THE PHILADELPHIA STORY, SET IN the city’s wealthy Main Line suburbs in the midst of the Great Depression, and famously starring Katharine Hepburn, captured the social capers of the 1 percent of that era. Hepburn’s character was modeled on the real-life Helen Hope Montgomery Scott, once described in Vanity Fair as “the unofficial queen of Philadelphia’s WASP oligarchy.”1 The colossal manors of the Gilded Age, like her 800-acre Ardrossan Estate, have now mostly been replaced by winding, tree-shaded lanes along which can be found the fieldstone mansions of the new Philadelphia elites of finance, consulting, and “eds and meds” (universities and medical centers). Just as a century ago, bucolic Lower Merion Township and its neighboring towns remain home to some of America’s most affluent, well-educated families.
Eleven miles to the east another classic of cinematic sociology, Rocky, was set in the gritty white working-class neighborhood of Kensington, close by the Delaware docks and the dying industries on which Philadelphia’s prosperity had once been based. During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries Irish and Italian and Polish immigrants had worked in mills, tanneries, shipyards, and packing plants and had crowded into nearly identical, tightly packed two-story row houses. For generations, families remained in the same neighborhoods and attended the same Catholic churches and schools. By 1970, however, the factories and their neighborhoods had begun a long descent, and the city lost over a quarter of a million jobs between 1970 and 2000. Close-knit communities where housewives once proudly swept the front steps daily gave way to abandoned factories, open-air drug markets, and acres of crime-infested empty lots. As poor blacks moved ever closer to the white ethnic enclaves, racial tensions in the area erupted, symbolized by the brutal battles between Rocky Balboa and Apollo Creed.
Just as in the rest of America, inequality and class segregation within metropolitan Philadelphia have grown during recent decades. As late as 1980, median household income in Lower Merion Township was roughly double that in Kensington, but by 2010 the difference was four to one.2 When the Social Science Research Council calculated the rate of “disconnected youth”—that is, people aged 16–24 who were neither working nor in school—in urban neighborhoods across America, the Kensington area was near the top of the national list (30 percent), whereas the Lower Merion Valley was near the very bottom (3 percent).3 Kensington seemed a million miles from Lower Merion Township, not 11.
This chapter describes the community settings within which the growing opportunity gap is playing out across the country, and the contrasting social resources and neighborhood challenges that affect the fate of rich and poor kids. We begin by meeting two white families: one from Lower Merion Township and another from Kensington, each headed by a single mom struggling to raise a pair of daughters amidst family turmoil and dissolution, grappling with issues of drugs, teen sex, and trouble in school. As we shall see, both moms have tried hard to help their children, given their resources, and in some respects both have succeeded. However, we’ll also see how the economic and social resources of the more educated, affluent family in the suburbs helped to buffer the kids from stress. Meanwhile, the Kensington neighborhood, once sustained by dense social networks that offered mutual support in modest economic circumstances, is now a source of problems, not solutions, for poor kids.
Eleanor (19) and Madeline (18) have lived with their mother, Marnie (55), in Lower Merion Township virtually all their lives. When the girls were young, their parents stretched financially to buy the kid-friendly sidewalks, excellent schools (both public and private), and agreeable (if reserved) neighbors of Lower Merion. The area is rich in community institutions—from the Lower Merion Soccer Club, the Ardmore Community Center, the YMCA, and several active civic associations to numerous religious institutions catering to Jews, Presbyterians, Quakers, Catholics, Anglicans, Armenians, and evangelicals, all now complemented by a lively town presence on Twitter and Facebook.
Older residents say that the Main Line was once more diverse, with children of mailmen and longshoremen in local schools, but nowadays that’s changed. “There’s not a lot of diversity,” Eleanor reports. “It’s mostly upper-middle-class families [in] the Main Line bubble.” Madeline, for her part, says that many kids at her high school “really buy into ‘Ivy or Die’: ‘If I don’t follow my parents’ footsteps in making millions of dollars, then I will be a failure.’ ”
Marnie, the girls’ mother, the daughter of a boom-and-bust movie producer, was raised in Beverly Hills and became the first person in her family to attend college. Her parents were alcoholic, and the family was dysfunctional (the parents married and divorced each other three times), which created a difficult home environment for Marnie, but Marnie herself was “super-brainy,” as she puts it, at Beverly Hills High School, and graduated from a top Ivy college with straight As, majoring in economics. After a stint in theater management, she married, earned an MBA from Wharton, and joined a consulting firm.
The girls’ father, Thad, got his BA from the same Ivy institution, followed by a graduate degree from another top university. For several years before and after the girls were born, he worked as a highly successful, well-paid entrepreneur, enabling the family to move to their large home in Lower Merion. Suddenly, however, when the girls were in middle school, Thad’s business failed, and he fell into depression. After a year or two, Marnie ended the marriage. Since Thad was in no position to provide financial support, she recognized that she would be the sole breadwinner. Faced with this frightening prospect, Marnie made a momentous decision to become an independent consultant, aiming to earn enough to support her family in what one daughter calls “a very extravagant lifestyle,” including private schools, horseback riding, and an extensive household staff. For better and worse, Marnie’s decision to strike out on her own was a decisive turning point in all their lives.
Because of their mother’s extremely long hours, well-remunerated professional skills, and frequent use of credit card debt, Eleanor and Madeline enjoyed a big house, piano lessons, summer sailing camp, costumed birthday parties, and (when they entered middle school) one of the best private schools in the area. The girls remember happy childhood years of hide-and-seek, lemonade stands, and stable friendships. “My mom is really a great, great mother,” Eleanor says, “just in the sense that for most of her life she put me and my sister first. And she really worked hard and did everything for us to make sure that we had really great lives.”
Their parents’ divorce hit both daughters hard. “I really didn’t see it coming,” Eleanor says, adding that it “was probably the biggest event of my childhood.” Initially, Marnie and Thad worked hard at co-parenting, hiring a marriage/divorce therapist to try to smooth the rough edges, and taking turns living at home with the girls. But these efforts did not work out, and Thad fled to the Mountain West “to heal.”
Since Marnie’s high-powered professional life (and the material support it provided) was all-consuming, she arranged for nannies, au pairs, and other household staff to be there when the girls got home from school, to drive them to activities, to prepare dinner, and so forth. “The staff raised us,” Madeline interjects sarcastically. Later, Marnie smiles, philosophically. “They know that I’m a big part of what’s been secure during this period. Someday maybe she’ll look back on this with different eyes.”
As her parents’ marriage was falling apart, Eleanor decided to attend an elite boarding school for high school, in part because, as she puts it, “I didn’t want to deal with the mess at home.” Shortly after she left, Marnie learned from several other mothers that Eleanor and a group of girls in the area had previously taken advantage of Marnie’s absence during the day to do drugs in her home. Shocked at her own naïveté, Marnie searched Eleanor’s room and discovered an ounce of marijuana. She flew to the boarding school and “had it out” with Eleanor for six hours. “I told her my goal is for you to get through adolescence alive and not addicted and not messed up. I was an angel dancing on the head of a pin, and she wasn’t about to jeopardize everything for us.” Marnie cut off Eleanor’s credit card, insisted that she wait to get her driver’s license, and warned her that if she got in trouble with the law, “I am not the Main Line mom who will hire a fancy attorney to get you off.” Tough love seemed to work in this case, because the problem did not recur.
At boarding school, Eleanor felt stress to achieve and to fit in, which meant being “rich, athletic, beautiful, smart—perfect.” Severely depressed, she left the boarding school at the beginning of 11th grade and returned to the public high school back home. Eleanor herself suspected that she suffered from undiagnosed ADHD (Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder), but not until she returned home did Marnie become aware of the problem.
Intensely supportive, Marnie sprang into action. She consulted specialists and through her contacts eventually found a psychiatrist who diagnosed the problem and prescribed effective medication, as well as consultants who could help Eleanor with learning strategies. Knowing that “ADHD kids need a quiet workspace,” Marnie remodeled the third floor, giving Eleanor a bedroom, a tranquil, well-lit study, and an extra bedroom in case hers became cluttered and distracting. At the same time, sophisticated about the risk of kids being “labeled,” Marnie carefully kept the ADHD diagnosis confidential. “We had constructed a road for this kid,” she says, “and it was going to work. And it did.”
Meanwhile, Madeline was encountering adolescent problems of another kind. During eighth grade, Marnie discovered that Madeline and her boyfriend, Sam, were close to becoming sexually active. Marnie and Sam’s parents met over dinner, Marnie says, “to figure out what our common response was going to be.” Marnie arranged for Madeline to have easy access to birth control. “I told her that I really didn’t approve of her being sexually active this early, but I wanted to make sure that she was protected if she made that choice. And I told her that all four parents were going to work hard to make sure they never had an opportunity to be alone together. His mom and I had a texting relationship: ‘I’m going to the grocery store. Please keep Sam at home until I get back.’ ”
Although Marnie and Thad tried to be mutually supportive when it came to their daughters, the girls themselves inevitably felt cross-pressures. In her sophomore year Madeline won her mother’s approval to move out west to care for her dad. The year’s escape from the Main Line bubble proved productive. For the first time in her life, Madeline was exposed to kids from humble backgrounds, and she was impressed by their values and hard work. “I had friends who were working in the cafeteria,” she says, “so they could pay for lunch . . . just completely different from what everyone on the Main Line is so used to.” Marnie, Thad, and Madeline all agree that it was a very good year for her.
However, Madeline also recognized that her schooling in the rural West was insufficiently demanding, so she returned home, enrolled in an elite private high school in Lower Merion Township, and persuaded her dad to move back to Philadelphia to live near her until she graduated. She also realized that she needed help with her writing, so with her mother’s assistance, she arranged to take a writing course at the University of Pennsylvania. Madeline says her instructor has become an “extremely close” mentor, suggesting books for her to read and then discussing them with her and a few Penn students over dinner. “He’s been absolutely life-changing for me,” she concludes.
Marnie has encouraged this sort of support. “I’ve always believed that teens need to form attachments with safe adults who are not their parents,” she says. And both girls have. While struggling with their parents’ divorce, for example, they found mentors in the church that they regularly attended. Madeline describes “a really cool youth pastor whom I ended up seeing weekly for something like six months because my mom was worried about me, so she had me talk to him. He was never pushy about religion, but just would listen to me and my problems. It was almost a therapeutic relationship.” Several of Madeline’s friends’ parents became role models for her as she matured, and many of her best friends remain the kids she met in church. When she moved out west, she met a friend of her dad’s who happened to have a degree in counseling, and informally he also helped her cope with the transition.
Eleanor, too, had a number of supportive adults in her life besides her parents, including the youth pastor at their church and one of her father’s female friends from graduate school with whom she went hiking out west every summer and could discuss family tensions. Both girls speak of close attachments to teachers and close, supportive friendships with peers, many of them dating back to grade school. Both also had professional tutors to help them prepare for the SAT exams. Madeline recognizes the importance of this broad network of supportive adults and peers. “I’ve been very lucky in my childhood to have all kinds of support systems when other support systems were failing or just not a right fit,” she says. “I’ve been very lucky in finding cool adults all over the place and good friends as well.”
Despite the turbulent rapids through which this family has passed, Marnie and her daughters seem now to be doing well. Eleanor is happily majoring in business at a major Midwestern university where she enjoys a strong network of middle-class friends who “are paying for school themselves and don’t take opportunities for granted.” Madeline is headed off to a prestigious Canadian university to study French and international development—mature, focused, and aiming for Yale Law School eventually. Marnie has happily remarried, and says that her girls, after some initial resistance, now love her new husband as “a second father.”
Marnie is proud that she’s been able to shepherd her daughters through adolescence to college success. “It was seriously nip and tuck,” she says. “It was never not scary—but I managed. My family is like the submarine traveling through hazardous seas and having depth charges all around it—suicide attempts, bulimia, anorexia, running away, all one degree of separation away—and my daughters managed to come through all of this family turbulence.”
Like air bags that inflate automatically to protect against unexpected crashes, financial, sociological, and institutional resources have cushioned Eleanor and Madeline when they encountered dangers.4 They are only half aware of the protective role that their parents’ extensive social networks have played, both within Lower Merion Township and well beyond the immediate neighborhood. As we shall see later, educated, affluent parents in America typically enjoy a wide range of what sociologists call “weak ties”—that is, casual acquaintances in disparate social niches (psychiatrists, professors, business executives, friends of the family, friends of friends), and Marnie’s daughters clearly benefited from such connections. By contrast, people lower in the socioeconomic hierarchy lack such useful weak ties and instead rely heavily on family and neighbors for social support.
Molly (55) and her two daughters, Lisa (21) and Amy (18), along with Lisa’s in-laws, have lived in the Kensington area for generations. We meet Molly and the girls in a 20-foot-wide, overcrowded row house where the family of Molly’s current husband has lived for three generations.5 Because both Molly and Lisa’s mother-in-law, Diane (41), have always lived in this same area, our conversations with these two extended families offer an unusually detailed moving picture of how dramatically the neighborhood has been transformed during the past half century.
Kensington is today one of the most dangerous neighborhoods in one of America’s most crime-ridden cities. But it was not always so. Molly and Diane both recall that when they were growing up, the area was so safe that on hot summer nights kids could sleep outside on rooftops, something no one would think of doing now. In that close-knit white ethnic working-class enclave, virtually everybody knew their neighbors by name, and together they kept the neighborhood safe and clean. Diane’s grandfather was a cop in the neighborhood and knew all the kids and their parents personally. In fact, nearly everyone knew everyone else’s kids, creating a pattern of communal childrearing. “Everybody looked out for each other,” Diane reminisces. “If you got into trouble with the neighbor two blocks down, because your mother knew them, they would beat you, take you home, tell your parents, and your parents would beat you again.” Molly adds, “You could not go down the street without [someone] saying, ‘Molly, go back home,’ or ‘What are you up to?’ ”
The two mothers recall many organized, no-cost youth activities, including a local youth recreation club named (appropriately, in what was then an Irish neighborhood) the Leprechauns. Kids went skating at the local rink, hung out in the local parks and public pools, and—Molly recalls from her teenage years—drank beer at the secluded back of the park. The local Police Athletic League (PAL), along with fraternal organizations, sponsored team sports, and the city recreation department offered free jazz and tap dance classes. Even when Lisa and Amy were in elementary school, they were free to play outside, so long as they did not roam beyond the well-defined neighborhood borders.
Like the Main Line in those years, Kensington was also more diverse in class terms. “Factory workers, downtown [office workers], lawyers, you had every kind of worker on a block,” Molly explains when we ask where the neighbors worked in those years. But just as longshoremen’s children have long since disappeared from the Main Line, there are no more lawyers’ kids in Kensington. Since the 1970s, Kensington’s history is one of disappearing jobs, fracturing families, declining population, rising racial diversity, and above all, mounting crime and drugs.
Fear of crime is pervasive. Police no longer walk the beat, for fear of being shot. Three babies in the neighborhood have recently been hit by stray bullets, so Lisa is home-schooling her daughter. The residents’ concern for neighborhood amenities has also collapsed. “No one stays involved in the neighborhood,” Diane reports, and recalls how things used to be: “On the weekends, everybody had their brooms, and the city gave you the bags for the trash. Most people keep to themselves these days. No one gets involved if they see crime going on, or even kids spray-painting neighbors’ homes.”
Most of the rec centers and pools have closed, because the Parks and Recreation budget was the first to be cut in successive budget crunches. While the city budget has grown by about one third (in constant dollars) since 1970, spending on parks and recreation has fallen by more than 80 percent. Disinvestment has also shown up in dwindling public services like libraries. The Police Athletic League still exists, but nowadays participants have to pay to play.
Some longtime white residents blame the neighborhood’s decline on the influx of nonwhites, though the neighborhood remains predominantly white. “It’s so racist around here,” Amy reports, “that they took the basketball courts off the park because black kids were coming around playing basketball with classmates from school.” Clearly, economic stagnation and the disappearance of steady jobs in the neighborhood are also an important part of the story. But the women with whom we spoke blame the neighborhood deterioration primarily on drugs.
Marijuana, heroin, and meth arrived in the neighborhood in the 1990s. “It affected our family,” Lisa says, “affected our neighbors, affected everyone, and it wasn’t safe anymore. Everyone we knew got high. It didn’t matter where you were, who you were.” “Everyone” included Lisa’s father, Amy’s father, and both Amy and Lisa. Their next-door neighbor was a major drug dealer, and three different dealers on the block sold drugs to Lisa as a teenager.
“You could get high wherever, no matter what age you were,” Lisa explains. “It just became our life. I don’t know why. It just took over.” Molly interjects, “I don’t think it helped that my neighbor actually sat there and smoked right in front of everybody.” And the situation has only deteriorated since then. “You can’t walk down the street without being offered drugs,” Molly adds. “Kensington Avenue [a few streets away] is the scariest avenue in the world. People get shot a lot. I hate to say this, but it’s really, really ghetto.”
Because of pervasive fear, Molly says, “you don’t even know where people work now, because they don’t ever come out of their houses. When we were younger, people would stop and say ‘Hi.’ ” Lisa adds, “I try to smile and be friendly, but everyone is just grumpy.” This is the pervasively paranoid social milieu within which Molly has raised Lisa and Amy, along with their two brothers. No wonder that both girls admonish us that “you can’t trust anyone.”
As a child, Molly (along with most of the residents of Kensington) was deeply involved in one of the many Catholic parishes. Indeed, as ethnographer Kathryn Edin and her colleagues have reported of this neighborhood, the Catholic Church and its ubiquitous parochial schools were the warp and weft of community here, and the weakening of those institutions has hastened neighborhood decline.6 When Molly’s father died and her mother was unable to support the family, the nine children in the family were sent to various foster homes. Molly herself was placed for six years in a Catholic Services orphanage that was closed down for child abuse shortly after she left, an experience that left her alienated from the Church, like Diane and many of their contemporaries.
When she finally returned home, just as the neighborhood’s economic collapse was beginning, Molly often skipped school and became something of a wild child. “My mom was there but not there,” she says, and she got no support from her family. School guidance counselors told her, she says, that she “was not going to end up being anything.” She became pregnant in high school and dropped out in the 12th grade. The father of her child came from an alcoholic family next door, and her aunts and uncles urged her not to hook up with him, but she disregarded their advice and ended up having two children with him—Lisa and her older brother.
Molly’s life story embodies the social and economic transformation of this neighborhood. Both she and Diane have warm childhood memories of a close-knit neighborhood, but their adult experiences of betrayal and abuse and dissolution parallel the neighborhood’s degeneration, and Lisa and Amy have never really known anything better, as neighborhood solidarity has spiraled downward, and drugs and crime have ravaged the lives of the residents.
Molly’s first husband ended up as an alcoholic and drug addict within a few years of their marriage, just as her family had feared. Molly left him and supported herself and her two kids for roughly a decade as a waitress and a construction worker. In her 30s she had two more kids—Amy and her younger brother—with a second man, who worked as a roofer. The girls say he was a good dad in the beginning, but he, too, got hooked on drugs, and Lisa and Molly kicked him out. He now is homeless, and the girls occasionally see him wandering the neighborhood.
To make matters even worse, Molly herself developed multiple sclerosis (MS), suffered a stroke, and ended up in a wheelchair. Her youngest son was diagnosed with autism around this time, too, so the family ended up with crushing medical bills and no insurance. Nearly destitute, they scraped by on various public welfare programs, though they found the welfare and tax bureaucracies inscrutable and unresponsive. Molly became seriously depressed and unavailable to her kids. Fortunately, at this point a Protestant church in the neighborhood stepped in to provide a lifeline.
The church offered an active program for youth in the neighborhood, including after-school tutoring and summer outings, and when Lisa was nine she started attending the church. When Amy’s father was kicked out, and the family began to fall apart, Lisa says, “the church was our main support,” physically protecting them from their drug-addled father and allowing them to sleep over at the church for respite. When Molly contracted MS, the church found the family a more accessible apartment near the church and built a ramp for her wheelchair, even though she was not a church member at the time. “We couldn’t have made it without them,” concludes Molly. Pastor Dan (“a big biker dude”) and Angela, his wife (a youth pastor at the church), remain Lisa’s closest confidants.
Lisa badly needed friends, because her life as a teenager was in shambles. Despite her involvement with the church, she was overtaken by the collapse of the neighborhood and of her family. Placed on probation because of her frequent truancy from school, she drank heavily and became addicted to the drugs that were by now omnipresent. Indeed, drugs were easily available in and around the church itself, because of the presence of recovering drug addicts. Lisa’s special addiction was to “skittles,” a derivative of cold medicine, but she also was impaired by “laced weed” that she got from their next-door neighbor.
Lisa became pregnant in the 12th grade, like her mother before her and like many of the girls at her school. The father of her child was a classmate who was also her pusher, and she refused to marry him. At this point her involvement in the church provided a kind of miracle. She and a boy (John) she had met at church fell in love, and although she was already seven months into her pregnancy, John asked her to marry him. “Because I love you,” he told her, “I’m going to love this baby.” (His mother, Diane, suggested that Lisa get an abortion, but Molly rejected that idea.) Four months later, they married.
Angela, the youth pastor, supported Lisa and John emotionally through this difficult period, though another pastor at the church forbade Lisa from coming to church during her pregnancy “because I was a bad influence on the other kids.” Partly for that reason, but also because of theological differences, Lisa and John (along with pastors Angela and Dan) have recently switched to a rapidly growing evangelical church in the neighborhood. When living with John’s alcoholic family became intolerable for Lisa and John, Angela helped Lisa find a new house, and the church helped John get a job at a Christian security firm. Although Lisa is worried that their current church, like their previous one, has become an enabling haven for neighborhood drug users, she concludes “I don’t know where we would be without that church, honestly.”
John graduated from a technical high school but dropped out of community college after deciding it wasn’t for him. Lisa graduated from high school nine months pregnant and attended a for-profit technical school to get an associate degree as a pharmacy technician—but that led to no job and left her with a daunting $50,000 student debt. She is now taking an online course in early childhood education while home-schooling her daughter. Their marriage seems stable, but their neighborhood is very dangerous, and Lisa is “terrified” about her financial prospects.
Amy’s story has distressing parallels to her sister’s narrative, but begins and ends in a somewhat different place. In middle school she was a talented musician, admitted to an academic magnet school, and invited to join the Philadelphia Youth Orchestra. During adolescence, however, she became deeply ensnared in the same neighborhood traps of alcohol and drugs and unprotected sex. “I’d tell my mom I’m going to be at my friend’s house around the corner,” she says, “but I’d really be like two neighborhoods over, hanging out with boys and drinking.” Because of Amy’s involvement with drugs and rowdiness in school, Molly pulled her out to be home-schooled, but Amy cheated on an online examination and failed a grade. Eventually Molly allowed her to return to school, but three months after returning for tenth grade, Amy became pregnant, like virtually all of her friends. “All the girls that ever got in trouble with me and drank with me,” she says, “every single one of them got pregnant.”
Unexpectedly, Amy’s pregnancy proved to be a positive turning point, because she transferred to a special high school for young parents, and counselors there helped her stay in school. In the new school she began to get straight As and was elected president of the student body. Her boyfriend (and the father of her son) is still hanging around, but she is not thinking of marriage. “Marriages just put you in debt,” she says. “Why would I want to do that to myself?” Although she was admitted to several good state universities, she is planning to attend a liberal arts college upstate that has a special program for unmarried mothers. “Pregnancy changed my life,” she says. “I wouldn’t even be going to college if it wasn’t for my son.” Nevertheless, she worries about where the money for this hopeful future will come from, and she recently has tried raising funds on her Facebook page to help out.
Despite substance abuse and teen pregnancy, Lisa and Amy seem to have survived extreme family turbulence and neighborhood trauma. Churches played a significant role in their survival, as did (in Amy’s case) the special public school program for teen moms. Their story powerfully illustrates the capacity of religious communities to help impoverished, troubled families, but evidence that we’ll review later in this chapter is sobering: nationwide, poor kids are increasingly detached from religious institutions.
Molly tried to save her daughters from alcohol, drugs, and pregnancy, but she was unsuccessful, in part because their dads were destroyed by addiction, in part because of her own debilitating illness and depression, and in part because of the pervasive breakdown of the Kensington neighborhood. Recently Molly remarried, this time to a man she met at church, and the girls say that he is good for their mother. Neither daughter intended to get married or to have children, but both now say they love being mothers. However, quite reasonably, both are also fearful about their financial future.
In sum, both of our Philadelphia-area families seem to have attained a certain “happily ever after” equilibrium, but that equilibrium is much more precarious in Kensington than in Lower Merion. Marnie and Molly had very different capacities to protect their kids from the challenges of contemporary adolescence, and Marnie’s daughters are much better positioned for success in life than Molly’s. If it takes a village to raise a child, the prognosis for American children isn’t good: in recent years, villages all over America, rich and poor, have deteriorated as we’ve shirked collective responsibility for our kids. And most Americans don’t have the resources that Marnie did to replace collective provision with private provision.
Private provision in Marnie’s case meant, in part, buying help for childrearing (household staff; therapists; writing instructors; SAT tutors; private schools; the remodeled suite to help Eleanor cope with ADHD), but it also meant using social networks (other cooperative parents in the neighborhood to minimize the risks of drugs and teen sex; professional networks that led to top-flight medical specialists; friends and colleagues to offer mentoring; and other “cool adults” to befriend the kids) that were unavailable to Molly and her daughters. With the partial exception of the churches, the neighborhood networks within which Molly, Lisa, and Amy found themselves were much more likely to transmit problems than solutions, and even the churches themselves, the last remaining community institutions, are vulnerable to adverse neighborhood influences.
We Americans like to think of ourselves as “rugged individualists”—in the image of the lone cowboy riding toward the setting sun, opening the frontier. But at least as accurate a symbol of our national story is the wagon train, with its mutual aid among a community of pioneers. Throughout our history, a pendulum has slowly swung between the poles of individualism and community, both in our public philosophy and in our daily lives.7 In the past half century we have witnessed, for better or worse, a giant swing toward the individualist (or libertarian) pole in our culture, society, and politics. At the same time, researchers have steadily piled up evidence of how important social context, social institutions, and social networks—in short, our communities—remain for our well-being and our kids’ opportunities.
Social scientists often use the term social capital to describe social connectedness—that is, informal ties to family, friends, neighbors, and acquaintances; involvement in civic associations, religious institutions, athletic teams, volunteer activities; and so on. Social capital has repeatedly been shown to be a strong predictor of well-being both for individuals and for communities. Community bonds and social networks have powerful effects on health, happiness, educational success, economic success, public safety, and (especially) child welfare.8 However, like financial capital and human capital, social capital is distributed unevenly, and, as we’ll explore here, differences in social connections contribute to the youth opportunity gap.
Many studies have shown that better-educated Americans have wider and deeper social networks, both within their closest circle of family and friends and in the wider society.9 By contrast, less educated Americans have sparser, more redundant social networks, concentrated within their own family. (By “redundant,” I mean that their friends tend to know the same people they do, so that they lack the “friend of a friend” reach available to upper-class Americans.) In short, college-educated parents have both more close friends and more nodding acquaintances than less educated parents.
Figure 5.1 shows that both race and class matter for the density of “close” friendship—the sort of “strong ties” that can provide socioemotional and (in a pinch) material support.10 Holding race constant, parents in the top fifth of the socioeconomic hierarchy report about 20–25 percent more close friends than parents in the bottom fifth. (Holding social class constant, white parents have 15–20 percent more close friends than nonwhite parents.) Contrary to romanticized images of close-knit communal life among the poor, lower-class Americans today, especially if they are nonwhite, tend to be socially isolated, even from their neighbors.