by LYDIA KIESLING
Last summer, my kids and I spent a month in Greece, where their grandfather lives. Time and again, I was struck by a public attitude toward children I seldom encountered in America: unequivocal support.
On Athenian buses, women older than myself frequently gave up their seats for my 5- and 8-year-old daughters. On one trip, an older woman hauled my younger child up next to her and tucked her hand underneath my daughter’s elbow to prevent her from being thrown forward with every sudden stop. She held on to her like this for the whole ride.
In America, we socialize our children to see strangers not as helpers but as threats. Worried parents scour Nextdoor for loiterers and miscreants; neighbors routinely call the police when parents let their kids explore outside. And when kids aren’t being treated as endangered, they’re often viewed as a nuisance. How many articles have I read about whether children should be allowed on airplanes, or at weddings, or in restaurants?
Every country has its share of adults who pose a threat to children. But the difference in how America treats its kids goes far beyond the “it takes a village” attitude that prevails in countries like Greece. Virtually every other industrialized nation provides more government aid for their children than America does. Of the 38 countries that belong to the leading Western trade alliance, the US ranks No. 32 in spending on early childhood. In Sweden, which offers single parents a staggering 480 days of paid parental leave, preschool costs no more than 3% of a family’s gross income. America, by contrast, has no mandated paid parental leave. It has no universal childcare. Only one-third of American families can afford childcare, which consumes 27% of their income on average. Parents are being forced to leave big cities because they can’t absorb the costs of childcare, while those in rural areas often can’t find care at all.ADVERTENTIELees meer
America’s rampant child neglect doesn’t stop with its lack of day care. Infants are more likely to die in childbirth in America than in any other rich nation, and US newborns are more likely to grow up in poverty. Millions of children attend public schools that are literally falling apart. Children who are neglected — a loose term inextricably tied to poverty — are thrown into a foster-care system known for its propensity to harm children. The shortage of foster families is so critical that many kids wind up being temporarily housed in settings like casinos, office buildings, and juvenile detention facilities. The US is the only member of the United Nations that hasn’t ratified the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, which includes the right to be free from violence and labor exploitation. In Oregon, where I live, children as young as 9 are allowed to do agricultural work, and many states are trying to loosen their already flimsy child-labor protections so teenagers can be forced to work longer hours. The leading cause of death for American children and teens is gun violence.
All of which raises the question: Why does America hate its children?
On the surface, America has always professed to love its children, and those who raise them. Women are told from birth that being a mother is “the most important job in the world,” that “children are our future.” “All I am I owe to my mother,” George Washington is said to have declared. And every May, when Mother’s Day rolls around, we are inundated with soft-focus advertisements celebrating the family as the core unit of American life.
But in practice, the rhetoric exalting motherhood has served not as a means for supporting children but as a tool for keeping women at home — while fending off demands for a broader and more supportive system of child-rearing. Even as women have become vital participants in the American workforce, the opposition to expanding childcare has remained remarkably persistent. In 2021, state Rep. Charlie Shepherd of Idaho made the connection explicit when he explained why he voted against state funding for early childhood education. “I don’t think anybody does a better job than mothers in the home,” Shepherd said. “And any bill that makes it easier or more convenient for mothers to come out of the home and let others raise their child, I don’t think that’s a good direction for us to be going.” (He apologized after an outcry, but everyone heard him loud and clear.)
America has often invoked the Red Scare as an excuse for abandoning its children. In 1971, the country was one signature away from having universal childcare. A bill had passed the House and Senate that would have created federally funded childcare centers across the US.
But a rogue’s gallery of Republicans persuaded President Richard Nixon to veto the measure, citing the threat of communism to the American family unit. Nixon wrote that he opposed committing “the vast moral authority of the National Government to the side of communal approaches to child rearing over against the family-centered approach.” Kids needed to be raised by their mothers — without any help from the state.
The one time America extended a form of universal childcare, tellingly, was during World War II, when men were not around to perform critical manufacturing jobs. The Lanham Act created a patchwork system of childcare provided by churches, community centers, and large employers. But as soon as the war ended and men returned to the workforce, the program was shuttered, even as many women took to the streets to call for its continuation.
The situation is worse for people of color; racism is baked into the paradigm of family life in America. The earliest cohort of American caregivers in white homes were enslaved Black women. When President Franklin Roosevelt implemented the New Deal, he specifically exempted domestic workers, who were more likely to be women of color, from receiving Social Security benefits and labor protections. Women who took care of other people’s children were stripped of the economic power they needed to take care of their own kids, let alone pay someone else well to do it. As a consequence, childcare is still one of the lowest-paid American professions, even while the overall cost of providing this essential service has soared. We end up with a broken system where the majority of American families are unable to pay a caregiver, while many childcare workers can’t live on what they are paid. Nearly one-third of childcare workers have experienced food insecurity, and more than 100,000 have sought other forms of employment since the start of the pandemic, desperate for better pay.
For a brief moment, the pandemic threw America’s grim provisions for children into stark relief. Teachers, leery of returning to classrooms before the advent of vaccines, called out their schools for subjecting kids to deplorable conditions: inoperable or toxic water fountains, widespread mold, sweltering, unventilated spaces with windows rusted shut. Administrators and politicians, meanwhile, unironically pointed out that schools needed to be open because they were the only place where many children could be sure of a regular meal. In 2021, as childcare costs soared by more than 40%, Congress provided a massive cash infusion to states to stabilize childcare and supplied parents with both cash and an additional tax refund to support their kids. Seemingly overnight, child poverty dropped by 40%.
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