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 3 of 4)

Similarly, risks for children are in no way distributed evenly across the population. For instance, lead poisoning--rarer than ever today--is confined almost exclusively to poor children living in old housing stock. For all the talk of a crime wave perpetrated by and against juveniles, most of the increase in criminal behavior is focused on a relatively small section of the youth population: black males between the ages of 12 and 19. As Boston University's Glenn Loury has documented, black males are at least 25 percent more likely to be victims of crime than white males of the same age. The murder rate for black youths, already three times that of whites, doubled between 1986 and 1991. That such disturbing trends affect relatively few children is not a reason for us to breathe easy, but neither is it a reason to generalize or exaggerate risk.

By implying that the typical child is understimulated--and, hence, at risk of underdeveloped brain functions--Time suggests a widespread problem where there is none, says Jerome Kagan, a psychology professor at Harvard University who has done groundbreaking work on developmental issues. "If babies are not played with at all, if no one talks to them at all, they will not develop well. If they just lie in their cribs, with a bottle propped up, they will not develop well. That's a fact. Everybody knows that and no one denies it," says Kagan. "However, most infants--certainly most middle-class infants--get plenty of stimulation." Lack of interaction, according to Kagan, to the extent it is a problem at all, is generally concentrated among "poor women and adolescents who are having infants, the mother who doesn't read Time."

Talking about specific matters as broad-based trends compounds the often tragic nature of such problems by diverting attention, time, and resources from where they are most needed. Such "democratization of risk," however, is a common rhetorical strategy when it comes to competing for attention in the "social problems marketplace," says sociologist Joel Best of Southern Illinois University. In Threatened Children: Rhetoric and Concern About Child-Victims (1990), Best documents how advocates for missing-children groups promoted broader and broader definitions of child abduction, despite weaker and weaker evidence for the phenomenon. That's a tendency shared by most activists, regardless of issue or political persuasion. "Social problems claims-making is rarely static," writes Best. "Claims-makers are likely to offer a new definition, extending the problem's domain or boundaries, and find new examples to typify just what is at issue."

Perhaps the one trend that has significant negative effects on children is divorce. Divorce, like marriage, is an evolving institution. In the late 1960s and early '70s, many states liberalized their divorce laws, making it easier to dissolve marriages. There is a growing consensus that such legislation has failed to adequately protect the interests of the children involved, and it is likely divorce laws, at least where children are concerned, will be toughened.

Between 1970 and 1992, the divorce rate per 1,000 people climbed from 3.5 to 4.8, where it has roughly stabilized. About 60 percent of divorces involve children. The economic effects of divorce are unambiguous, especially when the mother becomes the primary caretaker: somewhere between a 30 percent and 50 percent drop in income in the first year of divorce. It takes most divorced women and children at least five years to regain their predivorce standard of living (if they ever do), often through remarriage. Such divorce- driven dislocation ripples throughout children's lives: Compared with kids in two-parent marriages, they are one-third more likely to move (and they tend to move more often), they are three times as likely to be in poverty, and their mothers are likely to have increased their work hours significantly.

Depending on the level of animosity between parents, the psychological impact of divorce may well outstrip economic issues, especially in the short run. Adjustment patterns vary widely for both parents and children; not surprisingly, problems tend to be worse in ugly divorces. Problems are most intense for parents and children alike during the first two years following separation (psychologists speak of a "crisis period"). In response to divorce, children often become anti-social, disruptive, depressed, or withdrawn. "You lose a lot more than money when your parents split up," says a friend whose parents went through a particularly rancorous divorce when she was a teenager. "You lose a sense of connection, of security, of stability. It isn't easy to get that back. It sets you back years. That's what you lose ultimately: years of your childhood."

But, says the friend, "you end up working through it or moving on, more out of necessity than anything else." Most research confirms that, after the "crisis period," once routines are re-established, children from divorced parents tend to return to more or less normal development. It is hard to gauge the effects of divorce on children partly because it's virtually impossible to identify and study an appropriate control group of conflicted but intact families (some research indicates that children in highly conflicted but intact two- parent families fare worst of all children).

"Divorce, or the conflict that is usually a prelude to it, increases the risk to children of encountering problems later in life: dropping out of school, marrying and having children in the teenage years, and becoming divorced themselves. And whether or not they avoid long-term effects, children are likely to endure a wrenching period of upset and adjustment," write sociologists Frank F. Furstenberg Jr. and Andrew J. Cherlin in Divided Families: What Happens to Children When Parents Part (1991). Some solace can be taken from the fact that, despite heightened risks, "Studies based on nationally representative samples...suggest that the long-term harmful effects of divorce...occur only to a minority."

If things are not so bad for so many children, where do the stories come from? Harvard's Kagan sees the impulse as part of human nature. Today, he says, "there's less stress in a real, serious sense. But every generation of parents is anxious about their children. Every single one. And you always think yours is the most stressed."

Kagan is at least partly right. Parenting is inherently anxiety inducing: Children are impossibly soft, the world indifferently hard. And, despite knowledge transmitted from generation to generation, parenting is always learned anew. It's different when it's your child, and the urge is to emphasize both the softness of the child and the hardness of the world. It is hard to strike a balance between protection and isolation, to clear a play space of sharp edges for your charges without sliding into the excesses of the Buddha's father. The tendency is to compare the responsibilities of being a parent to your own experience as a child--a misleading comparison. Things were different when you were a kid. First and foremost, you were a child, not an adult. Similarly, it is easy to forget that being a child and especially an adolescent is often intrinsically a difficult, frustrating experience.

But there are also a number of reasons why attitudes toward "the kids" have been intensifying over the past 15 years or so. These break down into three basic categories-- economic, demographic, and psychological--all of which are related to developments in postwar America and all of which incline us to heightened concerns and fears about children.

In any generally wealthy society, it is common for each generation to tolerate less risk than the one before it. Hence, the progression from automobile safety belts to three-point harnesses, which are supplemented by driver-side airbags, then passenger-side airbags, then side-panel airbags, and so on. (The example of airbags underscores it is no simple march from absolute risk to absolute safety.) Economist W. Kip Viscusi and others have suggested that safety is essentially a "good" that we purchase. In general, the more money we have, the more safety we can buy. In this sense, the overall rise in income, compensation, and wealth over the past half-century allows and perhaps even predisposes us to buy more safety: We worry more about our children because we can afford to.

But it is not simply that we can buy more safety for our children. Not to put too fine a point on it, or to slip into unnuanced nostalgia for the good old days of nickel sodas and whooping cough epidemics, but kids cost more these days. Or, more precisely, we spend more on them--and not simply in terms of CD players, designer clothing, and sports equipment. Consider education, the importance of which has never been greater. As U.S. News & World Report noted in its 1996 college guide, "nearly 2 out of 3 of June's 2.5 million high school graduates are enrolling in some form of post-secondary education." To paraphrase Bacon, knowledge is opportunity, but in what U.S. News calls "The K-16 Era," such opportunities do not come cheap.

Kids have become more expensive in another way, too: There are fewer of them. The rate of births per 1,000 people was 24.1 in 1950 and 23.7 in 1960. By 1970, it had dropped to 18.4, reaching a low of 14.6 in 1975 and 1976. Throughout the 1980s, the rate crept up, averaging 15.8 and peaking at 16.7 in 1990 before subsiding once again (it was 16.0 in 1992). The trend toward fewer children--another correlate of increased wealth--will apparently be a long-term one. In 1995, children 17 years and under made up 26 percent of the overall U.S. population. The Census Bureau projects that figure to be 24.6 percent in 2010 and 23.9 percent in 2025 (the downward trend holds true at different levels for whites, blacks, Hispanics, and all other minority groups). Almost literally, we are putting fewer eggs in our basket. Psychologically and economically, we expect more from fewer children. And at the same time, we guard them all the more closely.

The trend toward fewer children intersects with baby boom demographics in an interesting way. What has led to "all these fears about kids was the aging of the baby boomers," says Gary Alan Fine, a sociologist at the University of Georgia who has studied risk attitudes toward children. As the boomers started becoming parents in force, their attention naturally focused on child-related issues. "Because it is such a large generation," says Fine, "the problems of the boomers have been taken to be the problems of society."