“Everywhere, everywhere, children are the scorned people of the earth…Two parents can’t raise a child any more than one.  You need a whole community — everybody — to raise a child.”    – Toni Morrison, Nobel Laureate, Literature, 1993

I try to stay interested in the health care reform debate.  I listen and read but find myself becoming bored quickly.  I wonder – what’s important enough that I should listen more?  The debate we hear reported rarely deals with substantive issues – especially since we’re in the bill-writing and voting stage on Capitol Hill.  

I can bob and weave with the best of them (I’m a preacher, remember?) but I am tired of how politicized our health care debate has become.  The tone is more about what is best for the party instead of what is best policy for the people.  No surprise.  We pay too much, too little, for the wrong things, for the wrong people, for them and not for us.  Perhaps with the demise of the mid-term elections we might hear a tiny bit more straight talk — although many legislators are already eyeing the next election.  Sigh.

I Want To Be Proud Of One Thing

I readily admit health care legislation is complicated.  Few of us will understand the details.  I also admit that much of what I hear even on the most rational news programs is sound bites designed only to polarize voters.  What we hear on news broadcasts is rarely substantive (except for my news program…).

So, I am groping for something simple and clear.  I ache for a single measure to help me determine if we are on the way toward something good.  I want to be able to say, even if most of the reform legislation is nonsense, at least this one simple thing is better.  I want, at the end of the day, to be proud of one thing.

How Are Our Children?

Here is my simple question:  How are our children?  It’s a simple start.  Sure, it’s not enough, but it is a step in one, right direction.  

So, how are our children?¹  Every now and then I stumble upon a couple of bits of data that trouble me about how we care for our children. 

More Children Are Hungry

For example, in the United States (the most advanced economy in human history) more of our children were living in poverty in 2007 than 5 years earlier.  Between 2000 and 2007 the total number of children living in our country (ages 0 – 17) increased by only 2.1 percent.  Surprisingly, the number of children living in poverty (below U.S. federal poverty level) increased by 14.7 percent during the same time period.  This increase is uneven, of course, with African American, Native American, and Latino children twice as likely to live in poverty than their white and Asian counterparts.  While across the entire country 18 percent of our children live in poverty, in 14 of our states – most of them in the south — a whopping 20 percent of our children live in poverty. 

I realize the economics and politics of poverty are complicated.  I realize also that the politics of caring for our children throughout history has been a bit checkered.  I know also that we can easily blame the parents — which we often do.  

But I say so what?  We argue on the floor of Capitol Hill and across our “fair and unbiased” airwaves until we are blue (or red, depending on your persuasion…) in the face about who is to blame for our child poverty problems, resulting in deadlock decision making or at best weak policy that pleases everyone and accomplishes nothing.  Still, year after year, our children remain hungry. 

I guess the hungry children seem to matter less if I smugly win an argument about why we should not help them your way.  The truth is, your way or my way, the children are not fed enough.  You’d think, in the most prosperous nation on the planet, we could — at least — feed all of our children enough. 

Keep Our Babies Alive

Another bit of information that troubles me also embarasses me.  You’d think the United States would have the best health care in the world, especially regarding our children.   Did you know that the infant mortality rate in the United States is ranked the 30th best in the world?  This means that of all the live babies born in the world, the babies in 29 other countries are less likely to die.  Ironic.  So, what do we do?  Instead of fixing the problem, we tend to argue about how we are counting those babies. 

Let’s agree that we might be comparing apples with oranges when we compare US infant mortality with other countries.  So, an apples to apples comparison might improve our ranking a bit — a very tiny bit.  But give me a break, 30th?  Why are we not #1 by any comparison, especially when it comes to protecting the health of the most fragile and vulnerable among us?²  When it comes to protecting our newborn babies, there should be no question, we should be the best.  Today we settle for #30.  Yippee. 

Can we take care of our children a bit better?  Forget comprehensive health reform legislation.  Forget the next election.  Forget news broadcast ratings.  Let’s take care of our children better.  This is a simple request.  At the very least, let’s do what it takes to feed all of our children better, and let’s do what it takes to keep more of our new babies alive.  It’s a simple first step.

Those of you who hung on to read to the end are to be admired.  Thanks.  I wonder, though, how many naysayers we lost along the way because my simple suggestion is too simple to argue about.  I wonder how many over-politicized readers slinked away because I sounded too much like “the other guys”.  I wonder how many readers lost interest along the way because the middle way of getting something simple accomplished (protecting our children and babies) doesn’t fit nicely into one of the two boxes, black or white.  We’re talking gray here.   But it’s simple.

It’s simple.  Let’s say we will protect our children and babies.  Let’s say we will feed all of our children enough.  Let’s say we will do whatever  it takes to keep more of our babies alive.  The rest we’ll worry about later.

© Copyright by Jeffrey Y. Harlow, PhD (2009).

1. Two fabulous sources of information about our nation’s children are Kids Count (http://www.kidscount.org) sponsored by the Annie E. Casey Foundation, and the National Center For Children In Poverty (http://www.nccp.org) of Columbia University.  A U.S. government data source is  www.Childstats.gov – another good source.  I use data from these sources in this article.
2. The CDC acknowledges that our dismal ranking seems to be exacerbated lately in the US, in part, by an increase in the number of premature births.  For some reason the percentage of babies born prematurely is increasing here, thereby increasing their risk and the likelihood of the baby not surviving.