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Hardwired to Connect Keynote
It's a pleasure to be speaking at The Children's Guild. As you'll see from today's talk, I think that nothing could be more important than your focus on children. I've been asked to speak about a recent report, Hardwired to Connect, jointly sponsored by the Dartmouth Medical School, the YMCA, and the Institute for American Values, which focuses on adolescents. The report has some bad news and some good news. I'm going to save the good news for the end. So what's the bad news? Hardwired to Connect, the report from the Commission on Children at Risk, documents dramatic declines in the welfare of adolescents over the last half century—to the point where approximately 20 percent of all adolescents suffer from serious emotional or behavioral problems, from depression to delinquency. Take suicide. From 1955 to 1990, the suicide rate for adolescents aged fifteen to nineteen more than quadrupled from 2.7 per 100,000 to 11.1 per 100,000. Moreover, even larger numbers of adolescents now report considering suicide—in 2001 almost 20 percent of high school students had entertained such thoughts. Suicide trends are important for two reasons. First, suicide is a dramatic and obvious indicator of poor psychological well-being among teens. These suicide trends reflect the marked decline in psychological well-being adolescents have experienced over the last half century. Since the 1960s, depression, anxiety, drug abuse, and delinquency have all risen precipitously among teenagers. Second, as sociologist Emile Durkheim observed over a century ago, suicide is an excellent barometer of the overall health of our social life. When adolescents are attached to what this report describes as ``authoritative communities"—religious institutions, intact families, and civic institutions such as the YMCA—they think life is worth living. These communities provide them with a sense of belonging and with moral and spiritual beliefs that lend their lives purpose and hope. When adolescents have no ties, or only attenuated ties, to authoritative communities, they lose hope and become vulnerable to a range of social and psychological pathologies, including suicide. So, how have authoritative communities fared in recent years in the United States? The sobering reality is that authoritative communities have not done so well over the last half-century. The family, which the report correctly notes is ``the first and most basic association of civil society," has been battered and buffeted in recent years. In particular, increases in divorce and unwed childbearing since the 1960s have left an indelible mark on the lives of millions of children. As a consequence of these changes, fewer and fewer children go to bed at night in a home that they share with their mother and father. In the 1950s, almost 80 percent of children spent their entire lives in an intact family, whereas in the 1990s only about 50 percent of children spent their entire childhood with their biological mother and father. Taking a page from Robert Putnam's Bowling Alone, the report notes that other authoritative communities in civil society—e.g., religious institutions, Parent Teacher Associations, and YMCAs—have lost ground over the last half century. For instance, the percentage of Americans attending religious services in any given week fell from 49 percent in 1958 to 43 percent in 1990. The decline was more precipitous among teenagers: weekly religious attendance among high school seniors fell from 40 percent in the late 1970s to 31 percent in 1991. These trends are especially sobering because declines in familial and civic life have been concentrated in low-income neighborhoods where too many residents are afflicted by what Isabel Sawhill of the Brookings Institution calls ``behavioral" poverty. By that she means that many residents of these neighborhoods do not finish high school, do not work full-time, and do not marry before having children. This behavioral poverty is serious because kids suffer when their parents don't reach these benchmarks. Tragically, Authoritative communities—especially family and nonreligious civic institutions—are weakest in these neighborhoods. Consider family trends. Only five percent of college-educated women will have a child outside the bonds of wedlock. Nearly 20 percent of women with a high school education or less will have a child outside wedlock. Divorce is also much more prevalent among the poor. Thus, the rural and urban poor are much less likely to get married and stay married than their middle- and upper-class peers, therefore losing out on the social, economic, and civic benefits of marriage. In many low-income urban communities, churches are often the only civic institutions with any real presence. Nonetheless, even churches located in poor neighborhoods are losing their ties to the poor in their communities, as they increasingly find their pews filled by working-class commuters who drive into the city from the suburbs for Sunday services. As Drew Smith of Morehouse College has observed, largely because of a growing moral and geographic divide between the church-going working class and the unchurched urban poor, ``there appears to be substantial social distance between the urban poor and faith institutions." I have detailed the decline of authoritative communities. Now, I'd like to step back and tell you a little bit more about these communities. Hardwired to Connect focuses on 10 features of these communities. In the interests of time, I'm going to focus on my favorite 5 features of authoritative communities. (1) Intergenerational closure – children are connected to adults who care about them and who know them, and often know at least some of the children they are friends with. Adults know something about their past, their character, their personality and they know many of the other children and adults who influence their lives. This knowledge helps them guide, discipline, and care for them better than adults who don't have this knowledge. (2) Children are treated as ends not means – adults aren't trying to get something out of kids; their well-being is their paramount concern. (3) Communities take a long-term view of the children. Anticipate having continuing contact with kids and, accordingly, treat them with a view towards the long-term consequences. Willing to sacrifice in the short-term because they know long-term payoffs. (4) Nurturing but firm. As you well know, the best literature on parenting suggests that kids need lots of affection as well as good, consistent discipline. They need to know they are loved and valued, but they also need clear limits. Authoritative communities give them both. (5) Vision of the good life. These communities seek to transmit a shared understanding of what it means to be a good person to the children in their communities. They allow kids to make connections to God or to some vision of the good life, thereby giving children meaning and hope in their lives. The report indicates that each of these features help foster the social, emotional, moral, and spiritual development of children. It is helpful to further illuminate the concept of authoritative communities by contrasting them to other types of institutions: namely, the state and the market. Now don't get me wrong. We need both the state and the market to perform important social functions in our society. But there are limits to what the state and the market can accomplish when it comes to fostering children who are healthy in body, mind, and soul. State has a number of limitations, foremost are its moral limitations. In a liberal, pluralistic society such as our own the state cannot endorse a specific vision of the good life. Specific visions of the good life—from Orthodox Judaism to evangelical Protestantism to secular humanism—cannot be the order of the day for the state. So the state cannot provide children and families with a clear and cogent belief system that will help motivate them to be good citizens, neighbors, and family members. For instance, as sociologist James Hunter has written, public character education campaigns—like DARE—have great difficulties in actually changing adolescent behavior because they don't give kids a clear and compelling case for being good. Instead, they offer utilitarian or therapeutic rationales—don't do drugs because it will hurt your future education, or it will depress you—that adolescents generally don't find compelling. Left unsaid is a justification rooted in a compelling vision of the good life. [State institutions and policies—from welfare to Medicaid—also don't enjoy the flexibility that authoritative communities do. To be fair, they have to treat children and their parents in a similar fashion. So a family of 3 on food stamps only gets a set allocation even though their dietary needs might be different from your ordinary family of 3. Authoritative communities, by contrast, can use their knowledge of any given family to tailor their help—dietary or otherwise—to that family of 3. They don't have to abide by laws passed in Washington or [capital of North Carolina].] Market has even more limitations: doesn't treat children as ends, no long-term view of kid's welfare, and no closure with kids. The entertainment industry offers the best example of these limitations. As you know, children spend an enormous amount of time consuming media—especially TV. Industry aims to make a profit by offering programming that attracts the attention of children and adults who have no connection to the company that produces the programming. So children are means to bottom line, the entertainment industry doesn't have their long-term welfare in view, and there are no direct connections between industry employees and the kids they influence. Consider this exchange between a mother and Jerry Springer on his talk show a few years ago, which ran in the afternoon, when many teens watch TV. JERRY SPRINGER: Mom, why are you going out with him? MOM: Because I love him. SPRINGER: How could you love him? He slept with your twelve-year-old daughter! … You don't see anything wrong in this story? What about your daughter? She's hurt. MOM: I love Amber . . . And I want both Amber and Glen to be in my life. And … if Amber can't accept it, then she can just stay living with her father and she can stay out of my life. SPRINGER: You're saying that to your own daughter? What's wrong with you? That's your daughter. That's your flesh and blood. MOM: It's just the way it is. I'm not going to be miserable because her and her father want things their way. (Hewlett and West 1998: 126) Jerry Springer is profiting off of venial exchange about pedophilia. Neither Jerry, his producers, or executives at Universal Studios care about the kids they affect with this type of TV, nor do they have any contact whatsoever with kids affected by this stuff. So authoritative communities do not come from the market or the state. They stand in between in the state and the market and are uniquely beneficial to children. Let me explain how two such communities typically work for children: the family and religious institutions. Family generally possesses all 5 of the key characteristics associated with authoritative communities. This is why our society should give the family the support it needs to do its job. Now when it comes to the family the intact, married family is most likely to have these unique characteristics. (And I say this as someone who was raised by a single mother.) What makes the intact family so valuable to children? Two parents are uniquely prepared to care for child. Know the child from the start, have a sense of his character and personality, and they know his friends. Because the child is theirs, have a long-term investment in her and her future. Her successes and failures as an adult will reflect well or poorly on them. Mother-father pairs bring unique gifts to childrearing. Now, of course dads can nurture and mothers can discipline but the best literature on child development indicates that mothers have an edge on nurture and dads have an edge on discipline. For instance, mothers are better able to read the expressions of their adolescent children. The physical size and deeper voice of fathers, by contrast, is more likely to engender obedience in teens. Children who grow up outside an intact family are more than twice as likely to experience serious psychological or social problems as their peers who grow up in intact families. Work by Sara McLanahan at Princeton University specifically indicates that girls who spend time outside of an intact family are more than twice as likely to have a teenage birth than girls who grow up in intact family. She also finds that boys who spend time outside an intact family are more than twice as likely to end up in prison as young men. Bottom line: family performs crucial functions for children, and intact, married family is usually able to perform these functions better than the alternatives. Turn now to considering another important authoritative community: religion. Because religious institutions typically provide moral meaning, spiritual sustenance, and social support to adolescents, and because they view children as created imago dei – that is, in the image of God – they help adolescents make connections to others and to the transcendent. So, for instance, a teenage girl active in a church youth group can benefit from the moral messages she is getting, a growing sense of connection with God, or the fact that her youth group leader and parents are exchanging information about her friendships and social dilemmas in school. Consequently, adolescents who are religious do better on a range of outcomes: religious teens have higher rates of volunteering and honesty. For instance, New Millenium Survey found that 70% of weekly attending teens volunteered, compared to 50% of teens who did not attend weekly. Also less likely to engage in problem behaviors like early sex, drugs, and delinquency. Bottom line: religious belief and practice among adolescents protects them from a range of social ills. So, when we put all this together – declines in child well-being and declines in the health of authoritative communities – we can see that one of the key reasons that adolescent well-being has declined over the last half-century is that the communities that give our children a sense of belonging and belief have not fared well. The picture painted by Hardwired to Connect may seem dark. But the report ultimately gives reason for optimism. To begin with, adolescent well-being seems to have stabilized and, in some respects, improved, during the 1990s. In the last decade, for instance, child poverty, adolescent suicide, teen sex, and juvenile arrest rates have all fallen. These improvements parallel stabilizing trends in family and religion over this same period. In the late 1990s, divorce rates continued a decline begun earlier, the percentage of children in two-parent families increased slightly, and, for the first time in years, opinion polls indicated that more married Americans are ``very happy" in their marriages. According to Gallup data, weekly religious attendance among U.S. adults held steady at around 42 percent in the 1990s, and other survey data indicate that attendance among high school seniors also held steady at 31 percent. Perhaps it is a coincidence that the very institutions that address adolescents' fundamental needs for belonging, moral purpose, and transcendent meaning have seen their fortunes improve at the same time that adolescent well-being has taken a turn for the better. But I doubt it. Taken together, these trends suggest that our social free fall is slowing down or even beginning to reverse itself. The report also suggests a parallel development among intellectuals, politicians, and social service professionals. For a long time intellectuals were not willing to acknowledge the importance of family and civil society for children. But the intellectual tide is now turning towards a refreshing willingness to grapple with our children's toughest social problems in a probing and open-minded manner. Virtually every member of the Commission on Children at Risk that wrote the Hardwired to Connect Report holds an academic position at a top private or public university—from Harvard to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Only a handful of conservatives were represented on the commission. Yet the commission concluded, rightly, that the intact, two-parent family and religion play a central role in promoting the social and psychological welfare of children, precisely because that is what the best social scientific evidence tells us. Perhaps the most striking feature of the report's intellectual honesty is that it goes beyond the usual sociological accounts of the positive role that communities play in the lives of adolescents by arguing that the ``human person is hardwired to connect to other people and to moral and spiritual meaning." In other words, human connections to family and God are rooted not only in enduring social needs but also in the biological makeup of the human person. The report notes, for example, that adolescent girls who live with their biological fathers experience puberty later than girls who live with unrelated adult males—for instance, a stepfather or a mother's boyfriend. Not surprisingly, girls in the former group are more likely to postpone sex than girls in the latter group. The intact family, then, has both sociological and biological value to girls moving towards adulthood. Similarly, the report stresses the social and biological functions that religion serves among adolescents. Adolescence is a time when the brain seems most primed to address fundamental questions about life and death, ultimate meaning, and the supernatural. During adolescence, for instance, the prefrontal cortex—a region that neuroscientists have linked to religious experiences—undergoes marked developmental changes. Not surprisingly, adolescents who manage to connect or remain connected to God during this time of change are significantly more likely to believe that life has meaning and purpose than their peers who do not report a ``direct personal relationship with the Divine." And as we have seen, adolescents who do not feel strongly connected to God, and who do not enjoy a community of fellow believers, are much more likely to turn to alcohol, drugs, and deviance to fill the hole in their lives. The Commission's willingness to acknowledge the biological and social power of faith, family, and community on the well-being of the young gives reason for guarded optimism about our children's future. The commission's willingness to speak up on behalf of the unvarnished truth suggests that academics, children's advocates, and social service professionals will help lead the way as we seek to strengthen our families and communities for the sake of children. Thank you. |
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Institute for American Values |
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