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Children

American Decades | Date: 2001

Children

Politics

Among the most important and divisive issues in the cultural politics of the United States during the 1990s was the debate about the rights of children. From the outset, the Clinton administration, largely at the initiative of First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton, gave the issue top priority. The emphasis on children, however, enabled activists and politicians alike to use the issue as political leverage. "I can win any argument by saying we need welfare reform, but not at the cost of the children," remarked Senator Edward M. Kennedy (D-Massachusetts) in 1995. For Marian Wright Edelman, founder and president of the Children's Defense Fund (CDF), poverty remained the single most devastating problem facing children in the United States. Her proposed solution was straightforward: the federal government must give poor families more money. Many of Edelman's opponents, however, charged that her focus on children masked her real objective—to end poverty for people of all ages through the expenditure of federal revenue. In a general sense, Edelman's basic position remained extremely popular with Americans throughout the decade. A Time/CNN poll conducted in 1996, for example, found that 73 percent of Americans surveyed favored allocating additional tax dollars to programs designed to benefit children. Yet, despite this apparent national consensus, as the 1990s drew to a close, statistics compiled by the federal government suggested that the number of children mired in poverty was growing at an alarming rate. According to a Department of Health and Human Services report the percentage of children living in "extreme poverty" doubled since 1975—at the end of the decade the number stood at 10 percent, or 6.3 million children. To experts in child development, such as Douglas Nelson, executive director of the Annie E. Casey Foundation, such statistics predicted a grim future for the United States. As Nelson explained in 1996: "It may well be that the nation cannot survive—as a decent place to live, as a world-class power or even as a democracy—with such high rates of children growing into adulthood unprepared to parent, unprepared to be productively employed and unprepared to share in mainstream aspirations."

Children and Education

The chief innovation in elementary education during the 1990s did not concern curricular reform. Rather, it involved the assumption on the part of schools, particularly those located in impoverished and crime-ridden neighborhoods, of responsibility for the emotional and social welfare of children from birth to age twelve. Theoretically, anything that affected a child became the business of the school, from nutrition to the prevention of drug abuse to health care to psychological counseling. Joy G. Dryfoos maintained in Full-Service Schools: A Revolution in Health and Social Services For Children, Youth and Families (1994) that "schools are being called on to be those 'surrogate parents' that can increase the 'teachability' of children who arrive on their doorsteps in poor shape." During the decade, therefore, schools expanded beyond traditional academics, but to many educators it was a logical evolution. One of the more far-reaching educational programs of the 1990s began in Missouri and had spread to forty-seven other states by 1996. This program employed so-called parent educators to offer advice on parenting skills to young families. Perhaps the most interesting aspect of this program was that it began by focusing on future parents in the third trimester of pregnancy. Bowling Park Elementary School in Norfolk, Virginia, which advertised itself as "A Caring Community," provided another notable example of the new directions in elementary education. Principal Herman Clark not only looked after the needs of his students, but provided object lessons for their parents in the form of field trips. One year Clark took them to the Greensville Correctional Center. On another occasion parents visited the woman's prison in Goochland County, Virginia. Perhaps the most memorable trip, However, was to death row at the Mecklenberg Correctional Center. "The parents are subjected to a shakedown body search," Clark said. "They hear the door slam. They look at the inmates and see the way the inmates look back at them. We ask the prisoners 'Was there something that led you to this life?' They say, 'Yes, my parents were not there when I was a kid. There was nothing to do, so I did this or that [crime].' It is frightening. It makes our parents realize: this is where their kid is heading." The shock-treatment field trips were just one of the methods that educators began to use to rescue not only children, but entire families. "School has to be about more than reading and writing," Clark declared. In 1992 Bowling Park was selected as the site of the first CoZi school, developed by James P. Comer and Edward Zigler of Yale University. The CoZi school model has since been adopted in more-affluent school districts throughout the United States. Operating year-round, CoZi schools became an exercise in cooperative management in which parents, teachers, administrators, and mental-health professionals jointly decided policy in an effort, as Zigler put it, to "make the success of the child in every aspect of development our constant focus."

The Market Place

Preteenage children, "tweeners" as they were known to advertisers and marketers, were active consumers. According to statistics compiled for the last quarter of 1999, preteens (ages eight to thirteen) spent approximately $14 billion a year throughout the 1990s, much of it on expensive, brand-name clothing and accessories. They also accounted for 9 percent of compact disc (CD) sales. James McNeal, professor of marketing at Texas A & M University, estimated that tweeners directly influenced more than $128 billion in family spending in 1997, the last year for which complete figures are available. "Kids invented the minivan," McNeil asserted, "and just recently, they've been encouraging their parents to sell them and get an SUV (sports utility vehicle) instead." Experts suggested that children came to exert so much influence on family spending habits because of a dramatic change in family relations. "People treat each other more like members of a group," McNeil points out, "rather than as sons and daughters and moms and dads." This more democratic ideal of parenting not only gave children of the 1990s more individual freedom but more power within the family as well. Child psychologist Paula Rauch of Harvard Medical School expressed concern that during the decade it became harder for parents to set limits on their children's behavior, a failure that, in turn, gave children a false sense of power. "They may end up self-centered, self-absorbed, incapable of managing a successful social life, spoiled and unhappy because they're never going to get their own way all the time," concluded William Damon, director of the Stanford Center on Adolescence.

HARRY POTTER

Throughout the latter part of 1999, thousands of young children walked around with paste-on tattoos in the shape of a purple lightening bolt. Many adults were puzzled; for those in the know, however, the tattoos indicated that these kids were fans of the young, would-be wizard Harry Potter. The fictional character and his adventures, the creation of English author J. K. Rowling, captivated readers young and old. Three books, Harry Potter and the Sorcerors Stone (1998), Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (1999), and Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (1999), racked up record-breaking sales in the United Kingdom and the United States. The books also earned the distinction as one of the few children's books ever to crack the adult best-sellers list, remaining on The New York Times Best Sellers' List for more than thirty-eight weeks. By the fall of 1999, more than 7.5 million volumes were in print, translated into twenty-eight languages, with more than 650,000 lightning-bolt tattoos also being sold at local bookstores across the country. Why Harry Potter? For many readers, the visit to Harry's world of enchantment promises a brief respite from the uncertainties of the 1990s. Rowling, a single mother of a young daughter, plans to write four more books for the series.

Sources:

"The Year of Harry Potter," USA Today, 18 (20 December 1999): 50.

"Hurry Harry/' Neivsioeck, 134 (1 November 1999): 6.

Paul Gray, Elizabeth Gleick, and Andrea Sachs, "Hooked on Harry," Time. 154 (20 September 1999): 66-72.

Sports

Paying for children to play sports was another major family expenditure of the 1990s. Some estimates placed the number of American children participating in organized sports during the decade at more than forty million. Parents on average paid close to $4,000 a year to enable their children to participate. These costs included not only equipment and uniforms, but club dues to help pay coaches' salaries, fees for private clinics and camps, and travel and hotel expenses. By the end of the 1990s, however, sports for children had succumbed to a cycle of rising expectations. "Nobody seems to want to play on the little neighborhood team for more than one season," said Judith C. Young, executive director of the National Association of Sport and Physical Education (NASPE) located in Reston, Virginia. The athletic lives of many children were consumed by practices, clinics, and competitive tournaments. There was no longer room for dilettantes or for what parenting manuals used to call "unstructured play." The objective of participating became more than experiencing the thrill of victory, winning a trophy, or molding a good character. Instead the prize was often a college scholarship, a place on an Olympic team, or a lucrative professional career. Experts and parents alike, however, pointed to the benefits of participation. A child busy with sports was less susceptible to the lure of drugs, gangs, and violence. Sports provided exercise, discipline, and camaraderie. Mark Goldstein, a child psychologist at Roosevelt University in Chicago, maintained that "we know from a lot of research that kids who participate in sports tend to do better academically. It forces them to be more organized with their time and to prioritize better." By contrast, critics increasingly cited the pressure that parents and coaches placed on children as the principal reason why 73 percent of them quit playing sports by age thirteen. Fred Engh, a coach and author of Why Johnny Hates Sports (1999) wrote that "they drop out because it ceases to be fun, and the pressures put on them by coaches and parents don't make it worthwhile.… There's nothing wrong with competition.… But children under the age of 10 don't necessarily want competition. What they want is to have fun."

The 1990s Lifestyle

"They are a generation stuck on fast forward, children in a fearsome hurry to grow up," concluded writers Barbara Kantrowitz and Pat Wingert. "The girls wear sexy lingerie and provocative makeup … in order to complete what some parents call the Lolita look. The boys affect a tough-guy swagger—while fretting about when their voices will change." These were the children of the 1990s: educated, affluent, computer savvy, apparently obsessed with athletic competition, and often motivated by the dictates of consumption, fashion, and celebrity. Experts worried, though, that they might never grow up, mistaking the appearance for the substance of maturity. "What we're seeing is a superficial sophistication," lamented Damon. "There's been no increase in the values that help a kid get through the confusion of life in a steady, productive way." The lives of these well-to-do children moved at an increasingly frenetic pace. Ten-year-old Allie Terese Baron-Phillips of Tarzana, California, described her hectic daily routine to Kantrowitz and Wingert. "My life is really hectic right now. I'm doing what some people in the 1800s weren't doing until they were full-grown adults. I get up at 6:30 every morning, go to school and have to rush through all my classes, come home and work on my homework, go to ice skating lessons, watch a little TV, talk on the phone, do more homework and practice my violin. If I'm lucky, I get to sleep by 11. And then the entire ordeal starts again." The consequences of this constant pressure are difficult to quantify, but perhaps one indication of its effect was that physicians wrote an estimated five hundred thousand to one million prescriptions a year for antidepressants to treat children and teenagers. The pressure on children to behave like adults became almost irresistible during the decade. Children were "being exposed to adult things from birth," said Markus Kruesi, a child and adolescent psychologist at the University of Illinois Institute for Juvenile Research. Half were children of divorce. As young children they worried about being abducted by strangers and having their photograph appear on milk cartons. Before they had been on a date, they had heard about the perils of AIDS. Many were exposed to drugs, gangs, and violence before they entered junior high. Recent research has suggested that sexual activity and drug use among preteens have both increased dramatically. According to a study conducted in 1997 by the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) in Atlanta, Gerogia, 6.5 percent of ninth-grade girls and 14.7 percent of ninth-grade boys admitted to having had sex before the age of thirteen. A University of Maryland study completed in 1998 found that 29 percent of eighth graders had sampled illegal drugs. More than half (52.5 percent) said they had used alcohol, with 24.7 percent saying they have been drunk at least once. Researchers placed the responsibility for the attitudes and behavior of children primarily on parents. "This is a time when they're real curious about the world and they're soaking up other points of view," argued Mary Pipher, the author of Reviving Ophelia: Saving the Selves of Adolescent Girls (1994). "They're not getting enough of that from the people who love them. They're getting it from machines and people who want to sell them stuff." Still, despite the problems and pressures they faced, the children of the 1990s remained optimistic. According the "1998 Roper Youth Report: The Mood of Young America," 80 percent expected to have better lives than their parents.

Sources:

Joy G. Dryfoos, Full-Service Schools: A Revolution in Health and Social Services For Children, Youth and Families (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1994).

Fred Engh, Why Johnny Hates Sports (Garden City, N.Y.: Avery, 1999).

Andrew Ferguson, "Inside the Crazy Culture of Kids Sports," Time, 154 (12 July 1999): 52-60.

Elizabeth Gleick, "The Children's Crusade," Time, 147 (3 June 1996): 30-35.

Sylvia Ann Hewlett, When the Bough Breaks: The Costs of Neglecting Our Children (New York: Basic Books, 1991).

Margot Hornblower, "It Takes a School," Time, 147 (3 June 1996): 36-38.

Barbara Kantrowitz and Pat Wingert, "The Truth About Tweens News-week, 134 (18 October 1999): 62-72. J. F. O. McAllister, "The Children's Crusade," Time, 150 (25 August 1997): 36.

"1998 Roper Youth Report: The Mood of Young America" (New York: Roper Starch Worldwide, 1998).

Mary Pipher, Reviving Ophelia: Saving the Selves of Adolescent Girls (New York: Putnam, 1994).

"Special Report: Troubled Kids," Time, 154 (31 May 1999): 33-59.

Copyright 2001, Gale Group. All rights reserved. Gale Group is a Thomson Corporation Company.