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Family as the cornerstone of society

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Today I saw a quotation attributed to Lyndon B. Johnson posted on Facebook. It caught my attention, so I traced down the source: his commencement address to Howard University on June 4, 1965. It is well worth reading in its entirety – especially in our age of sound bytes.

In order to entice you, let me give you an aperitif of that speech, and a commentary on its implications for public policy and civic engagement.

Perhaps most important [as an obstacle to the well being of poor black Americans]–its influence radiating to every part of life–is the breakdown of the Negro family structure. For this, most of all, white America must accept responsibility. It flows from centuries of oppression and persecution of the Negro man. It flows from the long years of degradation and discrimination, which have attacked his dignity and assaulted his ability to produce for his family.

This, too, is not pleasant to look upon. But it must be faced by those whose serious intent is to improve the life of all Americans.

Only a minority–less than half–of all Negro children reach the age of 18 having lived all their lives with both of their parents. At this moment, tonight, little less than two-thirds are at home with both of their parents. Probably a majority of all Negro children receive federally-aided public assistance sometime during their childhood.

The family is the cornerstone of our society. More than any other force it shapes the attitude, the hopes, the ambitions, and the values of the child. And when the family collapses it is the children that are usually damaged. When it happens on a massive scale the community itself is crippled.

So, unless we work to strengthen the family, to create conditions under which most parents will stay together–all the rest: schools, and playgrounds, and public assistance, and private concern, will never be enough to cut completely the circle of despair and deprivation.

President Johnson cites other powerful forces, including the terrifying force of slums in cultural formation.

Men are shaped by their world. When it is a world of decay, ringed by an invisible wall, when escape is arduous and uncertain, and the saving pressures of a more hopeful society are unknown, it can cripple the youth and it can desolate the men.

Yet among these and other forces, he puts his finger on the family. Here is what I think needs to be noticed at this point in history.

  1. White responsibility. President Johnson recognized the culpable cultural force of centuries of oppression. He did not look within the family exclusively when assigning responsibility, but addressed both personal and social responsibility.
  2. Family culture. The president who was known for his “Great Society” programs recognized that family was the cornerstone of society.
  3. Crippled community. LBJ saw that individuals aren’t islands, and nor are families. Communities where the families have collapsed are relational shanty-towns – and children born into this bear the relational scars.
  4. Work to strengthen the family. This was the sine qua non of renewal and restoration without which “all the rest: schools, and playgrounds, and public assistance, and private concern, will never be enough.”

There is, I think, one fatal flaw in the president’s reasoning. It is the notion that we can “create conditions under which most parents will stay together.” He was entirely right about the power of the family for cultural formation. He was spot on concerning the importance of unity and durability of marriage. He nailed the social collapse caused by entire communities in which the family fails. But, I would submit that it is impossible to “create conditions” for marital success without an animating Story that answers the question, “Why should I persevere when it is hard and I don’t want to?”

The family situation in 2012 is worse than it was in 1965. In addition to higher rates of divorce, lower rates of marriage, and higher rates of children born outside marriage, we have prison populations that could hardly have been imagined in 1965. In the intervening years, multiple generations have been initiated into patterns of social life in which marriage is foreign and almost incomprehensible.

The question now stands: Who will have the courage to offer a Story that can answer the Why question with beauty and power? Without that, we will only see an increase of what Kay Hymowitz has already chronicled as Marriage and Caste in America: Separate and Unequal Families in a Post-Marital Age.

Childhood adversity and brain development

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There is a growing literature showing that the early experiences of children shape their brain architecture. Two days ago an article in Frontiers in Human Neuroscience added to that literature.

Kids who come from lower socioeconomic families have a harder time ignoring insignificant environmental information than children who come from higher income families, due to the fact that they learn how to pay attention to things differently . . . (from the press release)

The sample size of the study is very small (28 students), and so one can’t put too much weight on it. However, it does suggest that environmental factors in early childhood affect the way that we process information. Specifically:

“These results indicate that children from lower socioeconomic status have to exercise more cognitive control in order to ignore unimportant information than children of higher socioeconomic status.”

Now the question is whether socioeconomic status is the critical variable. Poor children are four times more likely to live in a father-absent home. Is it possible that certain types of home environments not only correlate with poverty, but in fact perpetuate it by their effect on children’s brain development?

Cultivating resourcefulness

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Over Thanksgiving weekend I witnessed resourcefulness in action.

My younger brother came to visit with his family, and helped me solve all sorts of problems. He helped diagnose and fix a faulty latch on my front door. He tried a simple solution for another door that wouldn’t close without a push. And when my van quit on the side of the road as we set off for a hike, he helped me figure out how to get towed. (My AAA membership had expired and the roadside assistance on my car insurance wasn’t in effect so I thought I’d have to pay for the tow truck as well as the repair. My brother pointed out that we might be able to use my dad’s roadside assistance since the service is provided to the person, not just their personal vehicle. Since my dad was with us, we didn’t have to pay for towing!)

That experience pushed on me the question: How can I teach my children resourcefulness?

I think that there are five important elements:

  1. Model it. My kids are my apprentices. Like it or not, they’re going to imitate me in the way that I approach and solve problems.
  2. Think out loud. Talking about the resources available to solve a problem invites my kids into what is going on inside my head. It is the verbalization of modeling.
  3. Point it out. I need to help my kids see just how competent and clever my brother is at solving problems. He does it in ways that I don’t. When they see both his approaches and mine, they’ll have a bigger toolbox from which to draw.
  4. Support it. I need to walk my kids through the process as I let them do it. Resolving conflict among kids is the “easiest” way to do this in that it is the most frequent – and therefore the best opportunity for repetition, creative thinking and coaching.
  5. Expect it. When I have done the first four, then my kids are ready to do it. They have the tools and the experience. Now I can withdraw support (at least on a case by case basis) to let them dive in, use the available resources and come up with a solution. I’m convinced that doing this across the spectrum – in the kitchen, in the garage, on a hiking trail, using the computer etc. – is precisely what cultivates true resourcefulness. Then they’re not just familiar with one set of tools (say, those of the classroom), but a whole array of tools that can be brought to bear on whatever the challenge.

How do you teach your kids resourcefulness? What notable instances of resourcefulness have you seen them demonstrate?

Video: Where does the workforce begin?

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Smart Beginnings Virginia has produced a short video on the “workforce pipeline” that highlights the tremendous influence of the earliest years in promoting learning and preventing educational failure.

httpv://youtu.be/dhUDYBjTYkQ

Videos like these should prompt robust questions:

  1. What role do families, businesses, schools  and other institutions play in early childhood?
  2. Is the “workforce pipeline” an authentic, human way to speak about nurturing young children? What does this say to children about their identity and purpose?

Zero percent: Home Life and Thriving Schools

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In Paul Tough’s book How Children Succeed, he recounts a conversation with Elizabeth Dozier, the principal of Christian Fenger High School in Chicago.

When we spoke . . . Dozier said her thinking about schools had been changed by her time at Fenger. “I used to always think that if a school wasn’t performing, that it was strictly because there was a bad principal, or there were bad teachers,” she explained. “But the reality is that at Fenger, we’re a neighborhood school, so we’re just a reflection of the community. And you can’t expect to solve the problems of a school without taking into account what’s happening in the community.” (p5)

That is a wise insight. If you listen to the public dialogue about the education crisis and the achievement gap, the tacit assumption underneath much of it is that the school is the exclusive locus of education (and therefore the problem to be solved).

It is not. The school is vitally important, but it is primarily a reflection of the community. And therefore any attempt to address the needs of the school must address the needs of the community.

Tough and Dozier continued their discussion of the adversities that children in the community face.

A quarter of the female students were either pregnant or already teenage mothers, [Dozier] said. And when I asked her to estimate how many of her students lived with both biological parents, a quizzical look came over her face. “I can’t think of one,” she replied. (ibid)

Zero percent. Statistically that might be inaccurate. Despite the fact that Dozier couldn’t think of a single student, surely there was at least one in her school. How many children live not only with both biological parents, but with both biological parents who are married and were married at the time he or she was born? That might just be a statistical zero at Fenger.

What’s Going On in the Community
This is the elephant in the room that no one seems to have the courage to address publicly (unless it is finger wagging). What is going on in this community, and in virtually every community of endemic poverty in the United States is the devastation of the family. Since the family is the primary locus of cultural transmission and character formation, the devastation of the family is the demolition of the community, and the culture.

Any serious, courageous attempt to combat cyclical poverty must not only acknowledge this, but ardently seek to undo it. That means having the courage to say emphatically, “This is not the way things ought to be,” and “Because this is not the way things ought to be, we are willing to walk with those dying in it and call their children to lifelong, chaste marital faithfulness.”

The Other Zero Percent
I know almost no one who has the courage and integrity to boldly make both of those statements and live them out. It is that hard. It is like committing to live with the maimed in a mine field while slowly and painstakingly marking, disarming, and removing the land mines. That is the measure of the virtue required to serve and renew a shattered community.

“I don’t want you to end up like me.”

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Over the next few weeks, I will be blogging through Paul Tough’s book How Children Succeed: Grit, Curiosity and the Hidden Power of Character. It is packed full of insight into the role that families and communities play in forming children, and the role that supporting organizations can play in those families in communities. Paul’s first book, Whatever it Takes: Geoffrey Canada’s Quest to Change Harlem and America sparked my interest in apprenticeship as a compelling metaphor to describe what happens in every family and home during the earliest years of life. How Children Succeed contains many overlapping themes with The Apprenticeship of Being Human, and is worthy reading for anyone who cares about education, inequality and social flourishing.

The Breaking Point

Paul tells the story of Kewauna, who was arrested at age 15 for striking a police officer. Kewauna’s mother sat her daughter down and said to her, “I don’t want you to end up like me.” For Kewauna, that conversation was the beginning of change. It took her mother’s radical honesty about her own history to help her change course. (In one year, her GPA changed from 1.8 to 3.4.)

In the weeks and months to come, I will argue that this kind of honesty is essential to breaking cycles of poverty. Only when parents can honestly say, “I don’t want you to end up like me,” can there be an honest dialogue about responsibility and possibility. Kewauna’s mom was ruthlessly honest and humble. Her courage made possible her daughter’s transformation. That is beautiful, praiseworthy and revolutionary.

What is more valuable than self-control?

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Over the past year, I have volunteered to help with the chess club at my daughter’s elementary school. The students participate for an hour in a club that includes direct instruction in rules and strategies of chess, and lots of time to play the game.

One day I played chess with “Andrew,” and was struck by his inability to control himself. He interrupted the coaches, bothered the other students, and didn’t think through his moves carefully. I could only imagine how he behaved in the classroom during the school day.

Is there any skill more valuable for an 8 year old than self-control?

In Paul Tough’s new book How Children Succeed: Grit, Curiosity and the Hidden Power of Character, he argues that character traits and social skills (in which he specifically includes self-control) are more important than cognitive skills for children to thrive.

In chess club, that is certainly true. If you have self-control, you can listen attentively to the rules and strategies. You can wait patiently for an opportunity to put your opponent in checkmate. You can keep your cool even when your opponent has the upper hand in the game. Indeed, you can lose again and again – and learn from it to become a good player in all the senses of that word. It is no overstatement to say that self-control is a pivotal virtue that catalyzes learning, relationships, and human development.

Can you think of a more critical virtue for an eight year old?

Parents influence social mobility – by age 3

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If a picture is worth a thousand words, this one is worth two thousand:

The effect of environment on language development is staggering. A child’s early experience of language produces measurable differences in cognitive ability by 9 months of age and significant disparities in language (and, by consequence, social and cognitive development) by age 3, as evidenced in the graph above.

Illegitimacy: The New Normal

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The New York Times has noted that normal has changed. According to a report from Child Trends, more than half of children born to women under age 30 are born outside of marriage. The article begins: “It used to be called illegitimacy. Now it is the new normal.”

Not just “normal”, but new norms

What has changed is not simply the prevalence of children born apart from marriage, but the norms on which the institution of marriage was grounded. The reason that illegitimacy is no longer used is that it belongs to a time when marriage was not only normal, it was normative for procreation.

If you read the Times  article as an anthropologist, you will be struck by the way that norms have changed over the period of time that has experienced such an explosion of children born apart from marriage. Yes, of course, marriage as a social norm has decayed. But to focus on that is to miss the forest for the trees. What is taken as normative by the journalists – and many if not most of their readers – is that individual and social behavior ought to be explained by efficient causes: changes in the social milieu (e.g. “Liberal analysts argue that shrinking paychecks have thinned the ranks of marriageable men”) and public policy (e.g. “conservatives often say that the sexual revolution reduced the incentive to wed and that safety net programs discourage marriage”). It is now both normal and normative in public discourse to address – and attempt to resolve – social issues exclusively in terms of efficient causes.

The Compounding Effect
My generation is a unique one because we can remember a time when public discourse was not merely in terms of cause and effect, but of right and wrong. Dr. King’s letter from a Birmingham Jail argued powerfully for obedience to just laws and loving disobedience to unjust ones not because such actions were likely to produce desirable outcomes (Dr. King was writing from jail), but because the justice or injustice of a law was measured by its harmony with the moral law, or the law of God. Our children’s generation is in a profoundly different position because their experience of the use of language NOW establishes what they experience as normal and normative. If they listen to us, they stand in danger of seeing marriage merely as a social convention among some subcultures that is merely the product of social, political, and historical (efficient) causes and without any sort of relationship to a moral law or law of God.

Manipulation or Moral Courage
Being born out of marriage is the new normal (at least for children born to women under 30). That’s true whether we like it or not. The question now is how we will respond. Will we try to manipulate the levers of society (public policy, social factors, etc.)? Will we argue about what carrots and what sticks to use to manipulate others into behaviors we desire? Will we blame one another and accidents of history for the state of society?

Or will we have the moral courage to transgress the new norms of language? Rather than blaming others, or impersonal causes, or “social conditions,” will we have courage to take responsibility and confess our own culpability? Will we have the love and patience to come alongside shattered children, mothers and fathers? On what grounds will we call them to something better? Will we recognize that we and they are responsible moral agents who act within the web of real and powerful social settings which do not sufficiently explain our actions? Will we act against social, political, and historical forces for something that is more good, true and beautiful?

Our children are watching and listening.

Jeremy Lin, Character, and Parenting

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Jeremy Lin has made me watch basketball again, but not just because he is an amazing athlete. He is a remarkable athlete with a compelling story. I was snagged from the time that I read the first NYTimes article about Lin sleeping on his brother’s couch on the Lower East Side. I’m a New Yorker, but it wasn’t he fact that Lin is now playing for the Knicks that held my attention. It was his character.

I’m not alone. Today, Forbes ran an article on 10 lessons (mostly character lessons) to learn from the latest basketball phenomenon. It highlighted the role that family played in forming Lin’s character – and resulting strong network of relationships that persist from long years of patient, persistent hard work.

Already much has been said about Lin as an Asian-American Christian. Michael Luo penned a piece for the NY Times that captured well why Linsanity spread nearly overnight among the well-educated Christian Asian-American networks (and particularly in NYC). What deserves note is the way that culture is transmitted through Asian-American families, and particularly Asian-American Christian families.

Children in these families are apprenticed in a way of being human that encourages learning, self-discipline, interdependence, patience, and persistence. As a result, there are a shocking number of second-generation immigrants at the most prestigious and rigorous schools in the United States. And now, there is also one who holds the attention of New Yorkers, basketball fans, and a folks who want a hero who has character and not just skills.