Child-proofing the World

By every measure, children are doing better than ever. Why all the anxiety? And where will it end?

Nick Gillespie from the June 1997 issue

(Page 2 of 4)

As the Time reference suggests, the endpoint of these discussions is often an implicit call to public action: What can we do? "Is your playground safe?" asks Parents magazine in a recent article that notes, "More than 267,000 children will sustain playground-equipment- related injuries this year....A number of children will even die as a result." Later, the story suggests that "one reason for the safety problem is that there are no federally mandated playground-safety standards."

Other times, the call to arms is explicit. In 1995, the Environmental Protection Agency and the Department of Health and Human Services proclaimed lead the top "environmental disease of children, affecting at least 10 percent of preschoolers" and responsible for behavioral problems ranging from attention deficit disorder to juvenile delinquency. The Centers for Disease Control, which has called lead poisoning the "most common and societally devastating environmental disease of young children," has issued guidelines supporting universal lead testing of all children, regardless of risk factors. (The threat from lead was a truly unprecedented risk. As Ellen Ruppel Shell pointed out in The Atlantic, "To get to the 'one out of ten preschoolers' figure, regulatory agencies now deem as 'poisoned' children whose lead-to-blood ratios fall between 10 and 25 micrograms per deciliter"-- levels considered acceptable in 1990. Children in the 1960s, Shell notes, averaged more than 20 micrograms.)

Less-journalistic analyses are no less hyperbolic and wide-ranging. "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," warns Cornell University psychologist Urie Bronfenbrenner. "Childhood is beginning to seem downright grim," write Joanne Barbara Koch and Dr. Linda Nancy Freeman in Good Parents for Hard Times: Raising Responsible Kids in the Age of Drug Use and Early Sexual Activity (1992). "In the back of every parent's mind is the realization that one mistake made by their children can be fatal....One impulsive sexual encounter with a person with AIDS can lead to death. One 'experiment' with highly addictive crack can suddenly pull a young person into committing desperate crimes--a way of life that is a living death. One vehicle accident under the influence of alcohol...."

There is, of course, some truth in such statements: One mistake can end a child's life--a thought that is indeed ever-present in parents' minds. But, in a common move, Koch and Freeman discover potential mortality as an ominous new development. What actually is different today is the decreasing likelihood of such an event, as the author's own examples suggest. Between 1980 and 1989, for instance, arrests for 16- and 17-year-olds for driving under the influence dropped 24.7 percent. It is extremely rare for kids to "experiment" with crack at all, much less become regular users. Indeed, according to government statistics, in 1995, only 0.8 percent of kids between 12 and 17 reported past-month use of the far-larger category of cocaine (compared with 1.5 percent in 1985). The rate of increase of AIDS cases among children has been slowing; as important, unlike child-killing diseases of the past, AIDS can be largely prevented through relatively simple behavior modification.

Such trends might be cause for celebration, or at least a brief sigh of relief. But reductions in risks to children seem only to fire the imaginations of those who see ruin as imminent. In the 1992 revised edition of Dr. Spock's Baby and Child Care, by far the most influential child-rearing manual over the past 50 years, Spock and co-author Michael B. Rothenberg see the unprecedented sadness and malaise they claim is affecting children as part of a larger assault on civilization itself. The roots of this assault are only hinted at, but seem to encompass almost every social trend since the Industrial Revolution allowed people the luxury of worrying about their quality of life.

In a section called "Raising Children in a Troubled Society," they write, "American society in the 1990s is extraordinarily stressful. Normal family tensions are heightened in many ways: Our society is excessively competitive and materialistic; many working parents find less satisfaction and pleasure at their jobs while the good day care they depend on becomes harder to find; there is less spiritual and moral direction compared to the past; the traditional supports of the extended family and community are breaking up; and a growing number of people are concerned about the deterioration of the environment and international relations." This vague jeremiad (what does it mean to be "excessively" competitive or materialistic?) has a timeless air about it: When hasn't the world been running down, becoming more secular, less traditional, or been anything other than "extraordinarily stressful" compared to an implied golden age? "We live in a disenchanted, disillusioned age," they write elsewhere, rounding out a list of grievances that have been perennial since the dawn of history by invoking an ostensibly contemporary trend that dates back to 1960s-era "black humor": "Even greeting cards, instead of wishing invalids and relatives well, jeer at them."

Not surprisingly, such sentiments get even more overheated when expressed by lobbyists and policy makers. The introduction to Baby and Child Care, for instance, contains a plug for the Children's Defense Fund, perhaps the most influential child advocacy group in the country. In Guide My Feet: Prayers and Meditations on Loving and Working for Children, CDF head Marian Wright Edelman speaks the language of crisis and emergency--and, by implication, ever-greater collective action--to salvage that ultimate public good: children. She invokes a biblical king remembered for his proclivity toward infanticide: "Herod is searching for and destroying our children, pillaging their houses, corrupting their minds, killing and imprisoning the sons, orphaning the daughters, widowing the mothers," writes Edelman. "Herod's soldiers are everywhere, in government, on Wall Street, in the church house, schoolhouse, and moviehouse. Lead us and our children to safety." Drastic times call for drastic measures.

Although Edelman has reportedly had a falling out with the Clinton administration over last year's welfare bill, it's clear that at least one resident of the White House still thinks along similar lines. In arguing that "everywhere we look, children are under assault," Hillary Clinton outlines the culprits: "from violence and neglect, from the breakup of families, from the temptations of alcohol, tobacco, and sex, and drug abuse, from greed, materialism, and spiritual emptiness." These problems, the First Lady suggests, "are not new, but in our time they have skyrocketed." It is an interesting progression--from conceivably measurable social facts to long-standing human urges to unprovable commentary on contemporary mores. Given that the end of the century looms large, we can perhaps forgive such millenarian fervor--problems are skyrocketing!--but we need not embrace it as a basis of public policy.

Indeed, such notions are wrong on two very basic counts: First, despite a nod to historical context, they ignore the tremendous progress in child well-being over the past 100 years. Second, they generalize risks for specific subgroups to children writ large.

Consider a fairly representative family history: When my grandparents were born in Europe near the end of the 19th century, a fair question was whether they would survive their first few years of life. By the time my parents were born in America a quarter-century later, the question was whether (or when) they would contract polio or some other life-threatening, debilitating disease. When my siblings and I were born toward the end of the baby boom, the question was whether we'd have our own bedrooms. When my own child was born a few years ago, the question was which college he would attend.

Encoded in the sharply diminishing seriousness of such questions is one of the century's great self-erasing success stories. In 1900, about 186 out of 1,000 children died before their 15th birthday. In 1950, that figure had been cut to about 35 per 1,000. By 1990, the number had dropped to about 10 per 1,000. Life expectancy at birth has risen from 47 years in 1900 to 68 years in 1950 to 75 years in 1990 (to a projected 77 years in 2000).

Educational attainment--which correlates strongly with income and other living-standard measures--has similarly booted upward. In 1970, about 52 percent of the population had completed four years of high school or more; in 1993, the figure was about 80 percent. In 1970, about 11 percent of the population had a bachelor's degree or more. Twenty-three years later, 14.5 percent had at least a B.A. The rate is higher still for younger age ranges--18.6 percent of people ages 25 to 34 had a college diploma.

These indicators track consistently across all racial and ethnic groups as well. In fact, despite lower absolute percentages, the rate of increase in life expectancy and educational attainment for black children--who are disproportionately poor--actually outstrips that of whites. In these very important ways, things are, on the whole, getting better for the overwhelming majority of children.

Even the one apparent major counter-trend of the past few decades--the percentage of children living below the poverty level--appears to have more or less stabilized during the past 15 years. In 1970, roughly 15 percent of children under 18 lived below the official poverty line. By the early 1980s, the rate had increased to about 20 percent, where it has remained, within a relatively narrow band of fluctuation. Of course, having one in five kids in poverty--or 1970's one in six--is nothing short of tragic. But there are also reasons to believe that the official statistics overstate the extent of poverty in the country. As Bruce Bartlett of the National Center for Policy Analysis has suggested, official poverty statistics tend to "obscure the true condition" of the poor not only by excluding non-cash benefits such as food stamps, school-meal programs, and housing allowances, but by failing to account for the poor's consumption levels, which are more than double their reported income.

Perhaps more important, the Consumer Price Index's overstatement of inflation has a huge effect on official poverty statistics. As the editors of The American Enterprise have pointed out, if the CPI has overstated inflation by 1.5 percentage points annually since 1967 (within the variance suggested by the recent Boskin Commission), there were 15 million poor--about 6 million of them children--in 1996, rather than the 38 million counted in official statistics. While poverty exists, it has at least been heavily mitigated and is not indicative of the typical child's lot.