by Individually, we adore and pamper our children. We take them from soccer practice to music lessons and then organize their play dates with meticulous fanaticism.
Yet we collectively mistreat American children, especially by the standards of other wealthy countries. When we formulate policies for children as a whole instead of pampering our own little angels, we fall shockingly short. We value children in the abstract, but as a society we tend to ignore their needs. Children are more likely to starve or live in poverty in the United States than in most of our peer countries, and they are also much more likely to die, due to drugs, guns, accidents, and an unfair health care system.
If the United States simply had the same youth mortality rates as the rest of the rich world, we would save the lives of at least 40,000 Americans under the age of 19 annually, according to Steven Woolf, a population health expert at Virginia Commonwealth University. In other words, an American child dies approximately every 13 minutes because we don’t do as good a job as our peers protecting children.
And it’s getting worse. An American child’s chances of reaching adulthood have declined in recent years, Woolf told me.
This election year, these are issues that should be central to the battles between Democrats and Republicans. They are not, because children do not vote and are political orphans.
The consequences are not only felt by low-income, marginalized children. A country as a whole cannot prosper when so many people are left behind. What distinguished the United States for more than a century and helped it become the world’s leading economy was strong mass education that included widespread high school and college attendance, even as some European countries fared better with an elite education. But over the last 50 years we have failed to support and educate children in general as other countries have advanced.
We have tried to solve underlying problems, with the juvenile justice system or the criminal justice system, or with those alerts to be attentive to human traffickers. But we have entire failed structures, like foster homes. Less than 5 percent of youth who have spent time in foster care graduate from a four-year college. Several studies suggest that even 60 percent of trafficking survivors have been in the system. However, when was the last time a politician was asked how to fix foster care?
I’ve been thinking about this because I recently participated in the Summit about America’s children and families presented by Common Sense Media. James Steyer, the group’s founder, wants to put children on the local, state and national agenda this year: perhaps a “million-kid march” on Washington? – so that political candidates are forced to answer questions about our indifference to the well-being of children.
In the closing session of the summit, some of us talked about what a pro-child agenda would look like. Here are my suggestions:
An early childhood care program Modeled after that existing in the United States military. If our military can operate a child care program with fees based on ability to pay, then the rest of the country can too. A government-backed early childhood program rescues both parents and children. Barely one child in six lives with a parent who abused drugs within the last year, and some of these children may find a lifeline in a high-quality program like I will educate who also trains parents. Other wealthy nations spend an average of about 29 times more on child care per young child than the United States.
An expanded refundable child tax credit to reduce child poverty. Most other rich countries have introduced a monthly child allowance to lift children out of poverty, and the United States followed up in 2021 with the refundable child tax credit. This was a huge success that helped reduce child poverty. almost half – one of the most successful policies of my life. And then Republican opposition caused the program to expire at the end of 2021, and child poverty soared again.
A new regulatory body to oversee technology companies and new media, just as the Federal Communications Commission oversees old media. Senator Michael Bennet of Colorado has championed this idea, and it has become urgent as TikTok and artificial intelligence have a growing presence in children’s lives. Young people already face a mental health crisis that seems correlated to the expansion of smartphones and social networks. I don’t want to overregulate, but tech companies need oversight while they monetize our children.
Improvements in K-14 education get all children literate, numerate, graduate from high school and, when possible, at least community college, military or technical training. American children are particularly incompetent at math in ways that hold our entire country back. If even Mississippi, with inordinate child poverty, can focus on reading and significantly improve educational outcomes, then no state has an excuse to allow students to fail.
The best measure of a society’s future is how well it nurtures its next generation. So this election year, let’s look beyond the political race and the culture war to question the candidates about their policies toward children and, therefore, the future of our country.
