Further, the rise in divorce: Between 1995 and 2000, the number of poor children fell more than 20 percent, from 14.7 million to 11.6 million children. However, in the last five years, child poverty has made up nearly half its 1990s decline. According to the Census Bureau, in 2005, 12.9 million children lived in poverty, that is more than one in six. (U.S. Census Bureau, Income, Poverty, and Health Insurance Coverage in the United States: 2005, August 2006.)
A long-term study of children: In 2002, a group of scientists discovered a gene that provides people with more resilience in the face of trauma, allowing them to better recover from adversity. They found that people who have one “short” segment of this gene called an allele are more prone to depression and less likely to bounce back from childhood trauma. (Avshalom Caspi et al., “Role of Genotype in the Cycle of Violence in Maltreated Children,” Science, August 2, 2002, vol. 297, no. 5582, pp. 851–54.) In 2003, Joan Kaufman, a Yale psychiatry professor, studied the genetic and relationship history of a group of children in Connecticut who were victims of abuse or neglect. She found that kids who had the “short” resilience gene, yet had an adult on whom they could count, had levels of depression as low as those of abused children with the protective gene, and nearly as low as those of children who had not been abused. (Joan Kaufman et al., “Social Supports and Seratonin Transporter Gene Moderate Depression in Maltreated Children, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, November 24, 2004.)
The village can take it further: Many of the ideas from the first edition of this book about how to refocus the foster care system on the best interests of the child were later included in the Adoption and Safe Families Act of 1997, which I worked on with the late Republican Senator John Chafee of Rhode Island and others. After the passage of that legislation, foster adoptions increased 64 percent nationwide, from 31,030 the year the law passed to 51,000 last year. (Connie Maben, “Foster Adoption Law Brings Success, Challenges,” Associated Press, June 28, 2006.) As First Lady, I met many young people aging out of foster care who had little of the emotional, social, and financial support families provide. I worked with Senator Chafee and Democratic Senator Jay Rockefeller of West Virginia on the Foster Care Independence Act of 1999, which provides young people aging out of foster care with support services, including access to health care, educational opportunities, job training, housing assistance, and counseling. In the Senate, we passed a law that provides financial incentives to people who adopt older children and to help reduce the obstacles they face.
The first three years of life: Experts now believe that the brain is particularly sensitive to new information for the first five years of life, not the first three, and that children learn at an extraordinary rate from zero to five. (Jack P. Shonkoff and Debrah A. Phillips, eds., From Neurons to Neighborhoods: The Science of Early Childhood Development, National Academies Press, 2000, p. 5.)
A similar study, best known as the Abecedarian Project: Federal Reserve economist Rob Grunewald and Nobel laureate economist James Heckman have estimated that every dollar invested in programs like Abecedarian returns between $3 and $17 to society, for total lifetime returns running as much as $276,000 per student. They published these finding in Zero to Three, a journal focused on the needs of young children, in July of 2006. (James Heckman, Rob Grunewald, and Arthur Reynolds, “The Dollars and Cents of Investing Early: Cost Benefit Analysis in Early Care and Education,” Zero to Three, July 2006, vol. 26, no. 6, pp. 10–17.) That is why as senator I have fought to protect programs like Head Start and Early Head Start, which provide high-quality care to low-income children, from attempts to dismantle or undermine them.
If breast-feeding is a problem: The American Academy of Pediatrics now urges new mothers to breast-feed for as long as they can, ideally twelve months. (American Academy of Pediatrics Work Group on Breastfeeding, “Breast-feeding and the Use of Human Milk,” Pediatrics, 1997, vol. 100, pp. 1035–39.) Breast-feeding provides a boost to immune systems, helps kids fight off infections, and may even prevent chronic disease later in life. Today, 73 percent of mothers breast-feed their newborns, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. But that number falls below 50 percent after six months, even though breast-feeding during those later months is still critical to children’s health and development. (New York Times, “On the Job, Nursing Mothers Are Finding a 2-Class System,” September 1, 2006.)
And it is tragic that our country does not do more: In the last few years, we’ve seen major breakthroughs in research and effectiveness of contraceptives. For example, Plan B is a new emergency contraceptive that can prevent a pregnancy after another contraceptive has failed or after unprotected sex. I fought for years to get Plan B on the market, so that fewer women will face the choice of abortion. It is now available for over-the-counter use by adult women. I have also proposed Prevention First, a bill that focuses on prevention of unwanted pregnancies through comprehensive education, emphasizing responsible decision-making and expanded access to contraception. With these efforts, it’s my hope that the abortion rate will fall further.
Thanks in part to Ruggiero’s testimony: In September of 1996, Congress passed and my husband signed into law the Newborns’ and Mothers’ Health Protection Act of 1996, commonly known as the drive-by deliveries law, which required plans that offer maternity coverage to pay for at least a forty-eight-hour hospital stay following childbirth (a ninety-six-hour stay in the case of a cesarean section). (U.S. Department of Labor. [2006] Fact Sheet: Newborns’ and Mothers’ Health Protection Act, September 27, 2006.)
The biggest difference among the various households: We’ve learned that, beyond talking, having books in the house is also important. A 2005 national study found that minority children were not only less likely to be read to by their parents but also possessed substantially fewer children’s books in the household than white children, putting minority children at a distinct disadvantage in reading, language skills, and school achievement. White families had two times the number of books in their home that black families did. (G. Flores, S. C. Tomany-Korman, and L. Olson. “Does Disadvantage Start at Home? Racial and Ethnic Disparities in Health-Related Early Childhood Home Routines and Safety Practices,” Archives of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine, 2005, vol. 159, pp. 158–65.)
Family meals are a time-honored and important ritual: A study by Diane Beals at Harvard found that mealtime conversations during the preschool years are a strong predictor of literacy development, and are a critical element of children successfully developing early language skills. (David K. Dickinson, Ed.D., and Patton O. Tabors, Ed.D., eds. Young Children Learning at Home and School, chap. 4: Diane E. Beals, “Eating and Reading: Links Between Family Conversations with Preschoolers and Later Language and Literacy,” 2001.)
In 1993, as part of a larger initiative: In 1992, just 55 percent of three-year-old children received all the routinely recommended childhood vaccines; in 1996, three years after the Vaccines for Children bill passed, the rate climbed to 78 percent. (CDC, “Status Report on the Childhood Immunization Initiative: National, State, and Urban Area Vaccination Coverage Levels Among Children Aged 19–35 Months—United States, 1996,” July 25, 1997, vol. 46, no. 29, pp. 657–64.) In 2004, more than 95 percent of all children received the full, more ambitious schedule of routinely recommended childhood vaccinations. (CDC, “Vaccination Coverage Among Children Entering School—United States, 2003–04 School Year,” Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, November 12, 2004, vol. 53, no. 44, pp. 1041–44.) In 2003, the national Institute of Medicine recommended using the Vaccines for Children program as a model for adult vaccination. (Institute of Medicine, Financing Vaccines in the 21st Century: Assuring Access and Availability, National Academies Press, 2003.)
Diet alone does not account for the dramatic increase: At present, approximately 9 million children over six years of age are considered obese. (Institute of Medicine, “Childhood Obesity in the United States: Facts and Figures,” September 2004.) Obesity is on the verge of surpassing smoking as the single highest preventable cause of death for all Americans (CDC, “Actual Causes of Death in the United States, 2000,” March 9, 2004); and an Emory University study found that it accounted for a 27 percent increase in health care costs between 1987 and 2001 (Kenneth E. Thorpe et al., “Trends: The Impact of Obesity on Rising Medical Spending,” Health Affairs, October 20, 2004).
Today there are more than ten million children: As First Lady, I worked with members of Congress in creating the State Children’s Health Insurance Program (SCHIP) in the summer of 1997. It made a tremendous investment in the expansion of children’s health insurance, and it has had tremendous results. Today, because of SCHIP the number of children who lack health insurance coverage has dropped from over 10 million in 1995 to some 8.3 million kids in 2005. However, the numbers of uninsured have grown in the general population over the last ten years. In 1996, 41.7 million Americans did not have health insurance; today 46.6 million Americans do not have coverage. (National Center for Health Statistics, June 2006; Carmen DeNavas-Walt, Bernadette D. Proctor, and Cheryl Hill Lee, U.S. Census Bureau, Current Population Reports, P60–231, Income, Poverty, and Health Insurance Coverage in the United States: 2005, U.S. Government Printing Office, Washington, D.C., 2006.)
Three times as many children die each year: Nontraffic automobile accidents, most frequently involving a vehicle backing up, account for one hundred deaths per year. The average age of victims is one year, and in 70 percent of cases, a parent, relative, or close friend is behind the wheel. (Kids and Cars, Child Safety Advocates Join Victims on Capitol Hill to Push for Passage of Tougher Laws to Keep Children Safe in and Around Cars, www.kidsandcars.org, March 9, 2006.) In 2005, I proposed the Cameron Gulbransen Kids and Cars Safety Act, which would prevent child deaths in backing incidents by requiring a warning system to ensure that drivers can detect the presence of a person or object behind the vehicle. It would also require that power windows automatically reverse direction when they detect an obstruction, to prevent children from being trapped, injured, or killed.
Twenty-five thousand new police officers are being trained: By the end of my husband’s term, the Community Oriented Policing Services (COPS) program had funded over 100,000 police officers. (U.S. Department of Justice, Office of Community Oriented Policing Services, Attorney General’s Report to Congress, Washington, D.C., 2006.) However, over the last five years, the program has been cut from $8.8 billion to $3 billion, and only 25,000 police officers were hired between 2001 and 2005. (Democratic Policy Committee, Bush Republicans Cut Law Enforcement Funding, Crime Rate Increases at the Fastest Rate in Fifteen Years; U.S. Department of Justice, Community Oriented Policing Services, “COPS Count Data Surveys 2001–2005,” Washington, D.C., 2006.) Federal statistics show that between 2004 and 2005 violent crime increased by 2.3 percent. This was the first increase since 2001. A preliminary FBI report in June 2006 on crimes reported to police showed a 4.8 percent increase in the number of murders and 4.5 percent increase in the number of robberies in 2005. (Michael J. Sniffen, “Nation’s Crime Rate Hits 32-Year Low,” Associated Press, September 11, 2006.)
Whatever the reasons for the apparent increase: Over the last several years, there has been a dramatic increase in media stories of abducted and abused children. While there has not been an increase in the overall numbers of such cases, many families, and children, are more fearful. I have pushed for legislation that would appoint a national coordinator for AMBER alerts, an alert system for missing children; provide additional protections for children; and establish stricter punishments for sex offenders. That legislation passed the Congress in 2003.
The anthropologist Margaret Mead felt that exposure to religion: A 2004 study of the effects the sexual messages on television have on children found that raising children with religious belief lowers the probability that they will engage in early sexual experimentation, as does having committed and involved parents. (Rebecca L. Collins et al., “Watching Sex on Television Predicts Adolescent Initiation of Sexual Behavior,” Pediatrics, 2004, vol. 114, pp. 280–89.)
Creating a framework for service: In the last five years, we have seen an upsurge in volunteerism. Applications to Teach for America, which recruits graduates for underserved urban and rural areas, hit almost 19,000 this year, nearly triple the number in 2000; in 2006, the Peace Corps took 7,810 volunteers—the largest number in thirty years—from more than 11,500 applicants in 2005, up more than 20 percent over the year 2000; and AmeriCorps*VISTA (Volunteers in Service to America), which pairs young people with nonprofit organizations, has had a 50 percent jump in applicants since 2004. (Beth Walton, “Volunteer Rates Hit Record Numbers,” USA Today, July 7, 2006, nat. ed., p. 1a.) This year, I introduced legislation to create and fund a U.S. Public Service Academy modeled after the nation’s military service academies. The school would provide an education to 5,000 undergraduates, and graduates would be required to work five years in public service.
It may be that women will achieve: A Radcliffe survey conducted in 2000 found that more than 70 percent of men under forty said they would give up pay to spend more time with their families, and 82 percent said family comes first. (Radcliffe Public Policy Center, Life’s Work: Generational Attitudes Toward Work and Life Integration, 2000.) According to new research by Professor Suzanne Bianchi for the Russell Sage Foundation, the time married fathers spend on child care had more than doubled since 1965, from 2.6 hours a week to 6.5 hours. (Robert Pear, "Married and Single Parents Spending More Time With Children, Study Finds," New York Times, October 17, 2006.)
Child care facilities for infants and toddlers: A 2006 study of Quebec’s universal child-care system found that children under five in full-time center-based care showed greater rates of aggression, anxiety, and developmental delay. (Michael Baker, Jonathan Gruber, and Kevin Milligan, “Universal Childcare, Maternal Labor Supply, and Family Well-Being,” National Bureau of Economic Research, Working Paper No. 11832, June 2006). However, studies of Abecedarian and other high-quality, intensive early learning programs have demonstrated dramatic positive results for low-income children. (See Heckman et al. above, in note for p. 50.) Unfortunately, high-quality day care isn’t available to everyone—nationally known pediatric specialists T. Berry Brazelton and Stanley Greenspan estimate that only 10 percent of American children had access to truly high-quality day care—and many parents can’t afford to stay home to take care of their children. (T. Berry Brazelton and Stanley I. Greenspan, The Irreducible Needs of Children, 2000, p. xiii, from a 1995 University of Colorado study.) I proposed the Choices in Childcare Act to allow lower-income parents who receive government support for child care to use the subsidies to defray the cost of caring for their young children themselves.
Education is fundamental to our country’s future: The standards and accountability movement has grown dramatically over the last decade. The No Child Left Behind Act became law, and it has laid bare the problems in many of our poorest, worst-performing schools. We can no longer say that we didn’t know that these schools were failing some of our most vulnerable kids. To improve the quality of education, we need to improve instruction in the classroom. Nationwide, two million teachers will leave teaching over the next decade. New York City already loses 30 percent more math teachers and 22 percent more science teachers than it certifies every year. In 2001, I proposed the National Teacher Corps, which brings teachers into the classroom, and a new initiative that would provide more schools with strong principals. Both became law.
Children themselves report: A 2004 study for the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development found that teens who watch a lot of television with sexual content are more likely to initiate intercourse in the following year. This was true for girls and boys, regardless of race. Overexposure to highly sexed television made kids act older—twelve-year-olds behaved like fourteen-year-olds. (Rebecca L. Collins et al., “Watching Sex on Television Predicts Adolescent Initiation of Sexual Behavior,” Pediatrics, vol. 114 (2004) pp. 280–89.) Another study published in the journal Pediatrics showed that boys and girls, across all races and economic groups, who listened to sexually degrading lyrics were more likely to start sexual experimentation sooner. (Steven C. Martino et al., “Exposure to Degrading Versus Nondegrading Music Lyrics and Sexual Behavior,” Pediatrics, vol. 118(2006), pp. 430–41.) While this research is critical, there are still more questions about the effects of media on our children, especially young children. I’ve introduced CAMRA—the Children and Media Research Advancement Act. The bill, which recently passed the Senate, coordinates and funds new federal research on the effects of viewing and using electronic media, including television, computers, video games, and the Internet, on children’s cognitive, social, physical, and psychological development.
Whether, and under what circumstances, the violence people see on television: A 2005 study by researchers at Indiana University School of Medicine showed that playing violent video games triggers unusual brain activity among kids who are most vulnerable to aggression and misbehavior. (Vincent P. Matthews et al., “Media Violence Exposure and Frontal Lobe Activation Measured by Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging in Aggressive and Nonaggressive Adolescents,” Journal of Computer Assisted Tomography, vol. 29, no. 9 (2005), pp. 287–92.) Violent video games are getting into the hands of our kids at younger and younger ages. The National Institute on Media and the Family’s 2003 study found that 50 percent of boys between the ages of seven and fourteen successfully purchased M-rated video games (games appropriate only for people aged seventeen or older), and an astonishing 87 percent of boys play M-rated games. Furthermore, nearly a quarter of retailers in the study don’t even understand the ratings they are supposed to enforce, and only half of the stores train employees in the use of the ratings. (David Walsh, et al., “Eighth Annual MediaWise Video Game Report Card,” National Institute on Media and the Family, vol. 8 [December 2003].) Yet, video game makers continue to push the envelope. A year ago, the makers of Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, sold a game containing graphic pornography that anyone could unlock with instructions widely available on the Internet. I called attention to these games, and because of the public outrage that followed, they were pulled off store shelves.
But spurred on by cultural messages: James McNeal, the nation’s most influential estimator of the size of the children’s market, believes that the amount of advertising and marketing dollars directed at children rose more than one hundred times between 1983 and 2004. (Juliet Schor, Born to Buy: The Commercialized Child and the New Consumer Culture, 2005 [paperback], p. 21). Too many kids are getting the message that our worth is measured by what we can buy. A recent national survey found that more than a third of all children aged nine to fourteen would rather spend time buying things than doing almost anything else, more than a third “really like kids that have special games or clothes,” more than half agree that “when you grow up, the more money you have, the happier you are,” and 62 percent say that “the only kind of job I want when I grow up is one that gets me a lot of money.” (Marvin E. Goldberg et al., “Understanding Materialism Among Youth,” Journal of Consumer Psychology, vol. 13, no. 3, pp. 278–88.)
Even workers’ jobs may be sacrificed: Today, our globalized economy has seen an increase in the number of jobs outsourced to other countries. Goldman Sachs has estimated that 400,000 to 600,000 professional services jobs (or about 2–3 percent of employment in that sector) were offshored in the first years of the decade. (Andrew Tilton, “The ‘Giant Sucking Sound’ Is Fading,” Goldman Sachs US Economics Analyst, March 19, 2004.) Goldman estimates that another 6 million jobs could be lost over the following ten years. (Andrew Tilton, “Offshoring: Where Have All the Jobs Gone?,” Goldman Sachs US Economics Analyst, September 19, 2003.) Former Vice Chairman of the Federal Reserve Alan Blinder projects that 42 million jobs, or 25–35 percent of all services could be outsourced in the next several decades. (Alan S. Blinder, “Offshoring: The Next Industrial Revolution,” Foreign Affairs, March-April 2006.)
There are additional actions we can take: The last minimum-wage increase was in 1996, when Congress and the president raised it to $5.15 an hour. However, the impact of the 1996–97 increase has been eroded by inflation. (Economic Policy Institute, Minimum Wage: EPI Issue Guide, August 2006.) Adjusting for inflation, the minimum wage is at its lowest point in fifty years. (Center for Economic and Policy Research, Federal Minimum Wage at Lowest Point in 50 Years, June 19, 2006.) While minimum-wage workers have not had a single raise, Congress has given itself $31,600 in pay raises. In the Senate, I’ve proposed blocking Congress from giving itself another pay raise until it lifts wages for workers.
Government has to do its part: After this book was written, my husband and the Congress not only balanced the budget for the first time in a decade, but began to run federal budget surpluses. In 2000, the Congressional Budget Office projected federal budget surpluses for the foreseeable future. However, after 2000, our federal budget went from record surpluses to record deficits again. In 1996, our national debt was $5.2 trillion; as of September 2006, our national debt has reached $8.4 trillion. (1996 U.S. Treasury, “Historical Debt Outstanding,” 2006, http://www.publicdebt.treas.gov/opd/opd.htm; U.S. Treasury, “The Debt to the Penny and Who Holds It,” 2006, http://www.publicdebt.treas.gov/opd/opd.htm.) Today, every baby born in America starts life with $28,000 of our national debt—a birth tax that is higher than it has ever been in our nation’s history. (House Budget Committee, “Your Share of the National Debt, 2006,” extrapolated from the number of households in: Carmen DeNavas-Walt, Bernadette D. Proctor, and Cheryl Hill Lee, U.S. Census Bureau, Current Population Reports, P60–231, Income, Poverty, and Health Insurance Coverage in the United States: 2005, U.S. Government Printing Office, Washington, D.C., 2006; U.S. Treasury, “The Debt to the Penny and Who Holds It.”)