I'm of the opinion that the US is a pretty bad place to raise a child these days. I couldn't sleep last night and I read an article that really raised my ire, and motivated me to start writing again.
I wound up having a lengthy discussion with a friend about it, and she made some valuable, if anecdotal points. Unfortunately, there's plenty of evidence to back our conclusions up.
Caveat: I'm not a parent, though I'm of the age were I am seriously thinking about starting a family soon. I don't think that everyone is a bad parents, nor do I think that I'd be any better a parent than most people raising kids for the first time. I think that a lot of the failures of individual parents are caused by underlying problems in our societies perception of what it is to be a parent, and of the resources (or lack of) we make available to parents.
The article that started it all off is a sad one. A few weeks ago a girl a four year old girl here in MA died from an overdose of her ADHD and bipolar medications (it caused congestive heart failure). Her parents have been charged with murder because evidence is pointing to the fact that they overmedicated her and her siblings in order to keep them out of their hair. The article raised two troubling points. This girl was diagnosed as ADHD and bipolar at the age of two. Two. At the age of two you barely qualify as a sentient being. I find it very troubling that we're diagnosing children at this age, much less medicating them. I don't dispute that medication works for some people, but how do you distinguish a child's natural hyperactivity from a medical condition? How do we expect their brains to develop if we pump them full of medication before they're self-aware?
“As a clinician, I can tell you it’s just very difficult to say whether someone is just throwing tantrums or has bipolar disorder,” said Dr. Oscar B. Bukstein, a child psychiatrist and associate professor at the University of Pittsburgh.
A study of mentally ill children discharged from community hospitals, published in January in the Archives of General Psychiatry, found the proportion of children diagnosed with bipolar disorders jumped from 2.9 percent in 1990 to 15.1 percent in 2000.
A report released by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in 2002 estimated that about 7 percent of elementary school-age children — or approximately 1.6 million youngsters ages 6 to 11 — have been diagnosed with ADHD.
The annual number of U.S. children prescribed anti-psychotic drugs jumped fivefold between 1995 and 2002, to an estimated 2.5 million, according to a study published last year by researchers at Vanderbilt Children’s Hospital in Nashville, Tenn.
I find it particularly troubling that we've turned to medication in lieu of behavioral therapy of any sort. We're quick to point to the usual culprits, the pharmaceutical companies are out there after all to make a profit, not to help people. At the same time, I think most of the blame lies at the feet of parents and society in general. This brings me to the second point. Ruyi raised the notion that if you took away this problem of over-medication, you'd probably still wind up with a lot of neglected children with behavioral problems, and that this is a distinctly American thing. The article alleges that these parents were over-medicating the children in order to keep them out of their hair. I suspect their is something larger at play. I'm not quite sure when it happened, but I think we forgot how to raise children somewhere along the line. We couldn't figure out how to quantify it, and I'd be hard-pressed to point out any one thing as a cause (though I suspect our tendencies to pass the buck on our problems and extending childhood and adolescence is part of the problem). A recent study showing that immigrants are five times less likely to be incarcerated than native-born Americans lends some support to this idea.
[A] study released Monday by the Washington-based Immigration Policy Center showed that immigrant men ages 18 to 39 had an incarceration rate five times lower than native-born citizens in every ethnic group examined. Among men of Mexican descent, for instance, 0.7% of those foreign-born were incarcerated compared to 5.9% of native-born, according to the study, co-written by UC Irvine sociologist Ruben G. Rumbaut.
How is it that we're raising children in this country who are five times more likely to commit a crime than someone who was born and raised in a foreign country?
Speaking of crime, this brings me to another article, and another disturbing trend. Our criminal justice system is rigged against children. The US prison system is considered among the worst in the developed world, and the UN Human Rights Commission regularly condemns it. While Americans tend to lean towards the notion of punishment rather than rehabilitation and the rights of prisoners is another debate for another time, the fact that we're constantly lowering the age at which people can be tried as an adult makes it a relevant one. Recently a jury convicted a teenager who murdered his grandparents at the age of twelve, and the judge gave him thirty years. He is 18 now (apparently the circumstances dragged it out), and won't see freedom until his forties. Whether or not you agree with the defense strategy is pretty irrelevant, I think we can agree that in most cases a child of twelve is not a hardened criminal, though after spending 30 years of his life in prison, including nearly a third of his childhood, he'll probably come out as one. A child of twelve who commits murder is profoundly disturbed, and definitely a danger to society and himself. I won't argue his guilt, but there needs to be a better solution than adult prison for child offenders. Children who commit violent crimes are much more likely to become valuable members of society if we help them deal with their problems, than say an adult who commits the same crime. By putting this kid away for half his life, we're not even giving him a chance.
Somewhat ironically, we as a culture have extended childhood and adolescence far beyond it's traditional age range. High-school and college students are now referred to as and treated like children instead of young adults and adults. Society made a decision at some point to freak out and protect people far beyond their developmental years from everything bad that could possibly happen to them. Consequences are how we learn from our mistakes and I think that this leads to both an inability to think independently and accept responsibility for mistakes and problems.
Finally, there is the recent UNICEF report that lists the US as the second-worst place to be a child. Only Britain is worse. The study bases this on six broad dimensions, composed of forty different criteria: material well-being, health and safety, educational well-being, family and peer relationships, behaviours and risks, and subjective well-being. Of the countries studied, the US consistently ranks in the bottom third, with the exception of educational well-being, where it ranks twelfth out of twenty-one. I suggest everyone read the full report, since I can't touch on all forty criteria.
I come away from the report gleaning several important points. Firstly, children in the US are at risk from the get go, having the second highest infant mortality rate in the developed world, with only Latvia having more deaths per 1000 births.
Secondly, despite being the wealthiest nation studied, in terms of per capita GDP, income disparities between the rich and the poor and the way that the government spends money has a negative impact on our children. I find this to be utterly appalling.
Higher government spending on family and social benefits is associated with lower child poverty rates. No OECD country devoting 10% or more of GDP to social transfers has a child poverty rate higher than 10%. No country devoting less than 5% of GDP to social transfers has a child poverty rate of less than 15%
Thirdly, in the behaviours and risks category, the study couldn't even find data for the US on the number of fifteen year olds that have had sexual intercourse, or who used a condom during sexual intercourse. Somewhat tellingly though, the US has the highest teenage fertility rate, New Zealand, which was second of the OECD nations studied, had a full one third fewer births per 1000 women aged 15-19. I suspect a major culprit here is our refusal to discuss sex among teenagers, or to provide a national standard for sex education that addresses safe sex. Many of the countries with low teenage fertility rates are countries that provide comprehensive sex education from a young age. Currently the US is doing the exact opposite, we refuse to acknowledge teens are having sex in any sort of coherent policy, and insist on pushing the failed idea of abstinence only sex education as the only federal guideline. In fact, under the current administration, the Department of Health and Human Services has removed information from it's website on how to properly obtain and use birth control. As the study suggests, teenage birth severely disadvantages young women in OECD nations from an educational and financial perspective.
It appears that systemic failures in education and healthcare policy in the US contribute to making the US a poor place to raise a child, but in addition to these widespread policy problems, there is a societal factor at play too. There are widespread problems with how parents in this country, in general, raise children, but I can't seem to put my finger on what exactly the underlying cause is. I am curious as to whether addressing the policy failures of government in this area would have any effect on it, or if this is largely a problem of people not taking responsibility for their own actions.
I do know however, that if I were to have children of my own, as of right now, I would not want to raise them in this country.