Epilouge
In 1999 a team of social scientists at the University of Washington in Seattle reported their discovery of a groundbreaking method for preventing adolescent violence and other “risk behaviors,” including early sexual intercourse. They enrolled a group of first graders attending some of the city’s toughest schools in a “test program” that lasted throughout the elementary years. These children were treated with respect, encouraged to cooperate with one another and with their teachers, rewarded for their accomplishments, given a quiet place to do their homework, and taught how to say no without endangering their friendships and social status. By the sixth grade, the participants were far less likely than kids at “comparable schools with no special intervention” to have committed a violent act or started drinking heavily, engaged in intercourse or been involved in pregnancy.1
A friend and I have a name for this kind of research, which marshals lots of scientific methodology and statistics (and usually money) to demonstrate what is already patently obvious to almost everyone. We call it “Studies Show, People Who Are Happy Smile More.”
And yet in the last decade of the second millennium, at a time when social-science funding was tight, these scholars felt called upon to design a major study and procure six years of grants to demonstrate that children who are treated with respect and appreciation, given space to think, and helped to compromise while also standing up for their beliefs will do better in life. These points were not obvious enough to enough people. In fact, to me, the more disturbing aspect of the study was the part that was not reported. If attention to these basic needs constituted “special intervention,” what were the children in the control group subject to all those years? If you have spent any time in a school lately, you will know the depressing answer: ordinary “education.”
Hardly a day goes by when one of our nation’s leaders does not stand before a camera, dab a tear from the corner of his eye, and deliver a little paean to Our Nation’s Children. But truth be told, the United States is not a child-friendly place. For one thing, though we might love each child separately, in the aggregate the younger generation does not win much esteem from its elders. In 1997, the public-interest research group Public Agenda asked adults what came to mind when they thought of children and teens. A majority of the respondents snatched at the words undisciplined, rude, spoiled, and wild. The older the kids, the more frequently cited were these characterizations.2
We say we love our children. But, as a disgruntled boyfriend once told me, love isn’t a feeling, it’s an act. And America acts as if it does not love its children. The United States lags far behind other industrialized nations in many indicators of child well-being and behind some nonindustrialized ones as well. In this, the only developed nation that does not provide health care to all its citizens, 11.3 million children age eighteen and under are uninsured, and that number is growing by 3,000 a day. In part because of this health-care crisis, a fifth of American mothers get no prenatal care, which predisposes their children to many chronic health problems. Twenty industrialized nations surpass us in preventing infant mortality, according to the Children’s Defense Fund,3 and the percentage of children who die before the age of five is the same in this fabulously rich country as it is in Cuba, a desperately poor country.
Many families’ lives were not improved by American history’s longest boom. The coming recession hurt them most. Large numbers of the poor worked during those fat years, yet the lowest fifth of wage earners saw their incomes drop from 1970s levels, and the poverty rate has stuck stubbornly around 12 percent for decades, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics and the Census Bureau. “Welfare reform”—the federal Social Security Act of 1997 and the new regulations instituted by the states in its wake—appears to be worsening life for the poorest Americans. One study in 1999 found that the poorest 20 percent of families lost an average of $577 a year, and the poorest 10 percent more than $800. As state agencies erected more obstacles to obtaining food stamps, fewer poor and working-poor families applied for them. By 2001, soup kitchens were reporting the longest lines they’d ever seen at their doors.5
… simply being a child predisposes a person to poverty in America: almost twice as many children as adults are poor, and one in sex American children is poor … including more than one in three for black or Hispanic children.9 Poverty is the single greatest “risk factor” for most every life-smashing condition a kid might be at risk for, save perhaps compulsive shopping. Among these are sexual risks, including unwanted pregnancy and too-early motherhood, AIDS, and sexual abuse.
Not only is child abuse related to poverty, poverty is child abuse. David Gil, a Brandeis University social policy professor and lifelong child advocate, put it eloquently. “Children are abused and their development tends to be stunted as a result of a broad range of perfectly legitimate social policies and public practices which cause, permit, and perpetuate poverty, inadequate nutrition, physical and mental ill-health, unemployment, substandard housing and neighborhoods, polluted and dangerous environments, schooling devoid of meaningful education, widespread lack of opportunities, and despair,” he wrote. “The massive abuse and destruction of children is a by-product of the normal workings of our established social order and its political, economic, and cultural institutions.”10 It is wrong to single out sexual abuse as the worst harm to children, Gil told me, when child abuse is business as usual.
As I have said, it’s out in the world, as much as in the home, that children learn to be friends, workers, and lovers. Therefore, parents who care about what happens to their kids need to stop seeing themselves exclusively as Jennifer’s mom or Jamal’s dad. Mom and Dad are also firefighters, Web site designers, doctors, shopkeepers, and corporate executives; they are neighbors, school board members, and voters. Mom and Dad are citizens, and if they want their children safe, they must behave as such, which means looking out for other children in the village too. And that goes further than making sure tax dollars flow equitably to all children.
We also need to start seeing children as citizens. Twenty-five years ago, the child development sage Gisele Konopka identified nine basic requirements for children to grow up happy and healthy. Along with such personal essentials as kids’ need to experiment with identities and roles, she named “the need to participate as citizens.” Indeed, she put it first on her list. “A sense of belonging” and “a feeling of accountability to others” were among the nine too. But responsibility and duty weren’t all children needed, said Konopka. Also crucial were the experiences that would “cultivate the capacity to enjoy life.”15
When we are ready to invite children into the community as fully participating citizens, I believe we will also respect them as people not so different from ourselves. That will be the moment at which we respect their sexual autonomy and agency and realize that one way to help them cultivate the capacity to enjoy life is to educate their capacity for sexual joy.
Alligators lurk at the bottom of every child’s sleep. Peril is inevitable in childhood, and adults’ greatest pain may be the powerlessness to prevent it. But as children move out into the world, protecting them from sex will not protect them from those dangers that have little to do with sex but ultimately make sex dangerous.
Sex is not harmful to children. It is a vehicle of sex-knowledge, love, healing, creativity, adventure, and intense feelings of aliveness. There are many ways even the smallest children can partake of it. Our moral obligation to the next generation is to make a world in which every child can partake safely, a world in which the needs and desires of every child—for accomplishment, connection, meaning, and pleasure—can be marvelously fulfilled.
1 – Jane E. Brody, “A Stitch in Time,” New York Times, March 21, 1999, “Week in Review,” 2
2 – Steve Farkas et al., Kids These Days: What Americans Really Think about the Next Generation (New York: Public Agenda, 1997).
5 – “Study Says Welfare Changes Made the Poorest Worse Off,” New York Times, August 23, 1999; Elizabeth Becker, “Millions Eligible for Food Stamps Aren’t Applying,” New York Times, February 26, 2001.
9 – State of America’s Children Yearbook 2001 (Washington D.C.: Children’s Defense Fund, 2001).
10 – David G. Gil, “The United States versus Child Abuse,” The Social Context of Child Abuse and Neglect, ed. Leroy H. Pelton (New York: Human Sciences Press, 1981), 294.
15 – Gisela Konopka, “Requirements for Healthy Development of Adolescent Youth,” Adolescence 8 (1973): 1-26.
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