Families need more support
The stories of the stressed-out young American family waft through the air on Spokane buses these snowy mornings.
Earlier this week I was roused from my thoughts by the tale I heard from a couple of passengers across the aisle. They described a local family: The dad uses drugs. The mom’s “a crackhead.” Their child? Apparently a small, smiling Buddha. “Their little kid’s happy and that’s all that counts,” concluded the commute-time storyteller.
I was left to ponder this tale of astounding denial. Mom’s on crack, dad’s on drugs, but, not to worry, the child’s just fine?
We Americans love denial. We use it particularly well for coping with the needs of infants and small children. We know that the most important predictor of a child’s success in life is the quality of his relationship with his primary caregiver, but, well, we just prefer to space that out.
Each time there’s another school shooting, like the one in Wisconsin last week, or a global math comparison that reveals the mediocre achievements of American high school students, we look for easy culprits and ignore the obvious.
We often treat life as a giant sports metaphor, where each team focuses exclusively on scoring winning earnings in the next quarter. That means we can’t use workplace policies to help foster healthy families. When student achievement falters, the current solution matches that of the typical sports fan: Fire the coach.
Pink slips for the worst teachers can’t hurt, but they won’t bring students to school any more ready to learn than they are right now.
A recent study published by Education Next compared the rates of high-achieving math students in 56 countries. Researchers found that 30 other countries had a higher percentage of students with advanced math skills than the United States. Even after breaking down the data by state, we fared poorly. Massachusetts did the best, with 11.4 percent of students scoring at the advanced level in math. Washington came in fifth among the states at 8.7 percent.
But these scores looked anemic next to the top scorers, such as Taiwan at 28 percent, and Hong Kong at 23.9 percent.
A writer in The Atlantic concluded, not without some merit, that U.S. schools need higher standards and smarter teachers. But neither of those solutions can do much to mitigate the damages caused by neglectful parents, whether they’re drugged out or simply stressed out.
More research might reveal correlations between student achievement and societal support of children and young families. Not surprisingly, many of the countries that produce the world’s top math students also provide the most generous family leave policies.
A 2007 study shows that the United States ranks among the very worst of 173 countries in helping parents balance work and family life. The U.S., Liberia, Swaziland and Papua New Guinea were the only countries studied that provided no paid maternity leave.
Americans love to spout platitudes about personal responsibility. It’s a blithe way of saying, “I could care less about creating a healthy community.”
This week Spokane schoolchildren stood in snow and slush up to 90 minutes Thursday morning waiting for a school bus. The “personal responsibility” advocates would likely tell frantic parents that morning: “That’s your problem. If you didn’t want to have to worry about having children stranded at a cold, snowy bus stop, you shouldn’t have had them.”
And so the daily anxieties of figuring out how to tend to the needs of children while successfully navigating a career life fall almost solely to young parents. Two more studies released this week revealed the obvious: American parents are stressed, rely on high levels of multitasking, and report feelings of frustration and irritation.
Fortunately, young parents are also best equipped to confront these issues with energy and humor.
A pair of former Marines traded stories on another blustery bus ride last week. One of them confided he felt like his family was large enough, though he wasn’t sure his wife agreed.
Together, the tough young soldiers joked about the perfect solution: The weary dad could plan a fishing weekend with the kids, the buddies could pick up a supply of ice, and he could stop off at the doctor’s office for a quiet little vasectomy on the way out of town.
A slam dunk.