Watching A Generation Waste Away

By JANICE CASTRO/NEW YORK Sylvia Ann Hewlett

Q. Feminists call you a backslider and a traitor, conservatives say you sound like a big-spending liberal, and liberals say you sound like a reactionary. Why do so many different groups attack you?

A. Because I am extremely concerned about what is happening to the American family. Those of us in the sane center are always being clobbered by both the left and the right. We think of ourselves as a nation that cherishes its children, but, in fact, America treats its children like excess baggage. In all other countries, childbirth is seen as an event that is vitally important to the life and future of the nation. But in the U.S. we treat child rearing as some kind of expensive private hobby.

Q. In what ways?

A. Our tax code offers greater incentives for breeding horses than for raising children. We slash school budgets and deny working parents the right to spend even a few weeks with their newborns. We spend 23% of the federal budget on the elderly but less than 5% on children. We refer to pregnancy as a "temporary disability," putting it on a par with breaking your leg.

Q. What is the impact on children?

A. Children of all races and income levels are suffering. Nearly one-third of our children drop out before finishing high school; only 6% do so in Japan, 8% in western Germany.

Q. What kinds of changes are needed to address these problems?

A. We need parenting leaves, for one thing. When Brazil rewrote its constitution in 1988, it was seen as an inalienable right for mothers to spend some time with their newborn children. In this country, 60% of working women have no maternity leave. If they must spend time at home with their new baby, they stand to lose their job.

Q. What about private child care?

A. Most parents cannot afford decent child care. I spoke recently with a young father in Phoenix. He and his wife must both work to make ends meet. He told me what it felt like to put his five-week-old baby daughter in what he called a kennel: third-rate day care. It was all they could afford. They have no health benefits, and neither had the right to time off when their daughter was born. The worst part is that their situation is normal in this country. But the average European country now guarantees five months off with full pay after the birth of a child. You would never find a five-week-old child in day care.

Q. In your new book, When the Bough Breaks: The Cost of Neglecting Our Children, you maintain that this is a peculiarly American problem. Why?

A. When it comes to family policy, we're caught between two fantasy worlds, one described by the right, one described by the left. The left behaves as if we do not have children. They have focused on equal opportunities, ignoring the fact that individuals who are nurturing children cannot compete on equal footing with those who are not. The left has been so concerned with the rights of people to live however they choose that they cannot even decide what a family is.

Meanwhile, the right talks about traditional family values but does nothing to help families. They act as if we are living in the '50s, when women stayed home to raise the children. Day care was a dirty word. A hands-off government policy on families made more sense then. More families were intact, for one thing.

Q. In part because there were strong social prohibitions against divorce, parents were expected to put their children's interests first, and staying together was viewed as the best way to care for children.

A. Yes, even if that is not always true. At least we put the children first. These days we treat divorce as just another personal choice. Birth control has made it possible to choose when to have children, and liberalized divorce laws have made it easy to abandon them. Parents now spend 40% less time with their children than they did about 15 years ago.

Q. What about the argument that working women have brought these problems on themselves and are now asking the government to pick up the slack?

A. No, no, no. Working mothers are always the scapegoat. But look, real hourly wages have fallen 19% since 1973, so most families need two jobs just to get by. If women were not working, the American family would be in desperate financial trouble by now. Yet we seem to expect women somehow to rear their children in their spare time. We persist in thinking of child care as a woman's issue. It's not. Fathers are more to blame for the parenting deficit in our society.

Q. Why?

A. Too many still think that taking care of the children is women's work. And after divorce, almost half the fathers drop out of sight.

Q. In your book, you argue that the liberalization of social attitudes and the changes in family law are partly to blame. Weren't no-fault and other divorce reforms intended to help women and children?

A. But they made it too easy to dump the children. Twenty-four percent of the children in this country are growing up without fathers. At one time, society viewed divorced fathers as somewhat irresponsible. Now we see them as eligible males. We have forgotten that while marriages may not last, parenthood is forever. We are living with the appalling consequences of all this neglect. Teenage suicides have tripled since 1960. Since '71, the number of teenagers hospitalized for psychiatric care has increased from 16,000 to 263,000. More than 80% of them have no father at home.

Q. You started out as a development economist interested in Third World countries. What made you focus your work on the American family?

A. My own experience, to a great extent. I entered the work force at a time in the early '70s that many of us saw as the Golden Age of expanding opportunities for women. I was teaching at Barnard College, which was a leading center of women's studies. But when I began to have children, I discovered that a lot of people seemed to feel women were somehow cheating if they asked for things like maternity leave. Feminists said I was asking for "special privileges, a free ride." The men on the faculty told me that getting pregnant would jeopardize my chances for tenure -- and they were right. I didn't get it. The thing that really brought home to me the serious problems that American families face was the realization that I was better off than most. I had a loving and supportive husband and a very decent income. I was armed to the teeth with advanced degrees. If I was having so much trouble, what about all those women without choices?

Q. When did you begin to blame government policies for the problems of working parents?

A. About the same time that my first child was born, one of my sisters had her first baby. She was teaching at a secondary school in Manchester, England. I was astounded when she told me that she had seven months' maternity leave at full pay. I thought she must live in an enlightened place. But when I looked into it, I discovered that it was the U.S., not Manchester, that was out of step with the rest of the world.

Q. What accounts for that difference?

A. In the U.S. we have confused equal rights with identical treatment, ignoring the realities of family life. After all, only women can bear children. And in this country, women must still carry most of the burden of raising them. We think that we are being fair to everyone by stressing identical opportunities, but in fact we are punishing women and children.

Q. In what ways?

( A. Working women pay a steep price for motherhood. Look what happens: if you take a 27-year-old American woman right now, she is doing very well. Whether she is a lawyer or a bus driver, she is earning almost 90% of the male wage. But the same woman at 35, with two children, working full time, is earning 46% of the male wage.

Take a Frenchwoman, age 27: she's earning 75% of the male wage. She is not doing as well as her American counterpart because she does not have the same opportunities. But take her at 35, with two children, working full time, and guess what? She's still earning 75% of the male wage. She isn't losing ground. And that is because of the extraordinary investment France has made in preschool, maternity leave and other family supports. She does not have to quit her job when her children are small or limit herself to simple jobs close to home. She does not lose seniority and career momentum.

Q. Can we afford to match those programs?

A. Good family policy is cost effective. The confusion and stress and emotional deprivation in the home are robbing our children of the chance to succeed. We are facing a growing labor shortage in this country. Yet because of the rising skill demands of the workplace, many of our dropouts are simply unemployable. A technology-based economy cannot absorb workers who are not literate and who lack rudimentary mathematical skills.

Q. Aren't you describing mostly the inner-city poor?

A. No. As tragic as their situation is, the problems afflict middle-class children as well. Even high school graduates are coming up short in meeting the demands of the workplace. Chemical Bank has reported that it must interview 40 high school graduates to find one person who can be trained to become a teller. All they are seeking is eighth-grade-level skills, and they cannot find them in most high school graduates.

Q. Beyond parenting leave, what do you think we need to do?

A. We need access to free prenatal care. Companies should provide flextime and compressed schedules for working parents so that they can have more time with their families. We need mortgage subsidies for young families and tougher enforcement of child-support laws. We should throw sand in the machinery of divorce, force parents to think about what they are doing. We must hold parents accountable for the welfare of their children, and ourselves responsible for the care of America's youth. Otherwise we will not make it. Our standard of living will steadily decline. And the truth is, only a society that cherishes its children deserves to thrive.