Home Is The Key To Kids’ Well-Being

Politicians kiss babies, but parents raise them.

That’s a thought worth stowing away as the campaign season arrives.

Saturday in the nation’s capital, 200,000 people attended a Stand for Children rally on the Mall in front of the Lincoln Memorial. The event had a partisan agenda which its sponsors tried, sort of, to downplay.

It also made - and illustrated - an important point: As a nation, we are better at talking about the needs of children than we are at meeting those needs.

The Children’s Defense Fund, organizer of the march, urged participants to “stand for something more than ourselves, more important than money and more lasting than things.” It told participants that “the most important thing in every child’s life is a caring adult. Take time to listen, to help, to play, to be there. Volunteer. You can be a mentor, tutor, Big Brother or Sister or hold an abandoned baby at a local hospital.”

Amen! On that much, all Americans should agree.

But there’s a difference between agreeing and doing. Many of today’s parents, both fathers and mothers, pour their energy into careers while their children come home to empty houses. Nearly one of three children is born out of wedlock, lives in a single-parent home and lives in poverty. Only one of every two children lives with both biological parents.

These conditions worsened dramatically between 1960 and 1990. The results include booming juvenile crime and poor educational attainment.

Politicians have responded with more government programs, more spending, more reforms. Inflation-adjusted public spending for children’s educational and social programs doubled between 1960 and 1990. If there were a link between the amount of spending and the well-being of children, this would be Utopia. But it’s not.

The sponsors of Saturday’s march are advocates for President Clinton’s re-election and for more government spending on social programs.

Yes, the government must invest in education and a social safety net. But Democrats are as wrong to defend our very flawed programs as Republicans are to blame the programs for the problems children face.

The crucial aid to children isn’t governmental. It happens at home. So let the politicians pose. There’s more important work to be done - sitting down on the couch and reading a story to a preschooler, helping a fourth-grader with homework, listening to an anxious teen, volunteering with a youth group …

One by one, family by family, we can see to it that the children we know grow up loved, by us.

, DataTimes The following fields overflowed: CREDIT = John Webster/For the editorial board