...the United States is one of only three countries in the world, along with Swaziland and Papua New Guinea, that have no federal paid parental leave policy. After President Richard Nixon vetoed the Comprehensive Childcare Act of 1971, which promised to ensure quality, affordable child care, American parents were left to fend for themselves. In a country that pays its child-care workers less than its janitors, that is a time-consuming, expensive and often fraught search. Child-care costs, which consumed 2 percent of the average family budget in the 1960s, now take up 17 percent, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, second only to a mortgage or rent.
That paragraph jumped off the screen at me as I read Brigid Schulte in today's
Washington Post, a piece titled as is this column,
What’s so bad about American parents, anyway?. It is piece well worth the time to peruse and ponder it.
Let me be clear - I read it not from the standpoint of being parent, for we by choice have no children of our own, freeing us to be loving aunt and uncle to those of our siblings, and also freeing me to devote the time I do to my teaching. But the stress - and the guilt - I see among many of the parents of the children I teach came to mind as I read this piece.
We are in many ways NOT a family-friendly nation, at least not in many of our policies. Our approach to health care is certainly one example. As the words I have quoted from Shulte demonstrate, our approach to child care is certainly another.
But there is more.
Pamela Druckerman, author of Bringing Up Bebe,
lauds the “wisdom” of French parents, who love their children but don’t live for them the way American parents do
offers a particular focus on France. For example, in Paris she sees
chic mothers with good posture who calmly watch their children play while sipping a latte from a nearby bench
and writes
“They don’t radiate that famous combination of fatigue, worry and on-the-vergeness that’s bursting out of most American moms I know (myself included).”
The aforementioned child care facilities, called the creche, are of course part of the reason for their calm.
At the crèche, Druckerman, with typical American fears about “institutionalized day care,” worried that she’d be consigning her child to the DMV. Instead, she found the Canyon Ranch spa. After that, her children went on, like all French children, to the state-subsidized ecole maternelle. The 34-country Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development ranks France No. 1 for 100 percent preschool attendance, even though it’s not mandatory, while the United States ranks toward the bottom, with 46 percent.
We know that quality early childhood education makes a huge difference to children during the course of their studies. Yet in this nation we still argue about whether we can afford to provide it for all families.
As a teacher I listen to the words used to sell our educational policy - about economic competitiveness and achievement - and feel frustrated that we are losing sight of what is best for our young people. As I read this article, I encountered words about how too many of our parents judge one another by things as minute as dress and the quality of the stroller in which the young child is wheeled. We seem obsessively concerned about class, especially for a society that in theory does not have an inherited class structure, although the insistence upon passing down wealth untaxed and the difference of class implied by attendance at the schools of St. Grottelsex demonstrate that in many ways we are more obsessed with class than are nations with an official hereditary aristocracy. Certainly the number of people of both political parties who get elected to public office largely on their family name - be it Rockefeller, Bush, Kennedy, Boren, Mack - is another illustration of this obsession that seems to distort our judgment and at times pervert our democracy.
We are obsessed with comparisons, increasingly with other nations.
But this unending, merciless judging of other parents in the name of what’s “best,” this constant comparing of ourselves with parents in other countries, this gnawing fear that kids are falling behind and our nation is losing its superpower edge, point to a deep insecurity that is not only draining American parents but fostering insecurity in American children.
I see that insecurity among some of my students.
There is an extensive part of the article which focuses on the words of Christine Carter, a sociologist with the University of California at Berkeley’s Greater Good Science Center, who believes that we have things backward in focusing on achievement as the means to happiness, rather than helping our children find the appropriate happiness for themselves. Carter says that
Our cortex of fear is around achievement. So, in order for our kids to get into a great college, get a great job and be happy, we get them piano lessons, after-school Mandarin class, we think more, more, more, more, more is better. And it blossoms into such pressure that by the time the kids get to college, about a quarter are on some kind of anti-depressant or anti-anxiety medication. Our hovering and insecurity as parents breeds insecurity in our kids by teaching them that they can’t handle discomfort or challenge.
As I read those words, I thought of the film
Race to Nowhere by Vicki Abeles, about which I have written in the past. We are again in our registration season, and like other years I have to gently suggest to my students that if as juniors they take 6 APs they might be doing themselves a disservice - after all, a full load in most colleges would only be 4 courses, and some of them will not yet be 15.
And yet our educational policy seems to be insisting on ever more - content, "rigor" and all the things that contribute to insecurity, to unhealthy competition among our children, to too many adults who feel somehow they have failed if they do not opt for the high-prestige job or take the job with greater pay so they can offer more material things to their children - piano lessons, after-school Mandarin class for example.
“When our children are happy, when their brains are filled with positive emotions like engagement, confidence and gratitude, we know from science that they are more likely to be successful and fulfill their potential,” Carter said. “It does not mean they will be above average if, in fact, they are average children.”
As I read those words, I could not help but think of Garrison Keillor and his mythical Minesota town of Lake Wobegon "where all the children are above average." Yes, we should challenge our children to explore outside their comfort zones and previous experience, but we should not insist on comparing them one to another in a fashion that will mean for far too many a sense of failure.
At the end of Shulte's piece, she manages to combine the work of Druckerman writing about the French, and Carter, who points at an analysis of more than 600 studies by 3 psychologists who found that happy people
are more likely to have “fulfilling marriages and relationships, high incomes, superior work performance, community involvement, robust health, and a long life.”
I think that if we can get them to step away from the external pressures of what they think they should do for their children, most American parents would agree, as would those of any nation, of these as noteworthy goals for their children.
So why are so many of our policies in this nation antithetical to such goals? Why do we insist on destructive competition from which too few benefit? We see it in our economic policies, we see it in our tax policy, we see it in our health care policy, we see it in our childcare policy, we see it in our educational policy.
American parents absorb this, and feel obligated to focus on making their children better able to compete. Who can blame them, even if it is wrong?
What’s so bad about American parents, anyway? It is that they have bought into a destructive paradigm, sold to them by the same folks who seek to maintain advantage for the few at the expense of the rest of us.
At least, that was my takeaway from this article.
What's yours?