Is the US failing its children?

     Robert Samuelson has an op-ed in today's Washington Post (which has been mis-posted; a full and clean version can be found here), "Behind the Birth Dearth," in which he discusses Ben Wattenberg's new book, Fewer.

   Wattenberg continues an argument he has been making for many years now: that declining birth rates in advanced industrial countries as the signals of doom:

"The forthcoming and dramatic depopulation of Europe and Japan will cause many problems," writes Ben Wattenberg in "Fewer," his excellent book on the subject. "Populations will age, the customer base (for businesses) will shrink, there will be labor shortages, the tax base will decline, pensions will be cut, retirement ages will increase."

    I have never shared Wattenberg's worry on these matters; immigration and social and technological change may well be enough to avert calamity he fears (and I don't know if his new book is "excellent"). 

    What I am more interested in right now is the "why" question, which Samuelson delves into a bit, when discussing the US exception to falling fertility rates:

American fertility is roughly at the replacement rate, 2.1 children per woman. Nor does the U.S. rate merely reflect, as some think, a higher rate among Hispanic Americans. The fertility rate is 1.9 for non-Hispanic whites and about 2 for African-Americans, reports demographer Nicholas Eberstadt of the American Enterprise Institute. What explains the American exception? Eberstadt cites three differences with Europe and other advanced countries: greater optimism, greater patriotism and stronger religious values.

   Eberstadt's argument strikes me as the usual neo-conservative, American exceptionalist, "we are good" argument. Amercians are willing to have more children because, basicially, we are happy, holy and patriotic.  Maybe some of this is true.  But there is an alternate hypothesis that US nationalists might want to ignore: Americans have more children because they are irresponsible and do not understand or carry through their child rearing duties.

    Why would I even suggest such a thing?  Two social trends stand out: child abuse and incarceration.

    In a quick web search, I was not able to find comparative figures on child abuse.  But I was able to read through this report, from the US Department of Heath and Human Services, and especially this table, which gives some sense of the rate of child victimization in recent  years.  The good news is that the rate of victimization has declined in last few years; the bad news is that at least 11.9% of all US childrens were mistreated in 2004 (I am assuming some child abuse is not reported or discovered).  That strikes me as a high number, a national shame.  It is an enormous problem, as the links on this page suggest.

   I do not know, at this point, if rates of child abuse in the US are higher than those in Europe and Japan.  Data are hard to compare cross-nationally.  But at the very least, the enormity of the problem in the US suggests that a significant number of parents fail utterly in their duties.  It may be the case that some portion of young people in the US do not understant what child-rearing requires and they become frustrated with it and abuse their children.  Americans may have more children because they take child birth too lightly and then they get into trouble.

     It is important to note that this is not a matter of race.  In a very large study comparing child abuse in 1986 to 1993, the US DSS found:

The NIS-3 [National Incidence Study] found no race differences in maltreatment incidence. The NIS-3 reiterates the findings of the earlier national incidence studies in this regard. That is, the NIS-1 and the NIS-2 also found no significant race differences in the incidence of maltreatment or maltreatment-related injuries.

   It is a society-wide problem.

   Incarcertation rates might play into this picture.  The US has, rather infamously, the largest prison population (as a percentage of population) of any country in the world, by far.  Crooked Timber has the numbers.  It is not a big jump in logic to suggest that our high rates of imprisonment are related to child abuse, though that relationship is obviously mediated by other factors. 

    I only want to suggest here a possible hypothesis.  I am not sure that our high rates of fertility are due to our apparent willingness to neglect parental duties.  If I were to dig deeper into the issue I would look at infant morality rates, immunization rates, and child poverty rates, all of which might point to a national problem with child care.  We should not, however, be too quick to accept Eberstadt's "we have more babies because we are good" argument.  Perhaps the opposite is true: we have more babies because we, as a society, do not take our child care responsibilities seriously enough; we do not understand just how much work raising a child can be and we run into parenthood unprepared and unsupported.  Maybe Europeans and Japanese are just more careful about having children and, therefore, they have fewer. 

    The sad paradox may be that Americans have more children because we are worse, as a society, at parenting.

Comments

[Xtina]

"It may be the case that some portion of young people in the US do not understant what child-rearing requires and they become frustrated with it and abuse their children. "

I definitely agree. And the isolation that is encouraged in this nation, that is called "fiscal progress" does not help the matter.

I have read there is a correlation between financial hard times and child abuse - it skyrockets when times are tough. That is not hard to believe.

I know this is a very controversial thing to say in the United States, but I do believe the nuclear family is poison. Ideally, children would be enfolded in an extended family and a stable village. If the family falls apart, the village is there; the child is not sent miles away to a strange environ, seemingly in penance for being the cause of the problem in the family.

I hope we can defy the holy rollers and really start practicing birth control and sex education in this country. I would love to see compulsory child rearing classes for ALL people, not just concentrated on lower income black/brown people, because the problem is endemic.

The reason I am so vocal on this subject is that I'm a survivor of abuse. My abuser was a survivor of abuse, and his parents were survivors of abuse. I have one sibling that conquered the pattern in the rearing of her children; I myself didn't have any, so fearful was of repeating the pattern. What loss.

I think the system we have in place now is highly injurious to children in so many ways.