It Takes a Village, Not a Tiger
Katha Pollitt
The Nation
February 10, 2011
This article appeared in the February 28, 2011 edition
of The Nation.

Are you a tiger mother, a soccer mom, a helicopter
parent, an attachment mom, a permissive free spirit who
just wants your child to be herself? Congratulations.
Your kids have a good chance of turning out reasonably
well. Not because you are a parenting genius who has hit
on the perfect method but because you have the time and
energy and cultural capital to give your child what he
needs to be successful in today's world no matter what
child-raising method you choose. You are probably not,
for example, poor, homeless, functionally illiterate,
socially isolated, an addict, in prison, living in
substandard housing, working three low-paid jobs-or
unemployed for life. You have books in your house, and
probably a computer too. You know enough to help your
child with homework-and if not, you have the money or
networks to find a tutor. You feel comfortable
volunteering at your child's school, being in the PTA,
calling the principal, going to parent-teacher
conferences. You can afford to take your child to the
doctor and the dentist for regular care. If your child
should happen to get arrested, as quite a few do-if he's
caught with pot, say, or spray-paints graffiti, or jumps
a turnstile-there's a good chance that the charges can
be made to go away, or at least not become part of his
permanent record. Your ex may have run off with your
best friend, your apartment may be too small, you may
hate your job-but you are still a white-collar, college-
educated, middle-class person. And that makes all the
difference for your children.

The biggest barrier to educational achievement today is
not any of the things the media talk endlessly about:
poorly prepared teachers, badly run schools, too many
tests, low standards. It's child poverty-which, like
poverty in general, has just dropped out of the
discourse. The Democrats don't talk about it, except to
wag the finger at deadbeat dads and teen moms, and the
media don't talk about it except in the context of crime
or individual triumph. In fact, from the coverage you'd
think our current crisis chiefly affected the middle
classes-office managers, newly minted lawyers, college
grads who have to move back in with their parents-when
actually the unemployment rate for people with college
degrees is 4.2 percent, which is where it was for all
Americans before the recession. By contrast, for those
with only a high school diploma unemployment is 9.4
percent; for high school dropouts it's 14.2 percent. And
those figures measure only those actively looking for
work, not the millions who've given up or have never
held a job (some 16.5 percent of black men over 20). All
those women pushed off welfare, called success stories
because they got a job as a receptionist or a security
guard or a clerk, with supposedly the hope of something
better to come? Forget them.

Inconveniently, though, the poor and near poor, whom we
don't care about, come attached to children, for whom we
supposedly have some concern. So how are the kids doing?

Some facts from the National Center for Children in
Poverty: one in five families is food-insecure, i.e.,
they don't have enough food for everyone in the family
at least some of the time. Health? Poor children are far
more at risk than better-off kids: from secondhand smoke
(32 percent vs. 12 percent of nonpoor children), low or
moderate levels of lead in their blood (30 percent vs.
15 percent), lack of health insurance (16 percent vs. 8
percent) and lack of dental care (18 percent of poor
kids hadn't seen a dentist in the past year vs. 11
percent of nonpoor children, which is bad enough). Poor
children are more likely to have asthma (18 percent vs.
13 percent). They are more likely to have missed five or
more days of school for health-related reasons (20
percent vs. 15 percent). Twice as many poor parents
report that their child has "definite or severe"
emotional, behavioral or social problems (10 percent vs.
5 percent). Poor kids are also more likely to be obese,
to get insufficient exercise, to be diagnosed with ADHD
or other learning disabilities and to have mothers who
are in poor health themselves. No wonder they are less
likely to be described by their parents as being in very
good or excellent health (71 percent vs. 87 percent).

Poor children's home lives are more precarious. Almost
one in five children in poor or low-income families had
moved in the last year, which means disrupted schooling
and stress. In 2007, 1.7 million kids had a parent in
prison, including one in fifteen black children. In
2008, around 460,000 children spent time in foster care.
In 2009, 2.2 million were being raised by grandparents
or other relatives.

Poor kids are more likely to be raised by single mothers
and to have parents who didn't finish high school or go
to college. Even just living with other poor people
seems to harm kids. Those who live in disadvantaged
neighborhoods have lower reading scores; so do low-
income kids who go to schools where the student body is
75 percent or more minority. Most black and Latino kids
attend such schools. By the age of 2, poorer children
have fallen cognitively behind those from wealthier
families.

We're looking at millions of kids, disproportionately
black and Latino, who face a wide range of serious
difficulties: how can that not affect their ability to
do well in school? Moreover, the number of poor and near
poor children is growing. In 2009 more than 1.2 million
children entered poverty, even as school budgets are
being cut all over the country: classes are getting
bigger, teachers are being laid off, extracurriculars
are being cut. You can see why the schools say they
can't do it all.

The parenting wars look like they are about children,
but really they are only about each parent's own child.
That's why they serve such a useful social function.
Without them we might have to think about the
frightening place America is becoming for ever more
millions of kids. Who knows? We might even feel that we
should do something about it.

___________________________________________

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