Our Kids: The American Dream in Crisis, by Robert D. Putnam. Simon & Schuster, 2015. 386 pages.
Our Kids by Robert Putnam should be required reading for anyone interested in the youth of America. Presumably that includes all parents.
If you have ever despaired, as I have, that the flood of poverty is passed on from parents to children and pondered ways to help out the drowning kids, you will be enlightened by Putnam’s findings.
He begins by noticing that during his childhood in Ohio in the 1950s, there were kids with more money and kids with less, but they all went to school together. They all played sports, studied and socialized together. Though the poor kids had fewer financial resources, the adults in the community helped out where they could, all feeling some responsibility for those they considered “our kids.” Putnam’s classmates serve to illustrate the policies and attitudes of that era.
Jesse, whose African-American parents had fled violence in the Jim Crow South with only elementary school educations, earned an athletic scholarship to college and went on to get a master’s degree and enjoyed a long career as a teacher and principal. Don, a white classmate, also had two parents who never finished high school. His father worked in a factory, they had no car, but the minister at their church helped Don figure out the financial aid system and apply to college successfully. He went on to seminary and a satisfying career as a minister.
This upward mobility is not available to today’s working-class children. Rich and poor kids are increasingly segregated, with the former having access to opportunities to learn, while the latter are held back by absentee parents, violent neighborhoods and lack of enrichment opportunities. Putnam has labeled the widening moat between rich and poor America the “opportunity gap.” He conjectures how it came to be, details its implications and wonders at solutions.
In decades past, minority kids and girls had to contend with rampant racism and sexism. Putnam does not argue that these systems have dissolved, but that social class has become an even stronger barrier to success.
Between 2009-2012, the incomes of the top 1 percent of American families rose 31percent, while the bottom 99 percent remained constant. College-educated parents’ net worth rose 47 percent from 1989 to 2013, while that of parents with only a high school education fell by 17 percent. The rich are getting richer and the poor are going nowhere.
Neighborhoods (and the schools zoned for them) separate the rich and poor, with the upper class unable to see “how the other half lives.” With a decline in cross-class marriages, fewer working-class kids now have a rich uncle or other mentor to help them ascend the professional ladder, or even to see that it is possible. When we are so separate, it becomes possible for the privileged to delude themselves into believing that America is a land where everyone is free – where everyone has equal access to functional public schools, any determined student can earn a college scholarship and bald eagles glide through city streets picking up trash. If you have an inkling that this isn’t the case, that persistent poverty has causes other than a weak work ethic, Putnam’s interviews with struggling kids will prove why you’re right.
Consider the differences between Desmond and Elijah, two black young adults who grew up in Atlanta. Desmond was born to college-educated, professional parents. As a child, his father would bring him to see his office at Merrill Lynch while his mother helped him with Hooked on Phonics workbooks and presidential flashcards on school vacations. She was the PTO president of his elementary school, and even bought their house on the sole basis of the highly rated, racially diverse high school nearby. Desmond recently graduated from one of the South’s best private colleges and is interning with the Centers for Disease Control.
Elijah’s parents split up when he was an infant and left him to live with his alcoholic grandfather in a New Orleans housing project. As a child of 6, he followed around his older cousin, who taught him petty theft and then armed robbery. He witnessed several homicides, including the shooting of a little girl when he was 4 years old. His father was in and out of jail. At 13, Elijah went to live with his mother in Atlanta and soon was arrested for arson. His mother, who now had infant twins from a casual relationship and worked two jobs, was verbally abusive. He graduated from high school at age 19 and, after attempting to work in sales without any contacts, a car or professional wardrobe, is now bagging groceries. The futures of two young men, raised in very different environments in the same city, look very different.
For explanations, Putnam looks to schools and neighborhoods as well as parenting.
It is tempting to point the finger at school quality for the lack of mobility passed on to poor kids. Putnam finds the situation to be more complicated. He demonstrates how failing schools are merely part of the landscape of failing neighborhoods. Schools with higher test scores and more college-bound graduates are supported by parent volunteers, community donations and experienced teachers who want to be there. Putnam looks at two high schools in Orange County, California. Isabella went to Troy, where 99 percent of the students attend college, there are 100 different extracurricular clubs, and if students score 2200 (out of 2400) on the SATs, they try again. Lola attends Santa Ana High, 15 minutes away, where some of the kids carried guns, fought in classrooms and teachers and counselors were too exhausted to help her when she asked.
But these schools, in the same county, are similar in their public funding. Contrary to popular belief, high property taxes in affluent neighborhoods are now less and less responsible for school budgets and teacher salaries. Rich schools are rich in homework help at home and donations for the lacrosse team, while poor schools lack peaceful classrooms and gang-free hallways. Rich kids and poor kids are living in vastly different neighborhoods, with vastly different schools.
What struck me most was Putnam touching on developmental psychology. Executive functioning, our ability to plan, prioritize and make informed decisions, develops rapidly between 3 and 5 years old. Serious, persistent stress (inconsistent adults in the home, violence, food scarcity) impedes this process, meaning these kids grow into adults who are less able to solve problems, cope with adversity and organize their lives. The cycle continues.
Healthy infant neurological development requires interaction with consistent caring adults. Parental stress, caused by poverty and all its features, makes parents less attentive and more reactionary in their interactions with their children. Putnam notes that “what we usually understand as an impoverished parent’s lack of skills, care, patience, tolerance and dedication can actually be attributed to the fact that the parent’s mind is functioning under a heavy load.” A parent living with scarcity functions similarly to a computer with too many open applications. Their bandwidth is reduced.
Our Kids has been criticized by sociologists for its simplicity, and indeed there probably are more sophisticated analyses of child poverty out there. Critics point out that some of Putnam’s proposed solutions are naïve or unsupported by evidence. That he doesn’t have the solutions is beside the point. This book needed to be written. His qualitative style of reporting, painting portraits of individual kids in crisis and contrasting them with portraits of kids with strong support, is likely to make an impression on laymen – hopefully parents – that a suitcase full of statistics cannot. Wider awareness is the first step. Let’s put our heads together and our arms together and lift our kids up.
Ann Farrar is a freelance writer with master’s degrees in Acting and Mental Health Counseling. She is also a mom.
This article appears in Capital City Parent August 2015.
