The Future of Us: What the Dreams of Children Mean to Twenty-First-Century America

The Role of Government and the Impact of Investing in Children

While the case for a compassionate, humane focus on the well-being of children should be sufficient to make sure that our youngest citizens are properly cared for in a highly developed society, there are competing interests and economic realities that sometimes hinder this perspective. Fair enough. We do need to stimulate the economy, develop affordable housing, support the military, fight terrorism, reduce unemployment, control climate change, and so on.

But investing in children can also be seen in financial terms as a powerful means of ensuring America’s continued economic strength and global influence through the twenty-first century. Here’s the hard truth: we don’t need more research or more data. We don’t need any additional information beyond what we already know.

Who still needs to be convinced that America must protect its children, nurture their dreams and aspirations, and provide success pathways for every child? If we don’t do these things, we will pay a steep and very unfortunate price over the coming decades. All of this we already know. But, one more time, let’s just review what we know and what we should do, in case some of us haven’t been paying attention.

The intent of child investment policies should be to:

• Maximize the resiliency and well-being of the next generations of Americans;

• Maximize the possibility of every child’s fulfilling aspirations that lead to meaningful work and contributions to the tax base;

• Minimize the need for costly remediation of preventable challenges that lead to suboptimal development, costly physical and mental health conditions, the need for public assistance, and high rates of incarceration.

A range of America’s most respected researchers have reached a number of insights and conclusions that illuminate why it is in our national interest to make sustained, evidence-informed strategic investments in our children, especially those who live in persistent poverty—and the earlier, the better. Of course parents, families, and communities have critical roles to play in ensuring that children grow up healthy, ready to learn, and ready for life—but government, too, must support families, and programs that assist them, in ways that will pay off for the nation’s future.

For instance, here is the main takeaway of a 2006 Columbia University study: “Every additional high school graduate yields a net economic benefit to the public of $127,000 with benefits that are 2.5 times greater than the costs.”1 As two of the study’s authors wrote in the New York Times in early 2012, “this is a [net] benefit to the public of nearly $90 billion for each year of success in reducing the number of high school dropouts by 700,000—or something close to $1 trillion after 11 years.”²

A brief by Mission: Readiness and ReadyNation points out, however, that children can already be as many as eighteen months behind on milestones when they enter kindergarten.3 Clearly, the roots of academic failure, leading to severe loss of potential to make a decent wage as an adult, begin very early in life. As I have pointed out throughout this book, understanding the trajectories of success or failure for children living with persistent adversities and disparities leads inevitably back to conditions experienced from the first day of life, if not well before, during gestation.

Noble Prize–winning economist James Heckman notes that the growing failure to acquire skills and diplomas is reducing the number of college graduates and the overall growth of the U.S. workforce; although there are “downstream” public job training programs, their impact at this later stage in the lifecycle is generally poor.⁴ Similarly, the crime and court involvement so often linked to childhood disadvantage costs America $1.3 trillion per year;⁵ the massive U.S. criminal justice system largely fails to “rehabilitate” adults whose disadvantage is well entrenched, and it is a huge economic cost for society.

In his acclaimed book Enriching Children, Enriching the Nation, economist Robert Lynch explains, “By the year 2050, the annual benefits of publicly funded universal prekindergarten would total $779 billion: $191 billion in government budget benefits, $432 billion in increased compensation of workers, and $156 billion in reduced costs to individuals from less crime and child abuse. These annual benefits in 2050 would exceed the costs of the program in that year by a ratio of 8.2 to 1.”⁶ He also notes that “a voluntary, high-quality, publicly funded, universal prekindergarten education program serving all three- and four-year-olds would begin to outstrip its annual costs within nine years and would do so by a growing margin every year thereafter.”

Many health conditions that disproportionately affect poor children and run rampant in disadvantaged communities have a cascading impact on both the children and their families. The prevalence and impact of asthma in children illustrates the point. Approximately 9 percent of American children, across all demographic groups, have been diagnosed with this very common chronic illness. But among poor children, the incidence of asthma is at least 50 percent higher than the national average and is thought to be the most common cause of pediatric hospital admissions.⁸ For the millions of children who are homeless or living in extreme poverty, asthma rates can soar to 30 percent or more.

It is important to emphasize that these are not just dry statistics. Every child with undiagnosed or undertreated asthma represents an array of challenges that are particularly difficult for children and their families. Even finding an accessible, affordable, and good-quality doctor or clinic is a challenge for some children, especially those living in communities with persistent health care provider shortages or a lack of affordable public transportation.

When asthma is not properly controlled, children experience chronic respiratory distress, making concentrating in class or studying at home difficult, to say the least. When the asthma “attacks” become severe, an urgent trip to an emergency room—itself a terrifying experience—is necessary. Even getting to the doctor’s office for checkups, so that asthma control can be fine-tuned, is challenging for families in which the breadwinner has little flexibility in terms of time off from work.

And then there are the costs to the health care system of uncontrolled asthma. With every rushed trip to the emergency room, every time a child is admitted to the hospital, costs for health care increase. This is particularly vexing for childhood asthma because total control of symptoms is possible using currently available medications. In other words, if all asthmatic children actually received standard and appropriate care, ER trips and hospital care for asthma could be virtually eliminated. Children would be listening and learning in inner-city classrooms, instead of struggling to breathe.

As mentioned earlier, the economic impact of assuring proper care would be enormous. A study by Children’s Health Fund (CHF) showed that proper treatment of asthma in children dramatically reduces emergency room visits and hospitalization, reducing the cost of care by approximately $4,500 each year, on average, for every child with asthma.9

Another study looking at routine childhood immunization among all babies born in the United States in 2009 estimated that these immunizations will prevent some “42,000 early deaths and 20 million cases of disease, with net savings of $13.5 billion in direct costs and $68.8 billion in total societal costs, respectively.”¹⁰

The long-term return—or, as I prefer to think of it, the positive long-term impact of smart investments in programs to support the health, education, and well-being of children—is essentially indisputable. Robert Lynch projects that “in addition to the budget savings, by the year 2050, a voluntary, high-quality, universal prekindergarten education program is estimated…to reduce the costs to individuals of crime and child abuse by $156 billion.”¹¹ He also notes that investment in early childhood development for children in poverty would lower criminal justice system costs by nearly “$77 billion (or $28 billion in 2004 dollars) in 2050.”

A 2008 report from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation concluded: “A cost-benefit analysis of the Perry Preschool program estimated that approximately 80 percent of the monetary benefits of the program are benefits to the general public, with the remaining 20 percent accruing to the individual children/and or the adults they will become.”¹²

In summarizing economist Robert G. Lynch’s work on the benefits of early childhood education, the National Education Association observed: “Prekindergarten investments present much higher returns than the stock market. A Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis (2003) study determined that the total annual real rates of return (adjusted for inflation) on public investments in the Perry Preschool program exceeded 16 percent. The highly touted real rate of return on the stock market that prevailed between 1871 and 1998 was just 6.3 percent.”13

As reported by the Children’s Defense Fund, “Every year that we keep children in poverty costs our nation half a trillion dollars in lost productivity, poorer health and increased crime.”¹⁴ The 2008 Robert Wood Johnson report concluded, “Children who participate in early childhood development programs are more likely to be healthy, have higher earnings, and are less likely to commit crime and receive public assistance.”¹⁵

Despite the clear cost-benefit logic of investing in children, a point made repeatedly by highly respected nonprofit entities like First Focus, the United States is currently going in the wrong direction. In fact, recent sequestration cuts slashed funding to children’s programs by $4.2 billion in 2013.¹⁶ The Urban Institute projects that the share of spending on children will decrease from 10 to 8 percent over the next ten years.¹⁷ According to Bruce Lesley of First Focus, “Interest on the national debt will soon eclipse all federal investments in our nation’s children combined”—despite polling that shows that “72 percent of Americans prioritize protecting investments in children equally or more than reducing the federal deficit.”¹⁸

Many factors are essential to ensuring that every child has a chance to succeed. These include the support of parents and guardians, access to quality health care, the elimination of barriers to learning, good educational opportunities, and the mitigation of financial barriers that impede the ability of children to fulfill their aspirations.

This is not just about compassion, though that should drive everything. This is about a true “return on investment”—or maybe “impact of investment”—and doing what’s right for the country’s future. If we wish to ensure America’s continued economic strength and global influence through the twenty-first century, we must have the discipline to make informed and appropriate investments in the nation’s children.

Moonshots

I am a fan of moonshots—big bodacious efforts to solve major problems and reach cultural or scientific milestones. That’s what President Obama had in mind when he announced at his last State of the Union Message, delivered to Congress in January 2016, his intention to set the nation on a course to finding cures for cancer. He asked Vice President Joe Biden to lead this effort, utilizing every resource at the nation’s disposal, including all relevant expertise in government, the private sector, and academia. The very language of moonshots and huge goals is inherently exciting and motivating.

What about applying this strategy to fixing major social and economic challenges—for instance, transforming a major urban community? Can this be done?

Prospect Avenue in New York City’s South Bronx is a main thoroughfare in America’s poorest urban zip code. Bodegas, mom-and-pop shops, and tenements still predominate, although newly constructed townhomes, apartment buildings, and a smattering of new businesses are now appearing in a neighborhood once so notorious that the local police station was known as “Fort Apache.” That was not a complimentary nod to the Old West. The station was perceived by its own officers as a fortress, a safe zone, isolated from the community, surrounded by deadly violence, crime, and ubiquitous urban decay.

In 1993, Fort Apache was replaced by a modern new building, just in time to help usher in the slo-mo renaissance of the South Bronx. That same year, CHF opened a storefront clinic, the South Bronx Children’s Health Center. It was the first new health care program in that neighborhood in thirty years. Three years later, a modern Police Athletic League center was opened on Longwood Avenue, just two blocks from the police station, a block from the children’s clinic. Ever so slowly, wrecked buildings and smoldering, debris-filled empty lots were replaced by new buildings and community services. By 2011, CHF had built three more facilities: a family clinic, a special clinic for homeless kids, and a state-of-the-art comprehensive health center called the Center for Child Health and Resiliency, affiliated with the long-standing and highly supportive Montefiore Health Center.

Of course, it’s not just the CHF that has been evolving in the Bronx. Between 1980 and 2012, the borough’s population grew by 240,000 people, and by 2013 total private sector wages (in constant dollars) reached their highest point in history at $9.3 billion a year. Serious crime rates have fallen by an incredible 75 percent since 1990, and more than 100,000 living units have been renovated or created. There are now some 26 percent more businesses in the Bronx than there were twenty-five years ago.19

While still poor and struggling with social and economic adversities, racial disparities, and the need for even more growth and better access to services, the Bronx is undeniably a community on the move. Where there was once mostly an urban nightmare, there is new cause for genuine hope.

All of these changes reflect a commitment to renewal; these antidotes to a mistaken sense of intractable hopelessness and despair are cause for at least a muted celebration of possibility realized. Zip code 10459 is still one of America’s most destitute communities, but progress is real and visible—just excruciatingly slow.

Why so slow? The South Bronx was the poster child for the massive decline of American cities in the late 1970s. Nobody thought that those conditions should be tolerated—not politicians, and certainly not the residents. Eventually, after a series of what can be best characterized as random acts of investment and development projects, progress is visible. But the bottom line is that after sixty years of chaos and squalor, along with solid data to support evidence of positive change, this neighborhood remains an impoverished back alley of a great global city.

The explanation for this pitiful pace of change is, as is always the case, a combination of resources, priorities, politics, and, although it is probably less pronounced than in other struggling American cities, an element of urban segregation. Progress is being made in the South Bronx, but, for better or worse, it is not really gentrifying. There are very few blocks where middle-class white families and young commuters into Manhattan are finding the latest low-rent haven. For some that’s good. The cost of living remains affordable for low-income families, but the social price paid by the residents of the South Bronx is persistent isolation from the economics, the culture, and the growth of the city as a whole. Changing this state of affairs is certainly possible, but it would take focus and resources on a grand scale. It would mean a serious commitment, an operational timeline, and leadership.

Still, it could be done. It’s just that there seems to be little appetite, locally or nationally, to take on a project of such magnitude. Schools would have to be repaired physically and upgraded academically, far more decent and affordable housing would be necessary, along with more child care, senior care, cultural opportunities, parks, recreation centers—and most important, good paying jobs that would elevate families to a middle-class life.

It’s not as though America is incapable of setting and meeting big goals, missions of great national priority. The nation once led the world in its capacity to dream big, plan effectively, and “make it happen,” doing so competently and with a sense of urgency—precisely what is needed to truly bring the South Bronx roaring into the twenty-first century.

Massive development projects in the 1930s, like the building of the Hoover Dam and the Tennessee Valley Authority economic stimulus project, were conceived and completed at lightning speed compared with the grinding pace of creating and following through on a big idea during the past twenty years. Think about Boston’s Central Artery/Tunnel Project, affectionately known as the “Big Dig.” Planning for this major project began in 1982, construction began in 1991, and it was finally completed in 2007—that’s a quarter century, for those keeping score. Cost overruns were spectacular, as much as 200 percent over original projections.

But massive cost overruns and long delays have not always been the reality for the nation’s capacity to conceive and complete major construction projects. In the 1940s, America created an unprecedented military force that defeated powerful aggressors in World War II. In 1956, President Dwight D. Eisenhower decided that the nation needed a functional interstate highway system and convinced politicians of every stripe to make that happen. In the tumultuous 1960s, on May 25, 1961, President John F. Kennedy made a historic speech to Congress in which he declared that America must accelerate its space exploration efforts and put a man on the moon by the end of the decade. And so it was that Neil Armstrong set foot on the moon on July 21, 1969.

America’s history is rife with illustrations of our ability to effectively meet enormous challenges. So, again, why do the South Bronx, Central Brooklyn, and so many other marginalized neighborhoods in so many American cities languish in poverty, racial discrimination, social strife, and violent discord?

The big picture for communities “in waiting” for rehabilitation, and for the children who live in these neighborhoods, remains distressingly pessimistic.

One-fifth of America’s children live in poverty, and more than 16 million children go hungry for a significant portion of the year.20 In 2006, about 1.5 million children experienced homelessness for some portion of the year; by 2013, that number had risen to 2.5 million.²¹

There are those who acknowledge that these are serious problems and eventually we’ll need to address all of them but, at the same time, might be thinking, “In the greater scheme of things, does it really matter if rebuilding the nation’s many versions of the South Bronx in persistently depressed neighborhoods, from Miami and Boston to Chicago, Detroit, Indianapolis, and Los Angeles, takes thirty years, or perhaps fifty years, instead of ten? In the big sweep of history, what seems like forever from today’s vantage point may be ultimately inconsequential. Maybe we need to be patient.”

Well, actually not. Patience is far from a virtue when it comes to dealing with adversities that can have a lifetime of consequences. The whole idea of “patience” is incompatible with the urgency needed to solve challenges that are highly time-sensitive for children during the years when young brains are developing, emotional health is being established, and the substrates of long-term physical health are on the line. Like families, communities need to nurture the health and well-being of children—which is why upgrading neighborhoods and supporting children in every neighborhood should be considered America’s most compelling challenge.

Parenting and the Rest of Us: What We Can Do to Advance the Success of Every Child

Let me be blunt about two perspectives on the critical responsibilities of parents in making sure that their children grow up healthy, educated, and ready to enter the workplace.

First of all, there is no policy, special program, pilot project, demonstration, initiative, biblical passage, or clerical directive that can replace an appropriately loving and informed parent’s extraordinary influence over the long-term well-being and success of a child.

Second, there is almost no way to create pathways for all children to realize their dreams and aspirations without addressing the unjust ravages of poverty. Parents who are poor, including many who work full-time for wages too low to rise out of poverty, live in perpetual stress, facing challenges that consume their energies and deeply demoralize them. They struggle to pay the rent or buy enough nutritious food to feed their families. They are treading water, hoping for some way out of the morass of poverty.

There are many traumas, experiences, missed opportunities, barriers, and rough roads that can deter a positive trajectory for any child. But under almost any set of circumstances, resilient parents can help their children become more resilient, more capable of overcoming many adversities. What parents offer is encouragement and irreplaceable support which, as I said, no government policy can provide. But effective parental resiliency in the context of chronic poverty is extraordinarily difficult.

There is a moral problem buried in this thesis. Why should some children and parents face far more preventable and pernicious adversities and disparities than others? Poverty is a powerful barrier to good health and a decent education. No American child, no child born in any prosperous society, should face poverty-based consequences that can interfere with well-being and/or later productivity.

Parents of any socioeconomic stratum can potentially be powerful buffers of almost any trauma that befalls the family or the community. Even among the millions of children who are part of the ongoing global refugee crisis, there are some who will make it through relatively unscathed, even if their lives have been severely disrupted and psychologically traumatizing for an extended period of time. This is especially true if there is a protecting adult figure, particularly a parent, buffering the conditions that threaten a child, physically or otherwise.

In refugee camps or squalid urban homeless shelters, if the agencies and volunteers can make sure that basic nutrition, clean water, and somewhat secure shelter are available and stable, a buffering adult and a resilient child may have a chance to make it through, regain their collective footing, and find a path toward a productive and positive life. As the late Elie Wiesel personified in his own life story of survival through years of constant horror in the Nazi death camp at Auschwitz, it is possible to return, deeply affected perhaps, but recommitted to a life of hope and possibilities.

Raising all children successfully—that is, to fulfill their dreams—is our best hope for the future and the ultimate test of America’s ability to regain ground and sustain its global influence. But the nation’s trajectory has degenerated into fiercely partisan and ideological camps, maybe listening to but rarely hearing each other. Where’s the common mission shared by every citizen and family? Perhaps the goal is clear: make sure that every child has a shot at being a success story. But how to get there is where the common goal becomes impossible to realize, often because we resort to unyielding ideological or personal positions.

As with so many other issues, finding answers to how best to nurture our children has been drawn too much along quasi-political lines. The right wants more local and individual control, the left more government programs. But from down here in the trenches, parents know this is a false choice. We need a smart, compassionate government providing basic support to vulnerable families and resources for those who need guidance and information. But good parents, capable of independent decisions in the best interests of their own children, are indispensable.

Here’s a key point worth remembering: Parents are essential to maximizing a child’s potential. Parents are natural adversity buffers, universally understood to have primary responsibility for their children. But parents with limited resources can’t build a new school or clean up crime in the community or create accessible, good-quality health care opportunities where none exist. These things are the responsibility of a value-based government that understands its role in establishing a future that is inclusive and productive.

Government is not a replacement for good parents, but in the absence of a responsible government, even a great parent can’t ensure that his or her children have what they need to secure a fulfilled future.

Finally, whether we’re parents or not, there’s a role to play for each of us to do our part on behalf of our children. If we care about the future and wish the world well, if we want to make sure that America stays resilient as a prosperous, model democracy, there are many issues that need our attention. But I suggest that there is no higher priority than eliminating the barriers that keep children from achieving their dreams and reaching their full intellectual potential. Waiting fifteen or twenty years to remediate the issues that undermine success pathways for children will be too late. The damage will have been done, and the consequences are often irrevocable.

So what do we do? We can support local efforts to ensure that every child attends a capable and competent school. We can join the local school parents’ organization and vote for referendums that provide needed resources to schools. Others may choose to engage with efforts to expand access to health care for all children in their town or county. Another consideration is joining a community or national organization that supports critical programs for children. Finally, every citizen must participate in elections for officials on every level of government. Make it your business to truly understand a candidate’s voting record or positions on the issues regarding the provision of needed programs to assist marginalized and vulnerable children.

Whatever individuals and communities choose to do, our best hope for moving forward is to acknowledge and nurture the grand coalition of parents, voluntary organizations, and government that together have the ability to create success pathways for every child in America.