America, like most cultures, claims to love and value children, but, gosh, the reality sure seems very different. Three recent reports help illustrate this: The Pew Research Center’s report on expectation of having children, Claire Suddath’s searing look at the childcare industry on Bloomberg, and a UNICEF survey about how young people, and their elders, view the future.
It’s hard to say which is more depressing.
This shouldn’t come as a huge surprise. Earlier this
year the Census Bureau reported that the
birthrate in America dropped for the sixth consecutive year, the
largest percentage one year drop since 1965 and the lowest absolute number of
babies since 1979. It’d be easy to blame this on the pandemic, but, as sociologist
Phillip N. Cohen told
The Washington Post: “It’s a shock but
not a change in direction.”
In many ways, having children seems like
ignoring everything that’s going on. We have a climate change/global warming
crisis that threatens to wreak havoc on human societies, we’re still in the
middle of a global pandemic, and our political/cultural climate seems even more
volatile than the actual climate. One Gen Xer told
The New York Times: “As I think of it, having a child is like rolling dice with the child’s
life in an increasingly uncertain world.”
Yikes.
--------
The mess that is America’s
child care industry (nurseries, day care, preschool) may help explain why people
are reluctant to have kids/more kids. If
you’ve had a child, or known people who have, you’ve heard the complaints about
child care. It’s hard to find good ones, harder to get into them, and harder
still to pay for them. The people who work in them are, for the most part,
wonders, but there are too few of them and they’re woefully underpaid…despite
how expensive the child care is.
Ms. Suddath writes:
“Child care in the U.S. is the rare example of an
almost entirely private market in which the service offered is too expensive
for both consumers and the businesses that provide it.” She quotes
Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen: “The free market works well in many different
sectors, but child care is not one of them.”
At least in healthcare some
people are making money.
The workers are paid less than they’d
make at Amazon or Walmart, but, between staffing ratios and other regulatory
requirements, the costs can approach college tuition levels. It keeps many
women out of the workforce, hampering both their careers and our overall
economic development. Even worse, lack of preschool has lifelong impacts on
children’s development. She quotes Catherine Wolfram at the U.S. Treasury: “There’s very robust, strong economic literature
that documents the positive effects of early childhood education.
Educating kids has all these
benefits for the rest of society.”
Maria Fabrizio for NPR
The Build Back Better Act is supposed to address some of the child care issues, such as limits on how much parents have to spend on it and improving wages for the workers, but Ms. Suddath warns, not so fast. The bill is, she suggests, more aspirational than prescriptive:
States can decide to take money for preschool but reject additional funds to subsidize other forms of child care. Or a state could call all this communism and do nothing.
Beyond that, there’s not a lot of detail in the bill. States have no guidance on how to help child-care businesses pay higher wages, for example.
Think all those Red
states that have defied masks/vaccine mandates/Medicaid expansion are going to
rush into fixing the child care problems?
----------
The UNICEF survey, which included respondents from 21
countries, found that, overall, young people (15-24) thought children in their
country would be better off than their parents – but, in the U.S., only 43%
thought so, with 56% disagreeing. It could have been worse; the “worse off” percentages
were worse in many other developed countries. The older respondents were even
more pessimistic (64%).
Laurence Chandy, the UNICEF official who oversaw the
survey, said: “In a lot of the
developing world, there is a bit more optimism that yes, with each generation
our living standards are improving. But
there’s a recognition in the West that’s stopped happening.” In point of fact, U.S. children born in 1980
or later are no
longer likely to earn more than their parents, a startling reversal of the
trends from 1940 to 1980. 
Credit: UNICEF/Gallup/NYT
Young Americans still cite “hard work” as the key to success,
but just narrowly edging out “Family wealth or connections,” which is in
contrast to their elders, who are much more likely to still believe in hard
work. Education is a distant third.
We’re supposed to be the country where success is
about getting a good education and working hard, not about who your family and
friends are. We’re not that country anymore.
No wonder our young people are pessimistic about their
futures.
-------
When it comes to children’s health, of course, the
U.S. should
hang its head. We have too many children in poverty, too many children
going hungry, too many children without health insurance. Our infant (and
maternal) mortality rates are positively third world. Compared to other developed
countries, our kids are too overweight, too likely to have diabetes, too likely
to get pregnant, too likely to use illegal drugs.
We have some of the best children’s hospitals in the
world, but we pay pediatricians lower than any other physician specialty, and,
as a result, have a shortage. It’s similar to those child care workers or elementary
school teachers: we say we want the best for our children, but we don’t seem to
be willing to pay for the best. And it shows.
--------
I wish I had some good news. I wish I had some
solutions. When I look at the young people in my life I admire their spirit,
but I fear for their futures. Why politicians fight things like universal
preschool, affordable childcare, or paid family leave – each of which is
undeniably good for children – I’m at a loss.
We can do better for our children. We must.
No comments:
Post a Comment