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| 3/11 |
| Perils of the Recession Generation |
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Perils of the Recession Generation
The New York Times
Judith Warner
October 29, 2009
In October 1932, The New York Times ran a special section on the crisis of America’s Depression-era youth. It was headlined, “A Tragic Aftermath of the Days of Prosperity: The Army of Homeless Boys Now Roaming the Country.”
The following year, the historian Steven Mintz notes in “Huck’s Raft: A History of American Childhood,” the film “Wild Boys of the Road” grimly dramatized the plight of the quarter of a million kids who by the early 1930s were “bumming” around the country.
“Homeless children riding the rails became a defining symbol of youth in crisis,” Mintz writes. These children’s lives, he says, were full of violence, hunger, crime, fear and — for girls — sexual assault and prostitution: “Children were the Depression’s most vulnerable victims, both economically and psychologically.”
I was reminded of Mintz’s account this week when I read The Times’ devastating two-part series on the runaway boys and girls (Part I | Part II) who are becoming increasingly numerous in our own Great Recession as their family lives fray under the pressure of hard times. I contacted Mintz and, it turned out, he was thinking along the same lines.
“The parallel struck me as remarkable — and deeply disturbing,” he wrote in an e-mail message. “Economic hardship has a very destructive impact on parenting. Parents become depressed, withdrawn and quick to anger. Physical punishment often increases. Then, and now, the young are the unheralded victims of economic hard times.”
There are, of course, some very major differences between the current recession (or jobless recovery), and the suffering of children in the Great Depression. There is, for starters, a vast difference of scale; in 1932, at the peak of the Depression, 28 percent of the nation’s households did not have a single employed wage earner.
Thanks to the movement of women into the workplace, families today are at least partially buffered against the devastation of (mostly male) job losses. The psychological ramifications of fathers being out of work appear to be nowhere near as grave as they were in the 1930s. “In the Great Depression, large numbers of men did experience a sort of existential crisis: who am I, if I’m not a breadwinner; am I still a man? They had a very hard time adjusting to domesticity,” says Michael Kimmel, a sociologist at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, who specializes in the study of men and masculinity. “I get a lot of questions now asking if we’re seeing signs of increases in domestic violence or alcoholism among men, and the answer is no. This is not your father’s Depression. The men I’m talking to aren’t seeing this as an existential crisis.”
Still, the financial stresses on families now are real and undeniable, even among households far less afflicted than those fled by the runaways chronicled by The Times. With unemployment reaching up toward 10 percent, fully 80 percent of Americans have reported feeling stressed about the economic downturn. Women report the greatest levels of economy-related unhappiness of all, with increased stress-related symptoms like irritability, anger and fatigue. All of this radiates down to kids. “You don’t have to be poor to feel deep economic distress in this recession,” Mintz told me. “And kids are very vulnerable to what parents feel.”
The youth crisis of the 1930s terrified observers and led to a profound shift in American politics. “The Depression toppled the notion that children’s welfare could be left to individual families, private charities, and local and state governments,” Mintz writes. “It created a consensus that the federal government had a responsibility to promote children’s well-being.” Anxious about the emergence of a “lost generation” that could fall into the grip of fascism, the Roosevelt administration started the country’s first free-lunch programs, opened hundreds of free nursery schools, created the first federally-financed work-study programs for teenagers, funneled money to poor states to maintain teachers’ salaries, and created jobs for teenagers. Schools were built. Aid to Dependent Children came into being.
But if needy children were iconic — and change-inspiring — back then, they now appear to be all but forgotten.
The stimulus package of last spring contained a good deal of additional federal financing for child-care and Head Start programs. But that assistance was a one-shot deal. Ten states have cut back on their financing for pre-kindergarten education; at least nine have growing wait lists for child-care subsidies. Ohio and California have eliminated certain preschool programs altogether; other states are making it harder for families to qualify for state assistance.
Candidate Obama promised to double federal money for afterschool programs — instead that funding has remained flat, even as need has increased. According to a recent national survey carried out by the Afterschool Alliance, a nonprofit advocacy group, 26 percent of school-age children are left alone after school each day — an increase of 800,000 kids since 2004. And as many as 100,000 teachers have been laid off this year.
The issue of paid sick days — a hot one in the last election year — appears to be off the national agenda entirely, a bizarre omission in this flu season. Missing, too, is action on all the earlier talk about equal pay, a particularly relevant issue at a time when families are more and more dependent on women’s salaries.
Overall, the Depression-era consensus regarding care for children and families appears to be shattered, or at best, deeply fragmented.
“We seem to care little about what it means to a child to lose a home or have stressed-out parents,” Mintz says. “The difference between then and now is striking.”
Is it an overstatement to say that we’re at risk of losing a generation of children if we don’t step up to the plate to provide additional support for families under duress? We are, at the very least, at risk of helping erode children’s most basic sense of security and safety, as well as their hopes for the future. Families are keenly under pressure. We ignore them at our collective peril.
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