Hubert Humphrey famously said, “The ultimate moral test of any government is the way it treats three groups of its citizens. First, those in the dawn of life — our children. Second, those in the shadows of life — our needy, our sick, our handicapped. Third, those in the twilight of life — our elderly.”
On that first test, we are failing.
In September, the United Nation’s UNICEF agency released “Worlds of Influence: Understanding What Shapes Child Well-Being in Rich Countries.” This report concluded that the United States ranks 36th out of 38 wealthy nations in terms of children’s well-being.
It’s shocking. The richest nation in the world sits at the bottom of the barrel when it comes to meeting the needs of its youngest and most vulnerable citizens. And many of the ways in which we fail our kids have become more glaringly apparent than ever in this painful pandemic year.
But compared to the weeping, wailing and gnashing of teeth that regularly follows the release of international comparisons of student achievement, the UNICEF report stirred barely a ripple in the United States. Indeed, similar reports from UNICEF dating back to 2007 were also largely ignored in the United States.
The latest report’s findings around several dozen indicators are sobering, often appalling. Among them:
Health: The health-care Americans provide for children ranks us dead last.
Frequently bullied: The U.S. ranks 24th worst out of 33 countries reporting on this dimension.
Parental leave for fathers: The U.S. ranks dead last.
Support for families: The U.S. ranks 33rd out of 36 nations.
Low birthweight babies: The U.S. ranks 36th in the incidence of live-birth babies weighing 2,500 grams (5.5 pounds) or less. Those infants, frequently born prematurely to women without prenatal care, are approximately 20 times more likely to die than heavier and healthier babies, according to the World Health Organization.
Alienated teenagers: The U.S. ranks 27th out of 38 nations in the proportion of young people aged 15-19 who are not in school, not in a training program, or not working.
Over the course of many years, policymakers in both parties have ignored this depressing picture, despite mouthing standard platitudes of caring about children’s wellbeing.
When they actually think about our kids, they tend to look at schools. Like a drunk who dropped his keys up the street but looks for them under a streetlamp — because that’s where the light is — policymakers examining schools for children’s problems are looking in the wrong place.
School failure is the symptom, not the cause: It is simply the light being shone on the toxic environment in which so many children exist. In truth, too many children are arriving at school too traumatized to learn.
Of course, anyone paying attention over the past generation or so didn’t need “Worlds of Influence” to understand the parlous situation of children in the United States. The American people got a peek into that reality this year when they learned that the closing of schools amidst the COVID-19 pandemic required educators to provide tens of millions of meals daily to children shut out of schools.
That insight followed years of domestic studies and in-depth investigations revealing that the quality of life of many children in the United States is shockingly poor.
In 2015, the U.S. reached a shameful milestone: More than half of children in public schools qualify for free- and reduced-price meals because their families’ income is so meager, according to the Southern Regional Education Board.
A compelling 2016 analysis from Educational Testing Service described a nation in crisis as income inequality in America grew to levels not seen since the Gilded Age of the robber barons. ETS described a situation in which opportunity for fortunate children piled advantage on top of advantage (attractive homes, excellent schools and two-income households — think Bethesda, Md.), while low-income children and those of color faced disadvantage piled on disadvantage (poor housing stock, underfunded schools, and communities devastated by unemployment — think Flint, Mich. or Cambria County, Pa.).
Although accurate data are hard to find, an estimated two million evictions occur annually, according to Pulitzer Prize-winning author Matthew Desmond. Many of these evictions involve single mothers with children. The latest federal statistics reveal that a record-high 1.5 million students are homeless.
Gun violence is nearly off the charts in the United States, and children are among its disproportionate casualties. Yet still, eight years after 20-year-old Adam Lanza slaughtered 20 first-graders at Sandy Hook Elementary in Newtown, the nation’s political leaders have done nothing to address the public health hazard of essentially unlimited access to weapons of war in the United States.
Meanwhile, a striking photo-essay in the New York Times Magazine recently documented that hunger stalks American children. A mother on disability payments with children aged four and six told the photojournalist, Brenda Ann Kenneally.
“When they get food, the kids say, ‘Oh, Mommy, we’re going to have food tonight. We’re not going to sleep with no food in our tummy.’ ” The most touching aspect of the situation, reported Kenneally, is the innocence and hope that small children display in the beneficence of the society in which they live.
The coronavirus, of course, makes everything worse. It has both exposed these inequities and intensified them. As the pandemic rolls into its 11th month, the loss of jobs, ongoing shuttering of schools and businesses, and the rising death toll have devastated the lives of millions.
Children have not been protected. Many students and schools, particularly in rural areas and in inner cities, lack the high-speed bandwidth to make effective virtual learning possible. Reports indicate that the pandemic is taking a toll on children’s mental health as they miss their friends at school, deal with the loss of loved ones, or watch their families cope with precarious finances and the threat of eviction.
At least 20 million children are living in a household in which someone lost a job. In many, many cases, families are together in small quarters, with no privacy and little if any interaction outside the family.
National Public Radio notes that teenagers are reporting more unhappiness, depression and uncertainty about the future, while emergency room visits related to the mental health of both small children and teenagers skyrocketed in cities like Philadelphia this summer compared to last year.
Children are going hungry and increasingly losing health insurance plans as Medicaid is cut or parents are tossed off the insurance attached to their lost jobs. The Georgetown University Center for Children and Families estimates that 300,000 children lost medical insurance in 2020.
Child abuse and neglect, along with family violence that precipitates trauma may be on the rise. We don’t have definitive evidence. But what we do know is that child welfare calls from schools — usually states’ top sources of information about suspected abuse or neglect in the home — are down dramatically. Such calls dropped about 98% at one point in Virginia.
Then there’s the “pandemic within the pandemic,” the disproportionate impact of COVID-19 on people of color. Black unemployment during the pandemic has been significantly higher than white unemployment. Meanwhile, estimates indicate that Americans of color are nearly twice as likely as white Americans to contract the virus, up to four times as likely to be hospitalized for it, and up to three times as likely to die from it.
There is little in the debates or negotiations in Washington or state capitals that suggests our elected officials are paying attention to these developments, much less giving them primacy.
When we are done lamenting the awful state of affairs, what to do?
It begins with leadership from the very top, and there, we can learn from experience. Seven previous presidents — Teddy Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, Herbert Hoover, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Harry Truman, Dwight D. Eisenhower and Richard Nixon — have convened a White House Conference on Children.
Indeed, the first White House Conference on any subject was devoted to children’s welfare. Teddy Roosevelt pulled it together in 1909. Subsequently, such conferences were held about every 10 years, under presidents from both parties. But that practice, sadly, ended after Nixon — with two limited exceptions: a Clinton conference on pre-school education and a one-day Trump “summit” on child-care and family leave.
While income inequality exploded amidst the tax-cutting frenzy of the last 40 years and opportunity’s playing field tilted dramatically in favor of the children of the well-to-do, policymakers largely ignored the plight of children in low-income families while college costs (and associated student debt) exploded for low- and middle-income students alike.
If President Joe Biden convened an Eighth White House Conference on Children, it could shine a needed spotlight on the disparities in the lives of the children of the haves versus those of the have-nots in America. Such a conference could spark action on community violence and the need for economic development in depressed urban and rural communities.
It can examine evictions, substandard housing, access to health care, and transportation to work and job training for parents. It can explore “food deserts” — communities in which families are stranded without cars miles from decent grocery stores.
Of course, the need for focused policy responses to the problems of child poverty, the bipartisan abandonment of rural America, and the challenges facing children of color should be priorities.
How to go about it? The way prior presidents have organized White House conferences is to start with state-by-state gatherings to elect delegates and develop recommendations to bring to Washington in the second or third year after the initial announcement.
President-elect Biden, his wife Dr. Jill Biden, and Vice President-elect Kamala Harris should use what Teddy Roosevelt called the “bully pulpit” of the White House to insist that this nation live up to the promise embodied in the phrase: “Children are our future.” If they do, they’ll be building on a century-long tradition of leadership to promote children’s welfare by presidents from both parties. And a focus on children just might be a bridge to bipartisan action.
Ornstein is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. Harvey is executive director of the National Superintendents Roundtable.
