Jamie Tobias Neely: Work culture forgets kids

Our knee-jerk reaction is to blame the parents.

When a bus monitor from Greece, N.Y., was viciously bullied to tears last month by 13-year-old boys, YouTube viewers quickly pointed their fingers at neglectful mothers and fathers.

When Anne-Marie Slaughter, a Princeton University dean, wrote of her decision to leave her job as director of policy planning at the U.S. State Department because her 14-year-old son was struggling without her, online readers just as eagerly labeled her as an elite careerist.

Yet as representations of opposite sides of the socioeconomic scale, both stories illustrate a key flaw of contemporary American society. Much as we revere the power of individual choice, it’s often not the parents who are failing American children; it’s the culture in which the parents work.

As Slaughter pointed out in an article titled “Why Women Still Can’t Have It All” for the Atlantic magazine in June, parents make difficult decisions in the context of a system that no longer matches contemporary reality.

Working parents must conform to the requirements of school schedules designed to meet the needs of farming families. Working mothers must navigate career trajectories that were developed with the working father, stay-at-home mother in mind. And everyone must toil away at work schedules designed to squeeze maximum productivity out of the leanest of staffs, valuing profits and stock prices over the authentic needs of families attempting to raise children of character and compassion.

To maintain healthy relationships with their children, parents must be a consistent presence in their lives.

Slaughter writes of her son skipping homework, disrupting classes and failing math as he entered his teen years untethered to his mother.

The mothers of the bullies of Greece, N.Y., have been less forthcoming. But it’s likely their sons would not have sought attention through bullying had they received more healthy time with their parents at home.

We no longer have a choice, if we ever really did, to return to the single working parent model of the 1950s. But we do have a choice about the system we construct for employment.

Opportunities for flexible hours, part-time work and career paths that factor in the life cycles of families could support all children, regardless of the professional level of their parents.

We pay a high price for avoiding these changes. As mothers entered the workforce, our society steadily became less civil.

Bullying can be found everywhere from elementary school playgrounds to Congress. According to the National Center for Education Statistics, about 28 percent of 12- to 18-year-olds in 2009 reported having been bullied during the school year. Researchers at Indiana State University found that 15 percent of college students in one study reported being bullied. A Zogby poll commissioned by the Workplace Bullying Institute in 2010 found that approximately 35 percent of adults had experienced bullying on the job.

Dr. Chris MacDonald, professor of educational and school psychology at Indiana State University, has studied bullying among college students. She has found that bullying exists along a continuum of behaviors, with milder forms of incivility (failure to say “hello,” for example) on one end and violence on the other.

She believes that young people need codes of civility that provide consequences for rudeness. She likens the approach to that of the broken window theory in crime prevention. In marginal neighborhoods, officials prevent further decline by painting over graffiti and fixing broken windows. A similar approach, MacDonald theorizes, could apply to the character of children.

After the YouTube video went viral, the boys sent written apologies to bus monitor Karen Klein. In one of these statements, the boy’s words echo the influence of an older, wiser adult.

“I feel really bad about what I did,” a boy named Wesley wrote. “I wish I had never done those things. If that had happened to someone in my family, like my mother or grandmother, I would be really mad at them.”

It’s the daily, steady presence of caring adults that helps the Wesleys of our society reflect on their choices, begin to make amends and decide to act more respectfully next time. We need an American work culture that allows the adults in their lives the time and the energy to do just that.