#59. Our Children, Our Future
As I noted in the Welcome to this blog, it will occasionally feature posts by colleagues that relate to its whosafrasidof social democracy themes. This week, I asked two psychoanalyst colleagues, Laswrence Blum., M.D. of Philadelphia and Leon Hoffman, M.D., of New York (co-director of the Pacella Parent Child Center: theparentchildcenter.org) if I could offer you a piece they wrote earlier this year and published on Psychology Today’s blog: http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/beyond-freud/201104/our-children-our-future.
Our children and our future are at stake in today’s Congressional budget wars. The current temporary government funding bill passed by Congress will soon expire, and the battle will resume with the House pursuing a budget that will make devastating cuts to programs for children. Even programs that save the government money are threatened. That our leaders can propose this, with so little public outcry, requires explanation. We suggest that there are psychological reasons for this state of affairs.
The United States was born in our War of Independence and weaned on the Frontier spirit. Personal independence and self-reliance are the paramount virtues of American culture. As psychoanalysts, we know that relationships with other people are important foundations of physical and emotional health. Yet, many Americans believe that attaining personal freedom is best accomplished by sacrificing relationships; and many suggest that such an approach to life is the recipe that we should all follow. This radical individualism has both personal and serious cultural side-effects. One of those side effects, we propose, is a societal hostility toward, and neglect of, our children.
All of us, children and adults, have a need to be taken care of, and to take care of, other people. This powerful human need is the basis of much charitable and communal activity. Yet many Americans strive for radical personal autonomy, which can only be maintained by a posture of denial of their own real inter-personal needs and by denying any inclination to take care of others. Those who obviously need the most care, of course, are our children, our sick, and our poor. People in obvious need make us uncomfortable by challenging our idealized image of perfect self-sufficiency. To alleviate this discomfort we as a society then tend to ignore them.
Consistent with this idealization of self-sufficiency and intolerance of need, United States cares less for its children than any other developed country. We are last in leave from work for new parents, we lag in support for early childhood education, and twenty-eight nations now have lower rates of infant mortality than we do. The needs of our children have been buried in our drive for personal independence.
Although our children remain a low priority in our social hierarchy, it is no mystery what we should do for them. Research has confirmed what common sense tells us. We have evidence that children who are fed do better than those who are hungry. We know that dollars spent on early child care and education save many more dollars from being spent on special education and the criminal justice system. We have increasing evidence that hitting children, corporal punishment, which is now illegal in many other countries, contributes to behavior problems, encourages children toward violence, and can even lower intelligence. We know that people with insurance stay healthier than those without, and that healthy children do better than sick children.
Even though founding father Ben Franklin reportedly said “We must, indeed, all hang together, or assuredly we will all hang separately” we have gone so overboard with “independencism” that any collective good is now regarded by many as objectionably socialist. Many proposed budget cuts are clearly not about saving money. The ideological ax threatens programs such as Headstart and WIC (Women Infants & Children), which for every dollar invested demonstrably save taxpayers many dollars elsewhere.
Why is there so little public outcry, no “March for Children”? Maybe the same psychology is at work. Perhaps children, like adults, should be able to take care of themselves; like John Henry of American myth, they should be born big, strong, and independent. They shouldn’t need help. Part of the appeal of the small government movement is that when government is small enough there will be no communal endeavor, no objectionable help for anyone. It may be that poor and helpless adults also identify with the power elite, those who are clearly not needy, thus inhibiting them from “marching” for their own interests and their children’s interests.
First Lady Michelle Obama’s campaign against childhood obesity is commendable, but who will champion the efforts to help children be safe, loved, cared for, fed, and educated in the first place? Children are not self-sufficient, and childhood deprivation does not build character; it leads to misery and anger. As a society we need to temper our radical individualism, and nurture all of our care-giving impulses, to make sure our children get the foundation they need, and that they, and we, can look forward to a future of opportunity instead of deprivation.
thank you for this post. i believe that it is morally wrong for our political leaders, in our names, to attempt to balance the budget and raise the debt limit by attemting to lay the burden and the backs of the poorest and weakest in our society, and the back of the environment.
i urge the readers of this post to call and email your congressman, senators, and the president to express your concern.
again thank you for this post.
richard russell
This just happened in Minnesota. The state shutdown, no paychecks for three weeks, state parks and highway rest stops shut down, etc., and in the end, they balanced the budget on the backs of the school children. No one won, no one’s happy, but hey, children can’t vote. I’ll be surprised if anyone from either party gets reelected. Political Childism.
Do we Americans discriminate against our own children mainly because we cannot bear to recognize our own dependency and interdependence in the mirror of our children? Is this chiefly the result of the extreme glorification of independence?
I suggest that maybe we hope that this is the problem, because if it is mainly projection that is at work (as Elisabeth Young-Bruehl suggests in the Childism post), then we have primarily an ego problem.
But thinking about multiple function leads me to suggest that such a deeply entrenched social symptom (symptom in the sense that it creates illusory balance at the cost of reality – as this post demonstrates)has deep superego and drive aspects as well. Superego: I suggest that Americans have a deeply disavowed sense of guilt over the many failures to help their fellows and the many efforts and successes at destructive competition that are inevitable but traumatic experiences in unbridled competition. It is too painful to see in our children the people we have trampled. Drive: We disavow the libidinal and aggressive satisfaction that our competitive successes provide us; “it is only business,” we say. We disavow the satisfaction we gain through dominating our children, pushing them around, demeaning them for being “weak” or dependent, like our less successful competitors.
So I fear our Congressmen and women can too easily “see” the (preconscious) ego point, but “somehow” fail to act due to the drive and superego aspects.
Elisabeth Young-Bruehl’s brilliant work on prejudices pushes us to see the less comfortable aspects of our American prejudices against children. I just wanted to keep this discussion as full and uncomfortable as her work.
Mark Lilla proposed a similar hypothesis in an article in the NYRB a little while back. It’s an interesting piece of the puzzle. A certain image seems to dominate the thinking of a lot of Republican voters and politicians, especially the Ayn Randian types (E.g., Paul Ryan), and it can be pictured as “Big government taking away MY hard-earned money and turning right round and giving it directly to those revolting, undeserving slackers over there, particularly minorities and immigrants, who don’t even belong to my own group.” They may not like the “money being taken from me” part, but they seem to hate even more the part where those other people are actually getting some help, maybe even benefiting. They don’t like money coming out of the pockets of the rich, but what they really want to prevent at all cost is any money coming in to the government, where it might actually be used to help people. Is the Libertarian “philosophy” not just an elaborate attempt to give a rational justification to this ignoble sentiment? Can we possibly have a national debate on these moral issues, or even one that attempts to educate everyone about what public policy in a big complex community is all about? The ethos of the Republican base, that drives the politics these days, seems excessively callous, mean- spirited and hateful. It must not feel very good to be that way. In contrast, I think of an event I saw a recording of on TV, a “flash mob” choreographed mass dance with the Black-eyed Peas for Oprah’s birthday: you could tell that the participants, who were total strangers to each other, felt a lot of love, fellow-feeling and elation in a community spirit, and I thought it was sad that probably Republicans were barred from all that because of their inability to climb out of the swamp of ressentiment.