Message-ID: <9806128976.AA897669056@hudsmtphq.hud.gov> Date: Fri, 12 Jun 1998 12:27:33 -0500 From: mailto:michael_o._patterson@HUD.GOV Subject: strategic viewpoint To: mailto:DEVEL-L@AMERICAN.EDU
As we look at community development issues, at least in the U.S., there is one area not really covered. Put another way, what would you say to an economic development program that had the potential for increasing household income nearly 10 times?Economic health, community health- they're related. One really can't separate the two out.
The Hartford Housing Authority has an interesting program aimed at reuniting fathers with their families, in Public Housing. This message addresses some of the reasons why they did that, and might be of at least strategic interest to those of you doing long-range planning.
---------------------------------- Why so much child violence?
Why questions get all sorts of answers.
Here is one possible thread. Children are "canaries in the mine", they don't have the games, escapes, & so on that adults have.
If you examine US Media, you will find that this population sector is one that is hated and reviled, and which is often discriminated against. Perhaps they are simply acting out the role offered by the media. Child soldiers in Ireland, the Middle East, and Africa are particularly susceptible to media images, and kill absolutely without conscience. In interviews, they invariably cite American media images Sly as their heroes. Why should we be spared the panem et circenses [bread and circuses]?
A more accurate predictor of violent behavior is fatherlessness, as noted in Fatherless America, by David Blankenhorn.
Take Joseph Chaney, Jr. In Nov, 1993, he was cited in the Wall Street Journal. He was arrested at age 13 for armed robbery, his 16th arrest since the age of 6. His mother took advantage of several programs available, from drug rehab, to children's counselling, to special troubled youth counselling. However, Joseph Chaney, Sr., was never there for his kid. The Carnegie Corporation devoted a 1994 issue to sources of youth violence- frustration, lack of social skills, negative labels, poverty, substance abuse, physical abuse/neglect, violence in media, too short school days, failure to use anti-violence/conflict resol curricula in schools, and so forth. A pity they left out fatherlessness, which is a more important indicator than any of them. OJ Simpson grew up fatherless, for example.
It's all very well to have programs, and they are necessary. However, healthy systems address problems at the source- when they are small, and easily handled. Programs are "closing the barn door after the horse has gotten away", of necessity. They have to be applied en masse, and standardized. I've heard counsellors say that the best outside programs are, by comparison, worse than even below average parents. 2 concerned parents can do a lot more for kids than the best of programs, and counsellors I talk to all say this.
There will be 2 broad classes of people by the year 2000: the haves, and the have-nots. The have-nots almost invariably come from what used to be called broken families. "The Corner: A year in the life of an inner city neighborhood", noted that to jail all the criminals involved in the drug trade in the Baltimore area, prison spaces would have to increase by 10 times. Prison slots, like other affordable housing, just aren't keeping up with demand. At some point, in the next decade, if present trends continue, it will be more cost-effective to put law-abiding persons behind bars for their own safety, and to let criminals run free.
One of the definitions of insanity is continuing to do the same thing, expecting different results. The present system, however necessary, isn't working. Results are the only report card. The culture of violence is spreading, spreading, even to the rural areas. Violence is fashionable and chic. There was a time when children were taught respect. I know a fellow who works for a housing authority, who refers to every male he meets as "Sir". His father trained him so thoroughly in respect he can't not do it. My father grew up in a much different time- the 1930's. If a kid had a new pistol, he brought it to school to show off to his friends, and that was perfectly allright with the school. They knew it was safe, and that children would behave.
Violence chic is neotenous, in a way- in a healthy culture, kids would simply pass through this phase, but in our culture, they are stuck.
---------------------------- The Dream drives the Action- where there is no vision, the people perish. What does it say about those kids, that their vision for their future was so inadequate that they threw their entire lives away in an act of violence? They knew the consequences, yet still they did what they did.
I assume you are looking for answers. We might start with society's war on the family. A healthy family is the most cost-effective way to raise future generations. My father has said that being a father really meant something when he was young, and it means nothing whatsoever now. It is perfectly ok for a father to walk away from his kids nowadays. It is fashionable to dis fathers, to regard them as expendable and largely useless. In a peacetime world, there is no better model for a lose-lose deal than a divorce court.
There is no such thing as a friendly divorce. The "better" a divorce looks, the more it resembles, well, marriage. Visitation, as the book puts it on p. 155, is the "keenest torture divorce has to offer", because the visitation parent is no longer a real parent. Visitation tends to strangle father/child relationships, and fathers start "feeling like strangers to their children". Of course, only the more responsible fathers try to climb the "energy wall" of the visitation obstacle course. It's easier just to withdraw- that is the easiest energy path.
Take child support. Even assuming collection were 100%, the average award is well under 1/4 what a custodial father would pay. Support is far more than merely monetary- there are all kinds of in-kind support, like driving your kid to work when their car doesn't work, advice about school, loans for schoolbooks, say, contact networks for getting a job, and many, many others. Wisconsin, possibly the best state for collecting child support, actually got 33 percent of absent fathers to pay- matched only by Vermont. That's 1/3. At that time, paternity was established for 40% of welfare births. 1/3 of 2/5 is... 13% of all fathers making at least some payments, this in a state which really worked at making daddies pay. Then again, there's enforcement cost- one has to pay to track these people down. The net gain to society is very much reduced by that cost. The book Making Fathers Pay, by David Chambers, speculates that long term child support from an absent father may become an anachronism. Irwin Garfinkel's Assuring Child Support, a tough, influential, get tough book, notes that growing numbers of absent fathers simply will not support their children, and that no enforcement strategy will really work well.
A married father in 1990 contributed, on average, about $30,000 to what we could call a family fund, out of a median income of about $41,000. Direct annual expenditure on one child in a middle income family in 1990 was about $8,000, for 2 kids under 17, $14,000. This excludes frills like vacations, summer camps, & so forth. The father's expenditures on food, Christmas, vacations, and other extras, over this cost, for items not exclusively personal, are for the household. In most states, child support stops at 18. But the $30,000 father contributes to college, help with down payments, and other life challenges.
The average mean payment received by mothers who received or should have received child support payments in 1989 was $3,000. This means that a single mother, or social service agencies, would have to find ways to cover that other $5,000, not counting household income. If she can't, well, she and her children make do with less.
Well, gee, what about the other money? Ahh. It goes to support a separate residence, and the higher costs of living apart from the family. 2 separate housing arrangements cost more than one. Now, in our society, you have to be a winner to respect yourself. Divorce courts generally make sure men at least feel like losers. Do you like losing? Add that to the emotional turmoil of divorce, and visitation, and that father no longer asks "What can I do?". He has too much else to deal with. That assumes that he makes the payments, of course... having little direct contact with his children, well, the emotional part of being a father isn't there as much, to override the urge to direct income as he wishes. I've never seen raw, homicidal rage like I saw when I was in a Divorce Court. You can walk away from a loss in sports, but a loss in Divorce Court is a loss that keeps on draining... the kind of loss that leads people to kill with their bare hands, even. That is some serious energy, which is of course disregarded in society. Anger management programs just don't do the job, do they, not with powerful visceral emotion that people don't know how to handle.
Strictly speaking, in money alone, an absent father who pays support is worth about 10% of one who is resident. This totally disregards in-kind contributions, of course. Most of what a resident father does is as a volunteer. Paying for that same level of attention is simply beyond the means of the best program, the best social services, the best school, and all but the wealthiest families. Period. No matter how well meaning. Well, maybe with all the new emphasis on enforcement, we might actually get the mean child support payment to $4,000 a year, or even $5,000 a year, by the end of the decade. The point is, even the best, most totalitarian cop on the corner enforcement might actually get absent fathers to 25% of the level of a resident father. That is still a major loss to the family. Let's remember, we're talking average figures. At the lower end of the economic scale, it is very much worse, by far.
But better enforcement is not the case. Yes, more total dollars are being collected, but the dollars per child aren't really increasing. State and federal bureaucracies collect support- add their enforcement cost, and deductions from welfare payments, and you may just have a net loss to society. Among mothers receiving support, mean payments per mother actually went down, in real terms, from 1978 to 1989. In that period, when the problem of absent fathers grew far more larger and ungovernable, intensive efforts did actually prevent a large scale decline in per-child support payments. Our best efforts kept things from getting much worse, much faster, in other words.
Percentage of population divorced, percentage of single parent households, and percentage of unattached individuals in a community are very closely related to crime rates, acc. to 2 researchers in the field [p. 31] fatherlessness is closely related to the incidence of teenage pregnancy, crime, violence, violence against women, educational failure, child poverty, and even child molestation. Many police departments still rate performance on arrest stats only, without any consideration of community policing or community health issues. That is like the Australian government's paying Aborigines for Dingo hides, as a way to eradicate dingoes. Aborigines, no fools, set up breeding populations, and managed to triple the dingo population before the government caught on.
There is another, more important systemic effect. Culture is a human thing. It has overhead costs- values have to be passed on, and somebody has to do it. At some point, there is a breakdown in transmission. Positive cultural values are increasingly disregarded and disrespected. Culture, that which makes us human, is crumbling, even without accounting for substance abuse, and alcohol, a major factor in violence, which is only very rarely mentioned.
It is further fascinating to see the great disrespect society has for mothers, and teachers, as well. Arresting mothers for drug use during pregnancy, when there are effectively no drug treatment slots, is at best Kafkaesque. Expecting one teacher to somehow counteract chaos at home and on the street, for 30 or more kids in a class, is beyond mere stupidity. Culture transmission, like a pot on a pottery wheel, is a delicate thing, and easily upset.
The sad thing is that all of the problems we see are the direct, cumulative result of media-approved choices people made. As a society, we chose what we have. We created it as it is. We have these problems ourselves, and cannot blame anyone else. A system nearing death develops mechanisms to inhibit its own proper functions, and engages in arrhythmic panic activity, instead of addressing what it must.
Let's finish with that Vision thing we started with. Meaning in life is a spiritual thing. Spirituality is largely absent, and so is meaning. Meaning in life comes from service to others. Teaching that is the job of culture.
Somehow, some way, service to family and community needs to become fashionable and respected again.