Shameful Bequests to The Next Generation

By NANCY GIBBS

George Bush knows how to talk about children. With a sure sense of childhood's mythology, of skinned knees and candy apples and first bicycles, he campaigned for office in a swarm of jolly grandchildren and promised justice for all. In this year's State of the Union address, he mentioned families and "kids" more than 30 times -- the electronic equivalent of kissing babies on the village green. "To the children out there tonight," he declared as he built to his finale, "with you rests our hope, all that America will mean in the years ahead. Fix your vision on a new century -- your century, on dreams you cannot see, on the destiny that is yours and yours alone."

Forget the next century. Just consider for a moment a single day's worth of destiny for American children. Every eight seconds of the school day, a child drops out. Every 26 seconds, a child runs away from home. Every 47 seconds, a child is abused or neglected. Every 67 seconds, a teenager has a baby. Every seven minutes, a child is arrested for a drug offense. Every 36 minutes, a child is killed or injured by a gun. Every day 135,000 children bring their guns to school.

Even children from the most comfortable surroundings are at risk. A nation filled with loving parents has somehow come to tolerate crumbling schools and a health-care system that caters to the rich and the elderly rather than to the young. A growing number of parents with preschool children are in the workplace, but there is still no adequate system of child care, and parental leaves are hard to come by. Mothers and fathers worry about the toxic residue left from too much television, too many ghastly movies, too many violent video games, too little discipline. They wonder how to raise children who are strong and imaginative and loving. They worry about the possibility that their children will grow wild and distant and angry. Perhaps they fear most that they will get the children they deserve. "Children who go unheeded," warns Harvard psychiatrist Robert Coles, giving voice to a parent's guilty nightmare, "are children who are going to turn on the world that neglected them."

And that anger will come when today's children are old enough to realize how relentlessly their needs were ignored. They will see that their parents and grandparents have left them enormous debts and a fouled environment. They will recognize that their exceptionally prosperous, peaceful, lucky predecessors, living out the end of the millennium, were not willing to make the investments necessary to ensure that the generation to follow could enjoy the same blessings.

The natural case for taking better care of children would be made on moral grounds alone. A society cannot sacrifice its most vulnerable citizens without eroding its sense of community and making a lie of its principles. But having been left behind by a decade of political shortcuts, child advocates have < adopted a more practical strategy. "If compassion were not enough to encourage our attention to the plight of our children," declares New York Governor Mario Cuomo, "self-interest should be." Marian Wright Edelman, the crusading founder of the Children's Defense Fund, goes further. "The inattention to children by our society," she warns, "poses a greater threat to our safety, harmony and productivity than any external enemy."

Spending on children, any economist can prove, is a bargain. A nation can spend money either for better schools or for larger jails. It can feed babies or pay forever for the consequences of starving a child's brain when it is trying to grow. One dollar spent on prenatal care for pregnant women can save more than $3 on medical care during an infant's first year, and $10 down the line. A year of preschool costs an average $3,000 per child; a year in prison amounts to $16,500.

But somehow, neither wisdom nor decency, nor even economics, has prevailed with those who make policy in the state houses, the Congress or the White House. "We are hypocrites," charges Senator John D. ("Jay") Rockefeller IV, who is chairman of the National Commission on Children. "We say we love our children, yet they have become the poorest group in America." Nearly a quarter of all children under six live in households that are struggling below the official poverty line -- $12,675 a year for a family of four.

In some cases the abandonment of children begins before they are even born. America's infant mortality rate has leveled off at 9.7 deaths per 1,000 births, worse than 17 other developed countries. In the District of Columbia, the rate tops 23 per 1,000, worse than Jamaica or Costa Rica. Fully 250,000 babies are born seriously underweight each year. To keep these infants in intensive care costs about $3,000 a day, and they are two to three times more likely to be blind, deaf or mentally retarded. On the other hand, regular checkups and monitoring of a pregnant woman can cost as little as $500 and greatly increase the chances that she will give birth to a healthy baby.

Every bit as important as prenatal care is nutrition for the child, both before and after birth. "Of all the dumb ways of saving money, not feeding pregnant women and kids is the dumbest," says Dr. Jean Mayer, one of the world's leading experts on nutrition and president of Tufts University. During the first year of life, a child's brain grows to two-thirds its final size. If a baby is denied good, healthy food during this critical period, he will need intensive nutritional and developmental therapies to repair the damage. "Kids' brains can't wait for Dad to get a new job," says Dr. Deborah Frank, director of growth and development at Boston City Hospital, "or for Congress to come back from recess."

Congress understood the obvious benefits of promoting infant nutrition in the 1970s, when it launched the Special Supplemental Food Program for Women, Infants and Children. WIC provides women with vouchers to buy infant formula, cheese, fruit juice, cereals, milk and other wholesome foods, besides offering nutrition classes and medical care. It costs about $30 a month to supply a mother with vouchers -- yet government funds are so tight that only 59% of women and infants who qualify for WIC receive the benefits. "A power breakfast for two businessmen is one woman's WIC package for a month," says Dr. Frank. "Why can't public-policy makers see the connection between bad infant nutrition, which is cheap and easy to fix, and developmental problems, which are expensive and often difficult to fix?"

The theme of prevention applies just as forcefully to medicine. This year the U.S. will spend about $660 billion, or 12% of its GNP, on medical services, but only a tiny fraction of that will go toward prevention. For children the most basic requirement is inoculation, the surest way to spare a child -- and the health-care system -- the ravages of tuberculosis, polio, measles and whooping cough. During the first 20 years after the discovery of the measles vaccine, public-health experts estimate, more than $5 billion was saved in medical costs, not to mention countless lives. And yet these days in California, the nation's richest state, only half of California's two-year- olds are fully immunized. Dallas reported more than 2,400 measles cases from last December through July, eight of them fatal, including one child who lived within six blocks of an immunization clinic.

Even parents who recognize the importance of preventive care are having a harder time affording it for their children. Most Americans over age 65 are covered by Medicare, the federal health-insurance plan under which the elderly -- rich or poor -- are eligible for benefits. Children's health programs, in contrast, are subject to annual congressional whims and budget cutting. Fewer and fewer employers, even of well-paid professionals, provide health benefits that cover children for routine medical needs. This means that health costs are the responsibility of individual parents, who make do as best they can, often at considerable sacrifice.

Some states and community groups are trying to help. Two years ago, Minnesota pioneered the Children's Health Plan to provide primary preventive care for children. The plan costs the state about $180 per child, but parents pay only $25: in the end everyone saves. Schools in Independence, Mo., established a health-care package to provide drug and alcohol treatment and counseling services for every child in the district. Cost to parents: $10 per child. In Pittsburgh 12,000 children have received free health care through a program crafted by churches, civic groups, Blue Cross and Blue Shield.

But too many kids are denied such care, and that starts a chain reaction. "You can't educate a child unless all systems are go, i.e., brain cells, eyes, ears, etc.," says Rae Grad, executive director of the National Commission to Prevent Infant Mortality. A national survey in 1988 found that two-thirds of teachers reported "poor health" among children to be a learning problem. This is why Head Start, the model federal program providing quality preschool for poor children, also includes annual medical and dental screenings. But once again the money is not there: only about 20% of eligible children are fully served by the program.

Head Start and similar preschool strategies improve academic performance in the early grades and pay vast dividends over time. President Bush has promised enough funding to put every needy child in Head Start, which Congress says will require a fivefold increase by 1994 from the present $1.55 billion a year. Both the House and the Senate have approved higher funding levels, and lawmakers will soon meet to reconcile differences between the two bills. But as the deficit mounts, the peace dividend sinks into the Persian Gulf and the savings and loan crisis chews into basic budget items, politicians may have a hard time approving funding increases for a constituency that does not vote. Senator Orrin Hatch of Utah, a proponent of costly child-care legislation, says the outcome of the budget negotiations is "going to be terrible for kids."

Likewise, American society has, in the past generation, abandoned its commitment to providing a world-class system of secondary education. Education Secretary Lauro Cavazos himself calls student performance "dreadfully inadequate." From both the inner cities and the affluent suburbs comes a drumbeat of stories about tin-pot principals who cannot be fired, beleaguered teachers with unmanageable workloads and illiterate graduates with abysmal test scores. If they can possibly afford to, parents choose private or parochial schools, leaving the desperate or destitute in the worst public schools. Teachers, meanwhile, are aware that they are often the most powerful influences in a child's life -- and that their job pays less in a year than a linebacker or rock star can earn in a week.

Across the board, people who deal with children are more ill-paid, unregulated and less respected than other professionals. Among physicians, pediatricians' income ranks near the bottom. In Michigan preschool teachers with five years' experience earn $12,000, and prison guards with the same amount of seniority earn almost $30,000. U.S. airline pilots are vigilantly trained, screened and monitored; school-bus drivers are not. "My hairdresser needs 1,500 hours of schooling, takes a written and practical test and is relicensed every year," says Flora Patterson, a foster parent in San Gabriel, Calif. "For foster parents in Los Angeles County there is no mandated training, yet we are dealing with life and death." The typical foster parent there earns about 80 cents an hour.

Worst of all is the status of America's surrogate parents: the babysitters and day-care workers who have become essential to the functioning of the modern family. In the absence of anything like a national child-care policy, parents are left to improvise. The rich search for trained, qualified care givers and pay them whatever it takes to keep them. But for the vast majority, child care is a game of Russian roulette: rotating nannies, unlicensed home care, unregulated nurseries that leave parents wondering constantly: Is my child really safe? "Finding child care is such a gigantic crapshoot," says Edward Zigler, director of Yale's Bush Center in Child Development and Social Policy. "If you are lucky, you are home free. But if you are unlucky, well, there are some real horror stories out there of kids being tied into cribs."

The U.S. economy has long been geared to two-income families; many families could not afford a middle-class life-style without both parents working. The real median income of parents under age 30 fell more than 24% from 1973 to 1987, according to a study by the Children's Defense Fund and Northeastern University. But social programs rarely reflect those economic realities. Growing financial pressure all too often translates into fewer doctors' visits, more stress and less time spent together as a family. Between 1950 and 1989, the divorce rate doubled: 1.16 million couples split up each year. That makes the need for reliable support services for children all the greater.

In place of responses came rhetoric: a 1986 Administration report on the family titled "Preserving America's Future" called for a return to "traditional values," parental support of children and "lovingly packed lunch boxes." Time and again, Washington has failed to address the needs of working parents -- most recently in June, when President Bush vetoed the family-leave bill on the ground that it was too burdensome for business. The bill would have allowed a worker to take up to 12 weeks a year of unpaid leave to care for a newborn, an adopted child or a sick family member.

That is abysmal compared with what other industrialized nations allow. Salaried women in France can take up to 28 weeks of unpaid maternity leave or up to 20 weeks of adoption leave, though they are less likely to need it since day care, health care and early education are widely available in that country. In France, as well as in Belgium, Italy and Denmark, at least 75% of children ages 3 to 5 are in some form of state-funded preschool programs. In Japan both the government and most companies offer monthly subsidies to parents with children. In Germany parents may deduct the cost of child care from their taxes. "Under our tax laws," observes Congresswoman Pat Schroeder of Colorado, "a businesswoman can deduct a new Persian rug for her office but can't deduct most of her costs for child care. The deduction for a Thoroughbred horse is greater than that for children."

If the troubles children face were all born of economic pressure on the family, then wealthy children should emerge unscathed. Yet the problems confronting affluent children are also profound and insidious. Parents who do not spend time with their children often spend money instead. "We supply kids with things in the absence of family," says Barbara MacPhee, a school administrator in New Orleans. "We used to build dreams for them, but now we buy them Nintendo toys and Reebok sneakers." In the absence of parental guidance and affirmation, children are left to soak in whatever example their environment sets. A childhood spent in a shopping mall raises consumerism to a varsity sport; time spent in front of a television requires no more imagination than it takes to change channels.

At Winchester High School in a cozy Boston suburb, clinical social worker Michele Diamond hears it all: the drug use, the alcohol, the eating disorders, the suicide attempts by children who are viewed as privileged. "Kids are left alone a lot to cope," she says, "and they sense less support from their families." Pressured to succeed, to "fit in," to be accepted by top colleges, the students handle their stress however they can. Some just dissolve their problems in a glass. In nearby Belmont, a juvenile officer finds that parents shrug off the danger. When their kids are caught drinking, he notes, "they say, 'Thank God it isn't cocaine. It's alcohol. We can handle that.' "

All too often it is cocaine, the poisonous solace common to the golf club and the ghetto. It is not only the violence of the drug culture that threatens children; it is also the lure of the easy money that turns 11-year-olds into drug runners. "Alienated is too weak a word to describe these kids," says Edward Loughran, a 10-year veteran of the juvenile-justice system in Massachusetts. "They don't value their lives or anyone else's life. Their values system says, 'I am here alone. I don't care what society says.' A lot of these kids are dying young deaths and don't care because they don't feel there is any reason to aspire to anything else."

Violence in the neighborhood is bad enough. Violence in the home is devastating. Reports of child abuse have soared from 600,000 in 1979 to 2.4 million in 1989, a searing testimony to the enduring role of children as the easiest victims. In New York City, half of all abuse reports are repeat cases of children who have had to be rescued before, only to be returned to an abusive home.

When two-year-old "Rebecca" accidentally soiled her underwear, her mother and the mother's boyfriend were not pleased. So they heated up some cooking oil, held Rebecca down and poured it over her. Then they waited a week or so before Rebecca's mother, unable to stand the stench of the child's legs, which were rotting from gangrene, took her to the hospital. After a month's stay that saved her legs, Rebecca was able to move to a foster home. From there she went to live with her paternal grandmother, who had plenty of room: all four of her sons were in state prison.

Around the country there are hundreds of thousands of other children who scream for help from overburdened teachers, understaffed social service agencies, crowded courts and a gridlocked foster-care system. To dismiss child abuse as a personal, private tragedy misses the larger point entirely. If children are not protected from their abusers, then the public will one day have to be protected from the children. To walk through death row in any prison is to learn what child abuse can lead to when it ripens. According to attorneys who have represented them, roughly 4 out of 5 death row inmates were abused as children.

A reordering of priorities toward protecting children would include far higher funding and staffing of Child Protective Services, the organization that investigates charges of abuse and can move to rescue children before the damage is irreparable. But even that would do little good if there is no place to put them. No solution will be possible without an overhaul of the foster- care system, which in many cities is on the verge of collapse. All too often, children are separated from siblings and shuttled from group homes to relatives to foster families, with no sense of the safety, security or stability they need to succeed in school and elsewhere. "If we don't have money for adequate care," says Ruth Massinga, a member of the National Commission on Children, "removing children from their homes is just another devastation."

Failure to make treatment available to drug addicts who seek it will ensure yet another generation of addicted babies and battered kids. In Los Angeles the number of drug-exposed babies entering the foster-care system rose 453% between 1984 and 1987. A survey of states found that drugs are involved in more than 2 out of 3 child abuse and neglect cases. Children born into a family of addicts are left with impossible choices: a life with the abusers they know, or a life at the mercy of a system filled with strangers -- lawyers, judges, social workers, foster parents.

It is a common mistake to assume that all abuse is physical. The scars of other forms of abuse -- like unrelenting verbal cruelty -- can be just as apparent when children grow older, unloved and self-hating. "You can tell kids you love 'em," says April, a runaway in Hollywood. "But that's not the same as showing them. Broken promises is really what tears your heart apart." For April there is not much difference between insult and injury. "Beating kids will hurt kids. Sexual abuse will hurt a kid. But verbal abuse is the worst. I've had all three. If you're not strong enough as a person, and they've been telling you this all your life, that you can never amount to anything, you are going to believe it."

There have always been children who are survivors, who overcome the odds and find some adult -- a teacher, a grandparent, a priest -- who can provide the anchors the family could not. Toure Diggs, 18, grew up in a rough neighborhood of New Haven, Conn., and is now enrolled at Fairleigh Dickinson University. Since his parents separated three years ago, Toure has tried to help raise his brother Landis, who is 7. In the end Toure knows he is competing with the lure of the street for Landis' soul. "You got to start so young," Toure says. "It's like a game. Whoever gets to the kids first, that's how they are going to turn out."

Schools in particular have come to take that role very seriously, which accounts for the debate over how to teach values and self-discipline to a generation whose boundaries have been loosely drawn. But other institutions are slowly waking up to the implications of writing off an entire generation. The business community, in particular, wonders where it will find a trained, literate, motivated work force in the 21st century. The Business Roundtable, with representatives from the largest 200 companies, has made support for education its highest priority in the '90s. In Dallas, Texas Instruments helps fund the local Head Start program. Eventually, more and more companies may make parental leave a standard benefit, regardless of the messages coming from Washington.

In Des Moines business leaders are sponsoring a program called Smoother Sailing, which sends counselors like "Sunburst Lady" Toni Johansen into the city's elementary schools. National studies have shown that such support helps improve confidence, discipline and attitudes about school. With the extra funding, the city has been able to provide one guidance counselor for every 250 students, in contrast to a national average of one for 850.

But there will be no real progress, no genuine hope for America's children until the sense of urgency forces a reconsideration of values in every home, up to and including the White House. Polls suggest the will is there: 60% of Americans believe the situation for children has worsened over the past five years; 67% say they would be more likely to vote for a candidate who supported increased spending for children's programs even if it meant a tax increase.

^ When adults lament the absence of "values," it is worth recalling that children are an honest conscience, the perfect mirror of a society's priorities and principles. A society whose values are entirely material is not likely to breed a generation of poets; anti-intellectualism and indifference to education do not inspire rocket scientists. With each passing day these arguments become more apparent, the needs more pressing. Where is the leader who will seize the opportunity to do what is both smart and worthy, and begin retuning policy to focus on children and intercept trouble before it breeds?

With reporting by Julie Johnson/Des Moines, Melissa Ludtke/Boston and Michael Riley/Washington