Half Changed World

Today’s book is The Price of Privilege, by Madeline Levine.  Levine is a psychologist in Marin county, California, and she writes about how she’s seeing more and more affluent teenagers who are depressed, anxious, anorexic, using drugs, cutting themselves, or otherwise acting in self-destructive manners.  She argues that this isn’t in spite of their privileged backgrounds, but because of them. 

In particular, Levine suggests that affluent communities are characterized by:

• intense pressure to perform, in both grades and extra-curriculars
• materialistic values
• very busy parents who don’t have time for their kids (whether or not they work outside the home).
• isolation and lack of social supports.

She claims that the result is kids who don’t have a real "sense of self."  They know what is expected of them — and depending on their personality, may either conform or do precisely the opposite — but don’t know who they are and what they really value in life.  Or, as the subtitle says, "How Parental Pressure and Material Advantage Are Creating a Generation of Disconnected and Unhappy Kids."

Levine argues that parents need to both take a step back from their kids’ lives — let them make more decisions on their own, and learn to deal with the consequences — and be more connected with them as persons and let them know they love them for themselves, not just their accomplishments.  This rang true to me.  I know that my husband is still dealing with the message that he got from his parents as a teenager that they believed that if he was left to make his own decisions, he’d ruin his life. 

The book also helped me articulate some of my irritation with the Post magazine article on "toxic parents" from a couple of weeks ago.  The article seemed to suggest that the only parenting alternatives were to a) let your kids do whatever they wanted, including buying alcohol for them and letting them have unsupervised parties, and b) to track their whereabouts every minute.  I’m pretty sure that the right choice is c) set clear expectations, provide freedom within reasonable limits, and let there be consequences if the kid screws up.  (Levine admits that in spite of her best efforts, some of her son’s friends snuck alcohol into a party at her house, and she got busted by the police.)

That said, I’m not convinced that the people who read this book will be the ones who need to, or if they do, that they’ll recognize themselves.  I suspect it’s more likely to be read by people who enjoy tssking at other people’s bad parenting, and feeling virtuous by comparison.  (And who wouldn’t feel virtuous compared to the dad who wanted Levine to fix his kid’s drug problem, but wouldn’t give up using himself?)

This morning, the Census Bureau released the 2005 poverty figures, as well as data on income and health insurance coverage.

• The official poverty rate was 12.6 percent, statistically unchanged from the 2004 level (12.7 percent).  The Administration may try to spin this as good news, but it’s really a sign of how little the benefits of this "recovery" are spreading.  As my friends over at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities point out, it’s unheard of for poverty to still be higher four years into a recovery that it was at the low point of the recession.
• Median household income increased slightly, even though median earnings of year-round full-time workers, both male and female, fell slightly.  I think that has to mean more people per household were working, or were working more hours.
• I think the biggest story in this release is the decline in health insurance coverage.  46.6 million people in the US didn’t have health insurance, for an uninsurance rate of of 15.9 percent.  And that figure would look much worse if there hadn’t been a big expansion of public insurance for children in the 1990s.  I just don’t see anything turning around the movement away from employer-provided coverage.  I read something recently (in the New Yorker, maybe?) that argued that the campaign to require WalMart to provide health insurance benefits is really a back door way to try to get universal coverage, by getting employers to push for it.  Makes sense to me.

For those of you looking for a Tuesday Book Review, I’ll be posting about The Price of Privilege tomorrow.

Thanks to those of you who made suggestions in response to last week’s post about whether welfare reform reduced the stigma of poverty.  I think my conclusions are:

• The stigma of welfare, if anything, has increased over the past 10 years.  That’s one of the reasons that less than half of those who are eligible for welfare benefits now receive them.
• Clinton hoped that welfare reform would destigmatize poverty, but it’s not at all clear that it happened.  One of my colleagues argues that the stigma of poverty is declining, but it’s because middle-class people are feeling more insecure and that it could happen to them.

Bill Clinton had a self-congratulatory op-ed in the NY Times yesterday, in honor of the 10th anniversary of the signing of the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996, better known as the welfare reform law.  I had to shake my head at his defense of recipients’ opportunity to go to school, since a battle over that was probably the single most frustrating moment of my federal career.  (It was more depressing to work on welfare under the Bush administration, but it was more frustrating under Clinton, because I had higher expectations.) 

All in all, it was a lot more pleasant to commemorate the 10th anniversary of welfare reform now that I’m no longer a fed and don’t have to toe the party line.  (Oddly enough, the article that quoted me emphasized that I joined HHS just before the bill was signed, and didn’t list my current affiliation.  I hope no one called my former boss up screaming about how could they have let me talk to the press.)

For an assortment of progressive takes on welfare reform, check out inclusionist.org.  I’m not quite sure why they have it set up as a Drupal site, since they’re not opening it up for others to post, but they’ve got enough links to keep a wonk like me busy for weeks.

Ok, I want to see if my wonderful readers can help me out with a work-related question.  On a draft paper, I wrote the following bullet:

• Welfare reform removed some of the stigma from poverty.  Welfare reform changed the popular image of a poor person from a long-term welfare recipient to someone who is working hard but having trouble making ends meet.

So, of course I was asked if I could find a statistic or a quote (from someone well-known) to support that statement.

The closest I was able to find via google was this article by Chris Jenks, where he argues that welfare reform made it possible to spend more money on poor people.  I also found this interesting paper from the National Center on Children in Poverty that discusses how people’s willingness to provide help varies based on the characteristics of the poor people.

Any suggestions?  Thanks.

Today’s New York Times’ magazine has a long story about a family in the foster care system.  Marie has five children, the first of whom she had at age 13, and has a history of drug use, incarceration, and involvement with abusive men.  She’s completed a course of substance abuse treatment, is testing clean, and has jumped through the hoops the child welfare agency has asked her to.  But the agency is moving to terminate her parental rights, because they don’t think she has the emotional stability and personal resources to cope with the many needs of her troubled kids.

I’m not going to presume to second guess the agency based on a magazine article.  The one thing that’s clear is that this case falls in the awful grey range, where there aren’t clearcut right choices.  One of the things that was hardest for me to accept in my CASA training is that once families are in the child welfare system — particularly once they’ve messed up enough to have a child removed from the home — in many ways they’re held to a higher standard than families in general.  Things that would never get CPS involved in the first place are enough to prevent reunification.  But you can’t keep kids in limbo indefinitely while you wait for their parents to get their acts together.

The article raises the fact that poor kids are disproprortionately likely to be removed from their homes by CPS, that the same types of problems are much more likely to result in termination of parental rights when the parents don’t have other resources to draw on.  It needs to be read together with another article from the same magazine, After the Bell Curve, which discusses the evidence that being raised in poverty stunts kids’ intellectual development, so that they don’t achieve their maximum potential. 

The article about Marie quotes a DFS official as saying "Some people just should not be parents."  I’m sure that’s true.  But the article raises the possibility that Marie isn’t one of them, that she loves her children and with enough support could be a good parent to them.  But that support isn’t there, not from the child welfare agency, not from anyone in Marie’s life, and not from society at large.

Today HHS published regulations implementing the budget bill’s changes to Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF), aka "welfare."  I worked on them while I was at HHS, and my frustration with both the content and the process was a good part of what led me to jump ship.  It’s very strange to read them from the outside now.

We’re trying to get a draft of our preliminary analysis out to advocates who we work with by tomorrow.  So I was in the office at 7:15 this morning, left at 6:30, and will go online to work some more when I finish this up.  But I’m not complaining — I don’t mind working long hours occasionally, when there’s actually work to be done.  And it’s a lot more fun to spend all day writing when you get to say what you think.  I’m feeling pretty good about my decision to take this job.

I even get to talk to the press.  Yesterday, one of my colleagues called me and said "hey, Jason DeParle’s on the phone; can you talk to him about the regs?"  (No, I wasn’t using inappropriate insider knowledge — the regulations were on public display at the Federal Register’s office yesterday.)  I’m not sure I was at my most thoughtful and coherent, though; I was sufficiently impressed that I managed to accidentally turn on the speakerphone in my office, and I wasn’t sure how to turn it off without risking hanging up on him.

The short version is that overall, I think the regulations stink.  I mean, the welfare reauthorization was truly lousy lawmaking — it was tacked onto the budget bill in the middle of the night, with lawmakers desperate to go home, having no idea what they were voting for.  HHS only had limited flexibility to improve things in the regs.  But instead, they made things worse.  They made it harder for people on welfare to go to school, harder for states to help people who need services like substance abuse treatment or counseling.  And after all those years talking about state flexibility, it turns out, surprise surprise that the Republicans only believe in state flexibility when the states choose to do what they want them to.  Feh.

(There will be a polished version of what I’m working on up on my organization’s website in a couple of weeks.  If any of you are interested in reading all 25 pages of detailed analysis sooner, drop me a line and I’ll forward it to you when we have a sharable draft.)

I was struck by Christine’s comment that soccer is cheap to play, requiring only sneakers, a ball and a field.  Certainly, it’s a lot cheaper than hockey.   But that field can be hard to come by in urban areas, which is part of the conventional wisdom for why city kids play basketball instead of baseball these days.  There’s a reason why "soccer mom" entered the lexicon as synonymous with suburban.

And yet, as Foer points out, in most of the world, soccer is not an upper-class pursuit.  Working class children play this game, without benefit of organized leagues, and generally without lovely green fields.  In Spain, we saw kids and young adults playing informal games on stone plazas, on the beach, pretty much anywhere there was an open space.  You just don’t see that in the US.  Is there such a thing as a pick-up game of soccer in America?

One of my friends also pointed out to me that the local kids soccer league is far more expensive than the local basketball league.  I thought that the $80 registration fee (for Fall and Spring seasons combined) was pretty reasonable, a lot better than the gymboree type stuff in the area.  But she told me that the basketball league only charges $5 a season.  Is basketball really that much cheaper to run, or is it that they expect poor kids to play basketball, middle-class kids soccer, and charge what the market can bear?

***

PS.  The rest of my trip photos are now up at Flickr.

Today’s book is The Disposable American: Layoffs and Their Consequences, by Louis Uchitelle.  It’s the book from which his NY Times article about displaced airline mechanics came from.

The book alternates chapters in which Uchitelle discusses the overall growth of layoffs as a phenomenon with ones in which he profiles specific laid-off workers.  One of the the arguments he makes is that white-collar workers who lose their jobs to "downsizing" or "outsourcing" or who accept early retirement packages are as much laid-off as the blue-collar workers that we associate with the word "layoffs."  (He notes that the specific questions that the government uses to ask workers if they’ve been laid off refer to "plant closings" and make it less likely that a professional will answer yes.)

Uchitelle makes a convincing case that layoffs have extensive hidden costs — beyond the well-documented loss of earnings — especially the emotional toll on workers who are told that they’re no longer needed, and who often can’t find a job at a comparable wage.  He also argues that they often don’t provide the expected economic benefits to companies that use them, as the remaining workers are demoralized and less productive.

His discussion of solutions is less convincing.  Even a die-hard liberal like me finds it hard to believe that increasing the minimum wage to $12 an hour would automatically result in productivity increases enough to cover the costs.  He suggests massive governmental public works spending, prohibitions on compensating executives with stock options, and a complicated system of reporting all layoffs.  By contrast, he sees most of the political solutions of the past decades — promoting lifetime learning, increasing the portability of health insurance and pensions — as acquiescing to layoffs.

At times, Uchitelle’s criticisms seem simply contrary.  For example, he writes: "Like Stiglitz, and many other academics, he [Robert Reich] accepted the findings of empirical research concerning education.  In virtually all of this research, people with a college degree earned more than workers with only a high school degree."  The implication seems to be that it was a mistake to accept this empirical research, but Uchitelle doesn’t offer any explanation of his critiques.  (The problem is that there’s also been an increase in within-group inequality, so the averages don’t mean that a college education is a guarantee of security.)

The comments on my post about the "spoiled?" meme have been really interesting, and there’s also a good follow-up discussion going on over at Phantom Scribbler.

I do agree with Phantom Scribbler that if you re-frame the meme as "privileged" instead of "spoiled," I’d have no problem with the label.  At least some of the frustration with the meme is because a good part of what I associate with being "spoiled" is a lack of awareness of privilege.

Andrea (Beanie Baby) commented on how this meme has created controversy, and no one argues with the results of what Greek Goddess are you.  I think that’s because people don’t have an intuitive sense of what makes someone Hera, or a knee-jerk reaction against being Aphrodite.  "Spoiled" or even "upper-class" have every-day meanings, and so people are arguing when the results aren’t what they expect.

The NY Times today has an article about how unequal wealth can affect friendships.  Nothing terribly profound, but it reinforces the idea that people feel rich or poor compared to the people around them — in their workplace, in their neighborhoods — not to the world as a large. 

Last week, we were having dinner with some acquaintances, and the topic turned to houses, specifically the McMansions that are being built all over the place in the DC area.  A couple of people starting singing the praises of smaller houses, and how much more usable and friendly they were.  I had to bite my tongue not to say anything inappropriate, because one of the people making this case was our host — and I would guess that the house we were sitting in had approximately 3 times the square footage of ours.  What’s big and what’s small is all a question of what your comparisons are.

Last week, Danigirl at Postcards from the Mothership did a meme that’s a checklist of things that you might own or have done.  The claim is that if you answer yes to 40 or more of them, you’re "spoiled."

I’m not going to show my answers, but I came embarassingly close to being officially spoiled, which sort of surprised me.   I think both the fairly high score and my surprise have a lot to do with the attitude toward spending that I inherited from my parents — travel is always worth spending money on, but god forbid you should buy clothing that isn’t on sale. 

The list of items is also sort of weird, and not terribly well thought out.  Why on earth should going to New York and visiting the Statue of Liberty count as separate items?  And the list mixes things that cost tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars (having a second home, owning a boat, having a college education without student loans), with things that are far less expensive (we don’t have a TV or DVD player in our bedroom, but that’s a matter of preference, not cost).

I was curious to see where the list came from, so I tried following the chain of links back to the start, but ran into a dead end with a friends-only livejournal.  As others have pointed out, the list is both very American-centric and apparently aimed at a young audience (is having a queen sized bed really a big deal when two or more people are sleeping in it on a regular basis?).