Ellington

Febuary 8, 2006

If I hear the phrase, "It's the parents' fault," one more time, I'm going to scream.

This meme has become the new excuse du jour for people wanting to shun their societal responsibilities. It's muttered by people of all races, and it's usually accompanied by rolling eyes or judgmental head shakes. Something comes up about a young person getting in trouble, or having trouble, or being trouble, or whatever—and we increasingly hear the hackneyed response: "It's the parents' fault."

I heard this recently among journalists gathered to discuss the Mississippi media's coverage of children with Marian Wright Edelman. Ms. Edelman was a civil rights hero in Mississippi, and she is the founder of the Children's Defense Fund. She is a personal hero of mine.

After Ms. Wright Edelman made very eloquent opening remarks about how we are shortchanging children—in the media and in society at large—one of the reporters, who is black, responded predictably. First, he said, we must get the parents to take responsibility.

I—being the precocious alt editor—responded that these responses, while true, are too simplistic. Why? Because we like to point fingers before we help children. That is, we throw up our hands until the parents get with the program; meantime, the children most at risk may well grow up and have kids of their own and become our new punching bags.

I liked Ms. Wright Edelman's response to the reporter: "Children don't pick their parents." Stop and think about that for a moment. Children do not choose to be born to parents who are addicted, who are wounded by abuse themselves or years of discrimination, who have no idea how to parent because they had children so early or had troubled parents themselves.

The idea that we should wait until parents get themselves up to speed before we help children makes no sense—even if you're the selfish sort. After all, children who get in trouble hurt us all in so many ways. As the great writer James Baldwin said: "For these are all our children. We will pay or profit for whatever they become."

As a whole, our society has this backward. The media react to this parents-first idea and promote it. We somehow have developed the notion that if kids can't help themselves—and their parents aren't willing or able to—why should the rest of us spend our precious time and money doing it for them? We give up on children—especially, but not exclusively, poor children of color. We treat them as if they're not going to amount to anything, and they too often meet our expectations. Taken to its most extreme, it becomes what culture "czar" Bill Bennett said recently on his radio show—that aborting black babies would mean less crime.

You can't give up on children any earlier than that, dude.

Most ironic: Women who choose not to give birth to children they can't support are lambasted for "killing" their babies, even though most who make that choice know full well that they are not equipped to care for them. If they choose to have them, those single parents become society's whipping girls—the "single mothers" who are responsible for every one of society's ills, to hear the conservative coalition tell it. (A letter to The Clarion-Ledger last week from a Madison physician asserted just that.)

This is backward.

Yes, parents need to learn parenting skills. Young women need to use birth control if they choose not to abstain, as do young men. And society needs to fixate on "single fathers" just as stridently as it does on "single mothers."

Still, that's not enough. Long before Hillary Rodham Clinton adopted the phrase, Marion Wright Edelman was telling us that it take a village to raise healthy children. It takes a village to believe in our children, to help children who do not have good parents, to step in and help both the parents and the children. It takes a village to understand that we must provide solid educational opportunities for all children—not just those we expect to do best in school.

But in our backward way, we are blaming the weakest members of our society for their challenges. George W. Bush's "No Child Left Behind" Act—a phrase cynically lifted from the Children's Defense Fund, by the way—is swathed in good phrases about rewarding those who try the hardest. But a dark reality lurks—the federal government has found a way to reward children in "good" neighborhoods and punish those in bad ones.

To "pass" under NCLB, not only must schools improve, but they must show a certain amount of improvement every year over all. And dragging down the effort are provisions that say the entire school might have improved, but it can still fail if certain aggregated groups—special ed, black kids, for instance—didn't improve enough. It is a trap door designed for failure.

It is vital to identify those struggling groups in order to help them even more. But NCLB goes further—actually taking away the resources from the "failing" schools with the most needs.

Now that parents are seeing the harsh reality of NCLB, many are screaming about all the federally imposed regulations on the state and the districts. As they should be. So what does Gov. Barbour want to do here? Relax the requirements—like the ones designed to ultimately punish the neediest schools—by allowing the districts doing the best to operate under "home rule." That is, they can make more of their own decisions, rather than be hamstrung by regulation. They are "rewarded" for doing well, as the needier districts struggle under federally imposed "standards" designed to show that they cannot make it.

This is wrong; this is cynical; this is backward. These attempts to separate our kids into good and bad must stop. The children who need help the most should get it—not be further punished for being born into situations they did not choose.

Previous Comments

ID

71378

Comment

Donna, thank you for sharing your point of view on this. I know you are talking on a more serious level, but I gotta ask this: If I saw a child acting up in public, I often thought about what kind of parenting the child had before I thought of anything else. This article will help me not to jump to conclusions, but I still wonder what we should do if the parent refuses to allow outside help for their child. Some parents get offended if you reprimand their child for misbehaving, but they won't do anything about it either. When my siblings and I were kids, my parents gave permission for any adult they knew to chastise us if we got out of line. Therefore, if we acted up and someone my parents knew caught us, they were at liberty to pull a branch from the nearest tree and set our tails on fire. I'm not saying everyone should take this approach, but let's just say it worked. :-)

Author

LatashaWillis

Date

2006-02-09T10:15:18-06:00

ID

71379

Comment

Understand, L.W., I'm not talking about mind control here. Obviously, we all from time to time wonder what kind of parenting skills are missing when we see kids doing certain things. Or, when we see the way parents respond to their kids. My point is that bad parenting cannot be used as an excuse to look the other way and keep needed resources and assistance and mentoring from kids who need it. And that's happening way too often. And, have you ever noticed that some of the people who seem to be the worst parents are often the ones screaming about other parents?!? Yes, let's figure out how to help parents, too. But let's punish the kids in the meantime. I was just reading an essay by Ms. Wright Edelman yesterday -- unfortunately after this column was published. I LOVE this quote: God did not make two classes of children and will hold us accountable for every one of them. Amen, sister. That essay, by the way, is called "Stand Up for Children" and is reprinted in a wonderful collection of essays by Paul Rogat Loeb called "The Impossible Will Take A Little Time." $15.95, available at Lemuria.

Author

DonnaLadd

Date

2006-02-09T12:40:41-06:00

ID

71380

Comment

I first heard about Marian Wright Edelman a couple of weeks ago, when a friend of mine who works with the CDF referred to her as a personal hero. Since then I've been doing some reading on her--remarkable woman. Great collection of quotes here: http://womenshistory.about.com/od/quotes/a/marian_edelman.htm Bio here: http://www.childrensdefense.org/about/mwe.aspx That's one of the nice things about this world: I never have to look very hard to find new heroes. Cheers, TH

Author

Tom Head

Date

2006-02-09T13:20:45-06:00

ID

71381

Comment

Once upon a time I had a client accused of capital murder and who lost his father at 10 years of age. The death of the loving, caring and disciplining father was devastating to the client who before long started having problem associated with not having a role model or parent who cared for him like the father did. This child was thrown out of several schools due to fighting and threatening to harm others. The mother and others were well aware of the reason this child'd life changed. Yet neither the mother or anyone else offered or gave this child counseling or adequate help. He quit school after the 8th grade, fathered a son by 16 years of age, and allegedly committed a robbery and murder by age 18. I had the burdensome and overwhelming task of facing 11 whites and 1 black person, some of which were old white men, and begging them to vote for life without the possibility of parole as punishment instead of the death penalty. This 19 year old black male had no previous criminal record and the person he killed was a nearly 70 years old white male. The jury voted for death because, I bet, they couldn't bring themselves to help a person unlike them, and whom they felt was a menace to society because of his raising or lack of the same. I told the jury among many other things that a child can not be expected to fix themself. Adults have to do it. I did lot of begging, pleading and trying to persuade to no avail. Hopefully, I will get a reversal someday soon. This was a hurtful loss to me because I couldn't overcome race at that moment and save this boy from death row. I have won many similar cases when I was able to create reasonable or substantial doubt about guilt. It seems race trumped everything when all else is nearly the same.

Author

Ray Carter

Date

2006-02-15T17:23:26-06:00

ID

71382

Comment

Wow, Ray, that really stinks. I think that's why "To Kill a Mockingbird" is one of my favorite stories. Some people do not get it when they hear that the majority of juvenile delinquents do not have a father in the home. I hear things like, "That's just a cop-out. I grew up without a father and I turned out just fine." (Of course, these are the same people who don't believe that peer pressure is real, either.) If these individuals only knew that they are exceptions to the norm.

Author

LatashaWillis

Date

2006-02-16T11:33:20-06:00

ID

71383

Comment

Yes, LW, we live in a rough world. One minute I see unimagined hope. The next minute I see doom and gloom. I can certainly understand why so many people have given up on the eradication of racism and any hope for eventual equality.

Author

Ray Carter

Date

2006-02-16T11:52:20-06:00

ID

71384

Comment

FuturePundit has a similar discussion about this matter. Anyway, even some of the best parents are unfortunate enough to get dealt with something they can't control: the architecture of the child's brain (I even made up a whole post a nightmarish scenario I find fairly relevant to this topic just after the Edgar Ray Killen conviction). Beyond this, here is an excerpt from the British Journal of Psychology online: A striking feature of much of the antisocial behaviour shown by individuals with psychopathy is that it is mostly instrumental in nature, i.e. goal-directed towards achieving money, sexual opportunities or increased status (Cornell et al, 1996). This suggests that the pathology associated with psychopathy interferes with socialisation. It is well known that empathy-inducing, positive parenting practices give rise to less antisocial behaviour than punishment-based, negative parenting practices. This relationship is shown in healthy developing children as well as in children with conduct disorder who do not present with the emotional dysfunction of psychopathy. However, for children with conduct disorder who do present with emotional dysfunction, there is no relationship between parenting behaviours and level of antisocial behaviour (Wootton et al, 1997). In other words, the emotional impairment found in individuals with psychopathy interferes with socialisation such that the individual does not learn to avoid antisocial behaviour. Socialisation involves aversive conditioning and instrumental learning. In order to learn that hitting another is bad, this thought must be associated with an aversive unconditioned stimulus (e.g. the distress of the victim). Similarly, learning to avoid committing moral transgressions involves committing a moral transgression and then being 'punished' by the aversive response of the victim's distress (Blair, 1995). Individuals with psychopathy present with severe difficulties in both aversive conditioning and instrumental learning (Patrick, 1994; Blair, 2001). Moreover, they have particular difficulties processing the fearfulness and sadness of others (Blair, 2001). SOURCE:R. James R. Blair, PhD,"Neurobiological Basis of Psychopathy" (editorial). The British Journal of Psychiatry (2003) 182: 5-7; The Royal College of Psychiatrists, London. Online Version Accessed Feb. 17, 2006

Author

Philip

Date

2006-02-17T23:18:08-06:00

ID

71385

Comment

Good comment Philip. I remember the other post.

Author

Ray Carter

Date

2006-02-18T12:02:05-06:00

ID

71386

Comment

I remember the post as well. I didn't have to click on the link to recall it. Very deep. I wish that those who like to write off troubled children as "bad" could think about the roles psychology and sociology play in their behavior before shooting their mouths off.

Author

LatashaWillis

Date

2006-02-18T22:08:58-06:00