Born to Fail?

In terms of sheer size and duration, Britain's National Child Development Study is a behaviorist's dream. For 15 years this unique program has been periodically measuring the growth and maturation of every child who was born in England, Scotland and Wales from the third through the ninth of March 1958. Thus the National Children's Bureau, which was set up in 1963 with both private and public funding, has been working on an ideally random sample of more than 15,000 children from every kind of home and background.*

More Problems. The exhaustive data compiled on the children have been used in numerous studies. A report published in 1963 showed that the death rate of infants born to mothers who had smoked during pregnancy was significantly higher (26%) than that of infants born to nonsmokers. In 1969 a follow-up survey demonstrated that the seven-year-old children of mothers who had smoked during pregnancy were on an average shorter in height and also had more problems in school than seven-year-olds born to nonsmokers.

Other extrapolations from the mountains of statistics have been more purely behavioral. One study compared the situation of 458 illegitimate children who had been raised by their mothers with that of 182 illegitimate children who had been adopted and 15,563 legitimate children. Although all three groups were from the same social and economic strata, by the age of seven the illegitimate children who had remained with their mothers were already at a distinct disadvantage. The mothers had begun to move socially downward, and the children's behavior and school work were deteriorating.

This fall the Children's Bureau came forth with its most dramatic publication yet: a chilling comparison of disadvantaged and ordinary children called "Born to Fail?"

Drawing on its vast data bank of questionnaires and information gathered from families, schools, medical clinics and government social service organizations, as well as interviews and tests with the children themselves, the bureau discovered, first of all, that in its sampling one child in 16 (6%) was socially disadvantaged. By the bureau's cautious definition, a disadvantaged child is one who lives below the poverty line, is badly housed, and either has only one parent or is one of five or more children.

This hapless group--which contributes, on the average, two students to every British classroom--compared unfavorably with the "ordinary" children in the sampling in virtually every way--physically, intellectually and socially. Some outstanding contrasts:

> At school, disadvantaged children were, on the average, 3 1/2 years behind ordinary children in reading scores. Teachers classified a quarter of the disadvantaged children as "maladjusted."

> Disadvantaged children were notably short for their age, and four times as many of them suffered marked hearing problems as did the other children. The disadvantaged were five times as likely to be absent from school for long periods because of ill health or emotional disorders. One in 14 needed special education, compared to one in 80 among ordinary children.

> One out of eleven of the disadvantaged, but only one in 300 of the ordinary children, had had contact with the juvenile probation service. In fact, the disadvantaged use social service agencies so heavily that the report estimates that a 2% reduction in the number of disadvantaged would produce a reduction of between 11% and 14% in the number of "calls" on the agencies.

Having painted this dismal portrait of self-perpetuating misery, the report recommends strategies for alleviating it. Concluding that social work is only a palliative and education too slow and chancy, the bureau recommends strong efforts to divert public resources from "technological progress" and into direct expenditures that will raise low incomes and improve poor housing. Thus its major recommendation is the same one that Christopher Jencks made in his book about U.S. society and education called Inequality (TIME, Sept. 18, 1972).

Asks the report: "Are we more interested in a bigger national cake so that some children get a bigger slice eventually--or are we ready for disadvantaged children to have a bigger slice now, even if as a result our personal slice is smaller?"

* The actual number of births exceeded 17,000. but over the years some children died, others emigrated and a few could not be traced.

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