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From the library: Our Kids, by Robert D. Putnam

From the library: Our Kids, by Robert D. Putnam

Last updated on: May 1, 2015 at 8:17 pm by Jane the Actuary

From the library: Our Kids, by Robert D. Putnam 2015-05-01T20:17:19-06:00 Jane the Actuary

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Yes, finally, after having mentioned this book in several prior posts, I’m finally writing about this more directly!

And longtime readers will know that I generally don’t write “book reviews” in any conventional sense; what I do is more a sort of note-taking with commentary.

The subtitle of the book is “The American Dream in Crisis,” and the basic gist of it is that, in many ways, compared to the generation of the author’s upbringing, in the 50s (he graduated high school in 1959, which puts him two years younger than my parents, whose background I described briefly earlier this week). He begins with stories from his generation, and from two families now living in his hometown, as a way of illustrating his central thesis, that despite different material circumstances, rich and poor* children growing up in this earlier generation had much more in common compared to the much difference experiences of children of similar social classes now, either as a matter of poor children falling behind, or behaviors for both groups changing, and this affects the life chances of poor children and hinders their opportunity for social mobility.

(* Putnam early on introduces a simplification of treating rich/middle-class and college-educated as equivalent, and poor and high-school only as equivalent, because, by and large, the simplification works well enough for his points, and data on parents by education level is more straightforward.)

Here are some of the areas of divergence (note the “about” and “around” statements below are because, as I write this, I’m flipping through from graph to graph):

Wealth: yes, of course, college-educated parents are wealthier than high-school-only, but this gap has grown substantially since 1989.

Mother’s age at first birth: pretty stable at maybe 19 or so for low-education mothers, increasing from 24 to 30 from 1970 to 2000 for high-education moms.

Births to unmarried mothers: from maybe 3% in 1980 to 10% in 2008 for high-education moms; from 22% to 66% from 1978 to 2008 for low-ed moms; a roughly similar percentage divergence for children age 0 -7 living with a single parent..

Employment of mothers: from 18% to 32% for low-ed moms; from 21% to 70% for high-ed moms, over the period 1960 – 2010. (Yeah, I was surprised at this, too.)

Family dinners: 79% for low-ed, 82% for high-ed families in 1975; 63% for low ed and 75% for high ed families in 2005 — in other words, both groups decreased, but low-ed decreased more.

Time spent on “developmental child care” (so called Goodnight Moon time, purposefully interacting with the child vs. mere diaper changing): from 30 minutes per day in 1975 for both groups to 90 minutes for the low-ed and 135 minutes for the high-ed in 2010 — with a major jump from 1995 to 2005 for the latter.

Participation in after-school activities: 78%/88% for the lowest and highest Socioeconomic Status (SES) quartile in 1980 to 65%/86% in 2005. Putnam attributes the drop for the poorer kids to the increasing tendency of schools to charge fees for participation in after-school activities, and says that poor kids are too embarrassed to apply for waivers.

Educated parents also know more people, both close friends and “weak links” which are nonetheless useful, e.g., in helping a kid find their way towards a scholarship or job.

Church attendance: dropping for both groups, and the divergence isn’t as striking here, but: 30/34 weeks per year for the lower third/upper third of 12th graders, based on parental education in 1975; 21 vs. 28 weeks/year in 2010.

Why?

One of Putnam’s key reasons is the geographical stratification: what with suburbanization and the emptying out of cities, rich and poor are far more separated from each other than they were in the 50s.

What about the decline in marriage and increase in nonmarital births among the poor? Putnam essentially claims to be agnostic here, for the most part, except that he says that the jump in the imprisonment rate from 1975 to 2000 or so is partly responsible. He discards welfare availability because there seems to be no direct correlation with looser or tighter availability of benefits (e.g., welfare reform didn’t have an impact), and says it’s not just a loosening of moral standards because there isn’t any difference between less or more religious areas of the country.

Putnam also spends quite a bit of time profiling families, both “middle-class” — in reality, quite well off — families which are able to navigate family crises or children’s misbehavior by calling in experts, or, in once case, even buying a horse stable to redirect a troubled child, and poor families who struggle to find the resources and figure out a path forward, even to the degree that a high school girl, in a severely troubled school (where the teachers openly admitted they made no efforts to actual teach rather than babysit the kids), was placed in a Spanish class for native speakers solely due to her Hispanic last name and wasn’t able to transfer out for the school year because of a school bureaucracy that cared not a whit about students and a family that didn’t have the ability or willingness to push back.

What to do?

Here, in the final chapter, the book is weaker — I suppose quite simply the ability to analyze the data, to interview, to pull together trends, doesn’t necessarily translate to having solutions. And, really, no one’s got solutions. That’s the problem. I don’t have them, either.

Anyway:

He says it would be nice to revive marriage among the poor, but doubt there is any way to do this. He wonders whether IUD-izing poor women would be effective, but doesn’t go very far with this. He suggests simply giving the poor more cash, via an expanded EITC and refundable child tax credit, to simply reduce the financial stress poor families face. He proposes reductions in sentencing to reduce the frequency and length of incarceration, and boosting efforts at rehabilitation of ex-cons.

He proposes parental leave programs for a child’s first year, as well as welfare benefits that don’t require mothers of infants to work, and wants an infusion of funds so that poor families can afford day care centers rather than home day care, as well as universal preschool programs (citing, as always, the Perry and Abecedarian Project).

As far as residential segregation, he proposes the remedy of publicly-subsidized mixed income housing, as well as, of course, more money for poor schools, so that they can recruit better teachers, recognizing that, all other things being equal, they’d rather be at a middle-class school. Schools should also have expanded hours, with more extracurriculars, and social services at the school itself. And community colleges should have more funding to better serve their populations.

Does any of this break any new ground? No, not really. The preschool for all bit is one of the Left’s favorite causes, but there no firm evidence that this really makes a difference a decade later in these kids’ lives — the oft-cited projects aren’t really scale-able, and a while back even Brookings reported that, in Tennessee, it didn’t seem to help. There have also been studies reporting that even attempts to throw massive amounts of money at inner-city schools haven’t fixed the problem (see this old post), either.

But there isn’t really any way to un-do a lot of what’s happened over the last several decades so diagnosing the problem doesn’t in itself provide a solution.

And that’s all I’ve got. Time to go talk to the in-laws.

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