called an allele are more prone to depression and less likely to bounce back from childhood trauma. (Avshalom Caspi et al., “Role of Genotype in the Cycle of Violence in Maltreated Children,” Science, August 2, 2002, vol. 297, no. 5582, pp. 851–54.) In 2003, Joan Kaufman, a Yale psychiatry professor, studied the genetic and relationship history of a group of children in Connecticut who were victims of abuse or neglect. She found that kids who had the “short” resilience gene, yet had an adult on whom they could count, had levels of depression as low as those of abused children with the protective gene, and nearly as low as those of children who had not been abused. (Joan Kaufman et al., “Social Supports and Seratonin Transporter Gene Moderate Depression in Maltreated Children, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, November 24, 2004.)
The village can take it further: Many of the ideas from the first edition of this book about how to refocus the foster care system on the best interests of the child were later included in the Adoption and Safe Families Act of 1997, which I worked on with the late Republican Senator John Chafee of Rhode Island and others. After the passage of that legislation, foster adoptions increased 64 percent nationwide, from 31,030 the year the law passed to 51,000 last year. (Connie Maben, “Foster Adoption Law Brings Success, Challenges,” Associated Press, June 28, 2006.) As First Lady, I met many young people aging out of foster care who had little of the emotional, social, and financial support families provide. I worked with Senator Chafee and Democratic Senator Jay Rockefeller of West Virginia on the Foster Care Independence Act of 1999, which provides young people aging out of foster care with support services, including access to health care, educational opportunities, job training, housing assistance, and counseling. In the Senate, we passed a law that provides financial incentives to people who adopt older children and to help reduce the obstacles they face.
The first three years of life: Experts now believe that the brain is particularly sensitive to new information for the first five years of life, not the first three, and that children learn at an extraordinary rate from zero to five. (Jack P. Shonkoff and Debrah A. Phillips, eds., From Neurons to Neighborhoo
ds: The Science of Early Childhood Development, National Academies Press, 2000, p. 5.)
A similar study, best known as the Abecedarian Project: Federal Reserve economist Rob Grunewald and Nobel laureate economist James Heckman have estimated that every dollar invested in programs like Abecedarian returns between $3 and $17 to society, for total lifetime returns running as much as $276,000 per student. They published these finding in Zero to Three, a journal focused on the needs of young children, in July of 2006. (James Heckman, Rob Grunewald, and Arthur Reynolds, “The Dollars and Cents of Investing Early: Cost Benefit Analysis in Early Care and Education,” Zero to Three, July 2006, vol. 26, no. 6, pp. 10–17.) That is why as senator I have fought to protect programs like Head Start and Early Head Start, which provide high-quality care to low-income children, from attempts to dismantle or undermine them.
If breast-feeding is a problem: The American Academy of Pediatrics now urges new mothers to breast-feed for as long as they can, ideally twelve months. (American Academy of Pediatrics Work Group on Breastfeeding, “Breast-feeding and the Use of Human Milk,” Pediatrics, 1997, vol. 100, pp. 1035–39.) Breast-feeding provides a boost to immune systems, helps kids fight off infections, and may even prevent chronic disease later in life. Today, 73 percent of mothers breast-feed their newborns, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. But that number falls below 50 percent after six months, even though breast-feeding during those later months is still critical to children’s health and development. (New York Times, “On the Job, Nursing Mothers Are Finding a 2-Class System,” September 1, 2006.)
And it is tragic that our country does not do more: In the last few years, we’ve seen major breakthroughs in research and effectiveness of contraceptives. For example, Plan B is a new emergency contraceptive that can prevent a pregnancy after another contraceptive has failed or after unprotected sex. I fought for years to get Plan B on the market, so that fewer women will face the choice of abortion. It is now available for over-the-counter use by adult women. I have also proposed Prevention First, a bill that focuses on prevention of unwanted pregnancies through comprehensive education, emphasizing responsible decision-making and expanded access to contraception. With these efforts, it’s my hope that the abortion rate will fall further.
Thanks in part to Ruggiero’s testimony: In September of 1996, Congress passed and my husband signed into law the Newborns’ and Mothers’ Health Protection Act of 1996, commonly known as the drive-by deliveries law, which required plans that offer maternity coverage to pay for at least a forty-eight-hour hospital stay following childbirth (a ninety-six-hour stay in the case of a cesarean section). (U.S. Department of Labor. [2006] Fact Sheet: Newborns’ and Mothers’ Health Protection Act, September 27, 2006.)
The biggest difference among the various households: We’ve learned that, beyond talking, having books in the house is also important. A 2005 national study found that minority children were not only less likely to be read to by their parents but also possessed substantially fewer children’s books in the household than white children, putting minority children at a distinct disadvantage in reading, language skills, and school achievement. White families had two times the number of books in their home that black families did. (G. Flores, S. C. Tomany-Korman, and L. Olson. “Does Disadvantage Start at Home? Racial and Ethnic Disparities in Health-Related Early Childhood Home Routines and Safety Practices,” Archives of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine, 2005, vol. 159, pp. 158–65.)
Family meals are a time-honored and important ritual: A study by Diane Beals at Harvard found that mealtime conversations during the preschool years are a strong predictor of literacy development, and are a critical element of children successfully developing early language skills. (David K. Dickinson, Ed.D., and Patton O. Tabors, Ed.D., eds. Young Children Learning at Home and School, chap. 4: Diane E. Beals, “Eating and Reading: Links Between Family Conversations with Preschoolers and Later Language and Literacy,” 2001.)
In 1993, as part of a larger initiative: In 1992, just 55 percent of three-year-old children received all the routinely recommended childhood vaccines; in 1996, three years after the Vaccines for Children bill passed, the rate climbed to 78 percent. (CDC, “Status Report on the Childhood Immunization Initiative: National, State, and Urban Area Vaccination Coverage Levels Among Children Aged 19–35 Months—United States, 1996,” July 25, 1997, vol. 46, no. 29, pp. 657–64.) In 2004, more than 95 percent of all children received the full, more ambitious schedule of routinely recommended childhood vaccinations. (CDC, “Vaccination Coverage Among Children Entering School—United States, 2003–04 School Year,” Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, November 12, 2004, vol. 53, no. 44, pp. 1041–44.) In 2003, the national Institute of Medicine recommended using the Vaccines for Children program as a model for adult vaccination. (Institute of Medicine, Financing Vaccines in the 21st Century: Assuring Access and Availability, National Academies Press, 2003.)
Diet alone does not account for the dramatic increase: At present, approximately 9 million children over six years of age are considered obese. (Institute of Medicine, “Childhood Obesity in the United States: Facts and Figures,” September 2004.) Obesity is on the verge of surpassing smoking as the single highest preventable cause of death for all Americans (CDC, “Actual Causes of Death in the United States, 2000,” March 9, 2004); and an Emory University study found that it accounted for a 27 percent increase in health care costs between 1987 and 2001 (Kenneth E. Thorpe et al., “Trends: The Impact of Obesity on Rising Medical Spending,” Health Affairs, October 20, 2004).
Today there are more than ten million children: As First Lady, I worked with members of Congress in creating the State Children’s Health Insurance Program (SCHIP) in the summer of 1997. It made a tremendous investment in the expansion of children’s health insurance, and it has had tremendous results. Today, because of SCHIP the number of children who lack health insurance coverage has dropped from over 10 million in 1995 to some 8.3 million kids in 2005. However, the numbers of uninsured have grown in the general population over the last ten years. In 1996, 41.7 million Americans did not have health insurance; today 46.6 million Americans do not have coverage. (National Center for Health Statistics, June 2006; Carmen DeNavas-Walt, Bernadette D. Proctor, and Cheryl Hill Lee, U.S. Census Bureau, Current Population Reports, P60–231, Income, Poverty, and Health Insurance Coverage in the United States: 2005, U.S. Government Printing Office, Washington, D.C., 2006.)
Three times as many children die each year: Nontraffic automobile accidents, most frequently involving a vehicle backing up, account for one hundred deaths per year. The average age of victims is one year, and in 70 percent of cases, a parent, relative, or close friend is behind the wheel. (Kids and Cars, Child Safety Advocates Join Victims on Capitol Hill to Push for Passage of Tougher Laws to Keep Children Safe in and Around Cars, www.kidsandcars.org, March 9, 2006.) In 2005, I proposed the Cameron Gulbransen Kids and Cars Safety Act, which would prevent child deaths in backing incidents by requiring a warning system to ensure that drivers can detect the presence of a person or object behind the vehicle. It would also require that power windows automatically reverse direction when they detect an obstruction, to prevent children from being trapped, injured, or killed.
Twenty-five thousand new police officers are being trained: By the end of my husband’s term, the Community Oriented Policing Services (COPS) program had funded over 100,000 police officers. (U.S. Department of Justice, Office of Community Oriented Policing Services, Attorney General’s Report to Congress, Washington, D.C., 2006.) However, over the last five years, the program has been cut from $8.8 billion to $3 billion, and only 25,000 police officers were hired between 2001 and 2005. (Democratic Policy Committee, Bush Republicans Cut Law Enforcement Funding, Crime Rate Increases at the Fastest Rate in Fifteen Years; U.S. Department of Justice, Community Oriented Policing Services, “COPS Count Data Surveys 2001–2005,” Washington, D.C., 2006.) Federal statistics show that between 2004
and 2005 violent crime increased by 2.3 percent. This was the first increase since 2001. A preliminary FBI report in June 2006 on crimes reported to police showed a 4.8 percent increase in the number of murders and 4.5 percent increase in the number of robberies in 2005. (Michael J. Sniffen, “Nation’s Crime Rate Hits 32-Year Low,” Associated Press, September 11, 2006.)
Whatever the reasons for the apparent increase: Over the last several years, there has been a dramatic increase in media stories of abducted and abused children. While there has not been an increase in the overall numbers of such cases, many families, and children, are more fearful. I have pushed for legislation that would appoint a national coordinator for AMBER alerts, an alert system for missing children; provide additional protections for children; and establish stricter punishments for sex offenders. That legislation passed the Congress in 2003.
The anthropologist Margaret Mead felt that exposure to religion: A 2004 study of the effects the sexual messages on television have on children found that raising children with religious belief lowers the probability that they will engage in early sexual experimentation, as does having committed and involved parents. (Rebecca L. Collins et al., “Watching Sex on Television Predicts Adolescent Initiation of Sexual Behavior,” Pediatrics, 2004, vol. 114, pp. 280–89.)
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