Does America Love Its Children?; Not According to These Reports

When Bud Man and Spuds (the ultimate party animal) MacKenzie hit the Indian reservation festivals each year, they know how to make the youngsters whoop it up.

Riding on a parade float, they shower the American Indian children with candy cheerfully wrapped to look like little Budweiser beer cans.

That item, reported in the May/June Mother Jones, is not part of the magazine’s cover package of articles. But given the statistics--40% of American Indian teen-agers abuse alcohol, Mother Jones says; 12% drink booze regularly by their 12th birthday--Bud’s ad campaign would seem to fit nicely into this special issue’s theme: “America’s Dirty Secret: We Hate Kids.”

The important, if predictable, package takes off with an essay by respected children’s advocate Marian Wright Edelman. The United States has been at war on two fronts--in the Persian Gulf and at home, she says.

And each time Edelman watched an AWACs plane take off from Saudi Arabia, or saw a cruise missile land, she wanted to scream: “My God, how many Head Start slots was that? How much money in housing for homeless children? . . . How many opportunities to save lives in prenatal health clinics were lost?”

The children’s crisis Edelman addresses is not limited to the impoverished inner cities. There is, she says, a connection between poor children and the aimless rich kids who suffer from what one observer has termed “affluenza.”

“Physical poverty is killing our children’s bodies, but spiritual poverty is squashing their souls,” Edelman writes.

But in a round-table discussion on the issue, other commentators stress that the most severe crisis is among poor children of color. Money is found to fight in the Persian Gulf but not for domestic children’s programs, in part “because our constituencies don’t project a constant, driving drumbeat about the plight of children,” says Rep. George Miller (D-Martinez).

And that, adds Stanford University professor Michael Wald, is because most Americans are “unwilling to support programs for other people’s children if those people are perceived predominantly as people of color.”

The child crisis shows itself most clearly, perhaps, in the number of children abused and neglected and removed from the home of their parent or parents. Many child advocates see the greatest hope for children in family preservation programs, in which social workers actively intervene, coming into the home day after day for weeks or months to make home secure.

According to the May Governing magazine, the success of such programs is debatable. But most people blanch at the age-old option of the orphanage. Governing investigates the issue of orphanages and finds that the Oliver Twist horrors are being replaced by modern institutions that even have a bit of heart. These institutional surrogate families, writes Penelope Lemov, are the most likely dams to hold back this country’s flood of abandoned and neglected children.

In focusing on orphanages, Governing gives short shrift to the options, including family preservation. Given the complexity of the problem, such a narrow scope is unsatisfying.

Mother Jones, on the other hand, lets loose a scattershot of pieces, most of them quite interesting: George Bush’s report card on children’s issues, the story of a girl who grew up in a gay family, the story of the girl who was a runaway and two articles on nannies, from the nanny’s and the mother’s perspective. (“For most of us, child care means a woman from another country who’s paid by the hour to look after our young children,” the mother says. “What a joy it would be to live like this with my daughters, the three of us by ourselves,” the Salvadoran nanny writes.)

But the diversity dilutes the power of the underlying message. Meanwhile, as Joseph Marshall, a youth counselor in San Francisco, says: “You go to South Central, where I grew up, that’s a war zone. But that wasn’t perceived as a place that needed to be liberated or saved.”

And isn’t that the problem? Kids are dying on the streets, but the yups with the bucks keep getting distracted by the anguish of finding the perfect nanny.

REQUIRED READING

The May Architectural Digest celebrates California’s architects, artists, designers and collectors. Naturally the issue offers pictures of pretty homes from Rancho Mirage to Napa Valley. It’s also full of intersting perspectives.

Columnist Herb Caen rhapsodizes about Lake Tahoe. Brendan Gill eulogizes Cliff May, the man who invented the California ranch-style house. Susan Cheever discusses painter Billy Al Bengston’s Venice pad and Hunter Drohojowska explores West Coast decorative painters.

One of the best pieces is by author T. Coraghessan Boyle, an East Coast transplant who recoils at the harsh Los Angeles light. In the Sierra Nevada, where he owns land, it’s a different matter. “The light here is softer somehow, and it falls away into infinity or dissolves into the mists that so charmed John Muir.”

The cover of the May 6 Business Week asks, “Are CEOs Paid Too Much?” The excellent package of articles--including an executive compensation scoreboard--scream out: “Yes! Yes! A thousand times yes!” In the Reagan decade, worker pay rose 53%, corporate profits rose 78% and chief executive officers’ pay rose (brace yourselves) 212%. The gap between the pay of CEOs and engineers, factory workers and schoolteachers widened greatly. And now that profits and many companies have declined, are CEOs earning less? Ha!

NEW ON NEWSSTANDS

With a roundup of the five best camping vacations and a photo tribute to the family dog, the premiere issue of Family Fun magazine has a schmaltzy, 1950s TV-family feel to it. And it feels good.

This is a slick, cheerful addition to the family/parenting/child-oriented ‘zine scene, with plenty of great photographs, hip graphics and a peppy layout that resembles that of Outside. The articles are generic newsweekly-esque bourgeois, and that’s cool too.

Given the dozens and dozens of pictures in the magazine, there is a glaring shortage of kids of color. The advertisers know the demographics of this country better and do their best to integrate Family Fun.

Overall, though, Family Fun makes a refreshing debut. There is a increasingly noisy chorus of commentators today who contend that most if not all families are--to use one of the most abused buzzwords of the last decade--tragically dysfunctional. That is preposterous.

And nice as it would be to see a magazine like Family Fun shed some light into the more unpleasant corners of the American family on occasion, it is also nice to encounter a magazine that addresses itself to the majority of families, nuclear or nontraditional, that struggle and have crises, but somehow survive--and sometimes even have time for fun.

(Family Fun, 10 issues for $9.97, P.O. Box 185, Federalsburg, Md. 21632-9913, (212) 326-5392.)