NYT/Brooks: The Opportunity Gap

[IIOY]

On the heels of yesterday's red-shirting thread...


Over the past few months, writers from Charles Murray to Timothy Noah have produced alarming work on the growing bifurcation of American society. Now the eminent Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam and his team are coming out with research that’s more horrifying.

While most studies look at inequality of outcomes among adults and help us understand how America is coming apart, Putnam’s group looked at inequality of opportunities among children. They help us understand what the country will look like in the decades ahead. The quick answer? More divided than ever.

Putnam’s data verifies what many of us have seen anecdotally, that the children of the more affluent and less affluent are raised in starkly different ways and have different opportunities. Decades ago, college-graduate parents and high-school-graduate parents invested similarly in their children. Recently, more affluent parents have invested much more in their children’s futures while less affluent parents have not.

They’ve invested more time. Over the past decades, college-educated parents have quadrupled the amount of time they spend reading “Goodnight Moon,” talking to their kids about their day and cheering them on from the sidelines. High-school-educated parents have increased child-care time, but only slightly.

A generation ago, working-class parents spent slightly more time with their kids than college-educated parents. Now college-educated parents spend an hour more every day. This attention gap is largest in the first three years of life when it is most important.

Affluent parents also invest more money in their children. Over the last 40 years upper-income parents have increased the amount they spend on their kids’ enrichment activities, like tutoring and extra curriculars, by $5,300 a year. The financially stressed lower classes have only been able to increase their investment by $480, adjusted for inflation.

As a result, behavior gaps are opening up. In 1972, kids from the bottom quartile of earners participated in roughly the same number of activities as kids from the top quartile. Today, it’s a chasm.

Richer kids are roughly twice as likely to play after-school sports. They are more than twice as likely to be the captains of their sports teams. They are much more likely to do nonsporting activities, like theater, yearbook and scouting. They are much more likely to attend religious services.

It’s not only that richer kids have become more active. Poorer kids have become more pessimistic and detached. Social trust has fallen among all income groups, but, between 1975 and 1995, it plummeted among the poorest third of young Americans and has remained low ever since. As Putnam writes in notes prepared for the Aspen Ideas Festival: “It’s perfectly understandable that kids from working-class backgrounds have become cynical and even paranoid, for virtually all our major social institutions have failed them — family, friends, church, school and community.” As a result, poorer kids are less likely to participate in voluntary service work that might give them a sense of purpose and responsibility. Their test scores are lagging. Their opportunities are more limited.

A long series of cultural, economic and social trends have merged to create this sad state of affairs. Traditional social norms were abandoned, meaning more children are born out of wedlock. Their single parents simply have less time and resources to prepare them for a more competitive world. Working-class jobs were decimated, meaning that many parents are too stressed to have the energy, time or money to devote to their children.

Affluent, intelligent people are now more likely to marry other energetic, intelligent people. They raise energetic, intelligent kids in self-segregated, cultural ghettoes where they know little about and have less influence upon people who do not share their blessings.

The political system directs more money to health care for the elderly while spending on child welfare slides.

Equal opportunity, once core to the nation’s identity, is now a tertiary concern. If America really wants to change that, if the country wants to take advantage of all its human capital rather than just the most privileged two-thirds of it, then people are going to have to make some pretty uncomfortable decisions.

Liberals are going to have to be willing to champion norms that say marriage should come before childrearing and be morally tough about it. Conservatives are going to have to be willing to accept tax increases or benefit cuts so that more can be spent on the earned-income tax credit and other programs that benefit the working class.

Political candidates will have to spend less time trying to exploit class divisions and more time trying to remedy them — less time calling their opponents out of touch elitists, and more time coming up with agendas that comprehensively address the problem. It’s politically tough to do that, but the alternative is national suicide.

[cookiemdough]

This is depressing. It is sad that the public schools seem to offer less and less. At least where I grew up, team sports started in middle school as did most extracurricular type activities. It wasn't a disadvantage to start those kinds of things at 10 years old. Now you can do all of that earlier provided you have the money. I myself have fallen victim to it. There are never any kids in my neighborhood out and running about, so here I am putting DS in pee wee sports and other activities to keep him active and busy.

When it comes to academic achievement, I saw that they just opened a Kumon. Evidently there are 2 kids in DS' class that go there for extra enrichment...at 4 years old. These kids aren't behind in learning and DS' current teachers are actually great. Yet it is not enough. If the disposable income is there, parents will spend it.

[Deleted]

Has anybody read (or heard) the NPR two-part series about the prevalence of black lung disease among coal miners? This opportunity gap makes me think of that. Doctors are seeing more cases of very aggressive black lung in younger and younger miners - guys in their 20s and 30s.

As I was reading the stories, I found myself almost flabbergasted at the idea that guys in their 20s still become coal miners. It's like I knew in my head that this happened, but it hadn't really sunk in. With all we know about the dangers of coal mining, it's hard for me to imagine someone of my generation going into that line of work. I assume most of them grow up without a lot of opportunities because I can't imagine watching what miners go through when you're growing up and thinking that's what you want to do.

[IIOY]

But you almost have to participate in the madness or else your child has no one to play with!* Yesterday my DD went to her two best friends' houses to play and neither was home because they were doing sports camps. Now, I love the idea of encouraging girls to participate in sports, but...

As a SAHM, obviously I have spent a lot of time with parents of young children over the past several years, and I marvel at their fear - palpable anxiety - that if their children don't do activities X, Y, and Z, their children will be at a disadvantage. This topic has dominated our conversations at many a play group.

*directed to cookie's comment

[chichimi]

Jul 10, 2012 8:16:21 GMT -5 @angryharpy said:

Has anybody read (or heard) the NPR two-part series about the prevalence of black lung disease among coal miners? This opportunity gap makes me think of that. Doctors are seeing more cases of very aggressive black lung in younger and younger miners - guys in their 20s and 30s.

As I was reading the stories, I found myself almost flabbergasted at the idea that guys in their 20s still become coal miners. It's like I knew in my head that this happened, but it hadn't really sunk in. With all we know about the dangers of coal mining, it's hard for me to imagine someone of my generation going into that line of work. I assume most of them grow up without a lot of opportunities because I can't imagine watching what miners go through when you're growing up and thinking that's what you want to do.

In southern WV, its a respected way of life. Coal miners are thought to be hard workers and high school students would frequently start right after graduation or drop out early to start working. There are discounts, artwork, car decals, billboards you name it in appreciation of coal mining. It pays a good wage, they have very good insurance, and their jobs are promised to be protected by both parties in the state.

[pixy0stix]

Do we really think that the loss of the "sanctity of marriage" is really an issue?

[cookiemdough]

Jul 10, 2012 10:18:21 GMT -5 pixy0stix said:

Do we really think that the loss of the "sanctity of marriage" is really an issue?

I think in general the decline of a family support structure or even the loss of the "it takes a village" mentality is problematic. This is not just due to the increased number of single parents, but also the increase of people moving away from their families, or living in neighborhoods where people don't really help each other out.

I do think when you don't have people around you who are dependable and can help out, it can impact the opportunities you take advantage of. While my parents didn't live near their siblings, the neighborhood I grew up in was awesome. Other families always looked out for each other's kids, if you needed someone to pick your child up it was not a big deal, parents rotated carpools for extracurriculars, etc. It just made it possible to participate in more things because my mom (dad worked late hours) could not have done all those things on her own and I would have had to scale back.

[eclaires]

It's interesting to me how things that I remember doing in school cost so much now. I know they were free (or nominal fee) when I was a kid, but it seems like everything costs money or the parents are expected to provide money for various things that end up costing a LOT.

My neighbor has talked a lot recently about having to find something for his son (Jackson's age) b/c the city didn't do a flag football league this summer, which both kids did together last summer. And he keeps talking about it... it's weird to me, b/c I was like, "okay no sitting out in the bug field watching flag football this summer - YAY!" and figured we'd just not do anything other than our usual summer activities. Apparently, I should be worried about us not having an activity going on...