It Takes a Village (3 page)

How well we care for our own and other people's children isn't only a question of morality; our self-interest is at stake too. No family is immune to the influences of the larger society. No matter what my husband and I do to protect and prepare Chelsea, her future will be affected by how other children are being raised. I don't want her to grow up in an America sharply divided by income, race, or religion. I'd like to minimize the odds of her suffering at the hands of someone who didn't have enough love or discipline, opportunity or responsibility, as a child. I want her to believe, as her father and I did, that the American Dream is within reach of anyone willing to work hard and take responsibility. I want her to live in an America that is still strong and promising to its own citizens and lives up to its image throughout the world as a land of hope and opportunity.

I do not pretend to know how to nurture and protect every American child so that each one fully reaches his or her God-given potential. But I do know that we are not doing enough of what works. As of this writing, one in five children in America live in poverty; ten million children do not have private or public health care coverage; homicide and suicide kill almost seven thousand children every year; one in four of all children are born to unmarried mothers, many of whom are children themselves; and 135,000 children bring guns to school each day. Children in every social stratum suffer from abuse, neglect, and preventable emotional problems.

Even though our national rhetoric proclaims that children are our most important resource, we squander these precious lives as though they do not matter. Children's issues are seen as “soft,” the province of softhearted people (usually women) at the margins of the larger economic and social problems confronting our country. These issues are not soft. They are hard—the hardest issues we face. They are intimately connected to the very essence of who we are and who we will become. Whether or not you are a parent, what happens to America's children affects your present and your future.

 

I
WRITE
these words looking out through the windows in the White House at the city of Washington in all its beauty and squalor, promise and despair. In the shadow of great power, so many feel powerless. These contradictions color my feelings when I think about my own child and all our children. My worry for these children has increased, but remarkably, so has my hope for their future.

We know much more now than we did even a few years ago about how the human brain develops and what children need from their environments to develop character, empathy, and intelligence. When we put this knowledge into practice, the results are astonishing. Also, because when I read, travel, and talk with people around the world, it is increasingly clear to me that nearly every problem children face today has been solved somewhere, by someone. And finally, because I sense a new willingness on the part of many parents and citizens to turn down the decibel level on our political conflicts and start paying attention to what works.

There's an old saying I love: You can't roll up your sleeves and get to work if you're still wringing your hands. So if you, like me, are worrying about our kids; if you, like me, have wondered how we can match our actions to our words, I'd like to share with you some of the convictions I've developed over a lifetime—not only as an advocate and a citizen but as a mother, daughter, sister, and wife—about what our children need from us and what we owe to them.

This book is not a memoir; thankfully, that will have to wait. Nor is it a textbook or an encyclopedia; it is not meant to be. It is a statement of my personal views, a reflection of my continuing meditation on children. Whether or not you agree with me, I hope it promotes an honest conversation among us.

This, then, is an invitation to a journey we can take together, as parents and as citizens of this country, united in the belief that children are what matter—more than the size of our bank accounts or the kinds of cars we drive. As Jackie Kennedy Onassis said, “If you bungle raising your children, I don't think whatever else you do matters very much.” That goes for each of us, whether or not we are parents—and for all of us, as a nation.

In the pages that follow, we will consider some of the implications of what is known about the emotional and cognitive development of children. We will explore both big and bite-sized ideas we can put to work in our homes, schools, hospitals, businesses, media, churches, and governments to do a better job raising our own children, even when the odds seem weighted against us. Above all, we will learn ways to come together as a village to support and strengthen one another's families and our own. Most of these lessons are simple, and some may seem self-evident. But it's apparent that many of us have yet to learn them or to apply them in our families and communities.

These lessons come from family, friends, and neighbors; from dedicated volunteers and professionals; and from the many men and women whose passion is to see the promise of children fulfilled. I wish I had the space to introduce more than a few of the many people whose determination to help children has touched me and to describe more than a fraction of the innovative ways in which our villages are working right now to improve the lives and futures of my child and all our children.

Some lessons come from countries I have had the opportunity to visit. The sight of baby carriages left unattended outside stores on the streets of Copenhagen said more to me about the safety of Danish babies than any research study could, and it made me long to know what the Danes and other cultures might teach us. As Eleanor Roosevelt said, “There is not one civilization, from the oldest to the very newest, from which we cannot learn.”

Perhaps most important are the lessons I have learned from my daughter and her friends and from children all over the world. Children have many lessons to share with us—lessons about what they need, what makes them happy, how they view the world. If we listen, we'll be able to hear them. This book is about the first and best lesson they have taught me: “It takes a village to raise a child.”

I
WANT YOU
to know a little about my family, because my experiences, like everyone's, have informed my views. Whether or not we are parents, we were all once children, and that alone gives us opinions on the subject of raising them.

I grew up in a family that looked like it was straight out of the 1950s television sitcom
Father Knows Best
. Hugh Ellsworth Rodham, my father, was a self-sufficient, tough-minded small-businessman who ran a plant that screen-printed and sold drapery fabrics. He was the only employee, except when he enlisted my mother or us children or hired day labor. He worked hard and never encountered a serious financial setback. But like many who came of age during the Great Depression, he constantly worried that he might. “Do you want us to end up in the poorhouse?” was a familiar refrain.

He grew up in Scranton, Pennsylvania, as the middle of three boys, surrounded by a multitude of kinfolk on both sides of his family. He attended Penn State, where he was a loyal member of the Delta Upsilon fraternity. He graduated with a degree in education in 1935. His first job after college was back home in Scranton, selling lace curtains, but he moved to Chicago when he was offered a better job, selling textiles throughout the Midwest.

One of our favorite pastimes as children was listening to him tell stories of his life “before you were born.” We loved hearing how, as a boy, he would go down into the local coal mines to find mules who were blind from spending their lives underground and would lead them out into the sun. He also hopped freight trains and then jumped off as they rolled slowly along the countryside. One time, however, a train took off so quickly he wound up riding all the way to Binghamton, New York. A boy doing any of that today would be called “delinquent.”

Another time, after he had hitched a ride on the back of an ice truck, he was rammed from behind, and his lower legs and feet were badly broken. He was taken to the hospital, where the doctors wanted to amputate both feet. His mother, a formidable woman, barricaded herself in his room, refusing to let anyone in until her brother-in-law, a country doctor, arrived. Then she ordered him to “save my sonny's legs.” He did, and my father went on to have an active childhood and sports career, lettering in football in high school and college. Sometimes Mother knows best too!

After Pearl Harbor, my father joined the navy, became a chief petty officer, and trained recruits at Great Lakes Naval Base, north of Chicago. He and my mother, Dorothy Howell, were married in 1942 and lived first in apartments in Chicago, where I was born in 1947. After they had saved up enough cash, they bought a house in the city of Park Ridge. My father didn't believe in mortgages or credit, then or later.

By upbringing and conviction, my father was a devout Methodist, who prayed kneeling by the side of his bed every night. He also was an old-fashioned Republican, who, until he met Bill Clinton, eagerly pulled the “R” lever in every voting booth he entered.

I saw my father as the emissary from our home to the outside world, a place he perceived as very competitive. He was determined to give me and my two younger brothers, Hugh and Tony, the life tools we needed to survive and thrive. That meant, among other things, paying higher property taxes to live in a suburb that supported the schools his children attended. It meant periodic object lessons like driving us down to skid row to see what became of people who, as he saw it, lacked the self-discipline and motivation to keep their lives on track. It also meant having high expectations and pushing us to meet them.

When I brought home straight A's from junior high, my father's only comment was, “Well, Hillary, that must be an easy school you go to.” By raising the bar, he encouraged me to study even harder, and in fact, comments like that spurred me on. I realized later that this well-meaning motivational ploy could have had the opposite effect on a child of a different temperament than mine, who might have decided she could never live up to the expectations that had been set for her.

As it happened, my father's parenting tactics were harder on my brothers than on me, perhaps because they were boys. They idolized him, and he saw them as appropriate subjects for the training methods he had applied in the navy to prepare young men for combat. He was less certain of how to treat a daughter, beyond broadly encouraging me to do whatever I did as well as I could. He often told us, “When you work, work hard. When you play, play hard. And don't confuse the two.”

My father was devoted to his own family and took us to visit them every August at Lake Winola, outside Scranton. We stayed at my grandfather's cottage, which had neither hot water nor an indoor bath or shower. We kids didn't mind. We loved exploring the mountain in back of the cottage, fishing in the Susquehanna River, and swimming every day “to stay clean.”

The whole clan, along with friends and neighbors who dropped by regularly, sat for hours on the front porch of the cottage, chatting and playing pinochle. Part of what I loved about those vacations was spending time with my grandfather, who had come to America from Durham County, England, as a young boy and had started working in the lace mills at eleven. He was proud of the high school diploma he had earned through correspondence courses, and of the gold watch he had received after working in the same place for fifty years. My grandmother died when I was quite young, but my grandfather, along with my great-aunts and great-uncles, steeped us in stories of the family's life in England and Wales. Those vacations were a big part of my childhood, not least because they provided some of the best times I ever had with my dad.

My father constantly reminded us how many advantages we had compared to his generation and to most people in the world. “You will never know how lucky you are” was a phrase I heard more times than I can count. He and the fathers of most of my friends were men who had paid their dues and then devoted their energies to giving their families the financial security they themselves had missed. If my friends and I were foolish enough to ask for extra pocket money or an advance on our allowance, we received the classic lecture about money not growing on trees or how they had walked miles to school through the snow. All of our fathers thought we had easy lives compared to theirs.

When the neighborhood fathers took us ice-skating on the Des Plaines River, they stood around the fire drinking hot toddies, trading stock market lore, and, yes, complaining about politicians. We may have rolled our eyes, but we learned a lot from watching and listening to them, even when they were not interacting with us directly. None of them could have explained what “quality time” was. They were just there for us—at dinner, on weekends, during holidays, as part of our daily lives. They were fulfilling the traditional paternal role, supporting the family financially, guiding us into the uncharted terrain of adulthood by toughening us up, scouting out dangers ahead, and preparing the way.

My mother assumed an equally traditional role, providing the unlimited affection and encouragement that smoothed our path and balanced the pressures my father imposed. She organized our daily lives and fed us with her devotion, imagination, and great spirit. She attended every school and sports event and cheered for us whether we scored or struck out. She taught Sunday school, helped out at our public school, and was there when we came home for lunch. She entertained our friends, took us to the library, and made sure we did our chores.

My mother loved learning and spent hours discussing our school projects and typing our papers. She had not had the money to attend college, although she later took college courses for credit. But during the hours I spent with her, I learned some of the most important lessons of my life—above all, what it means to have unconditional love and support.

My family, like every family I know of, was far from perfect. But however imperfect we were, as individuals and as a unit, we were bound together by a sense of commitment and security. My mother and father did what parents do best: They dedicated their time, energy, and money to their children and made sacrifices to give us a better life.

 

I
N
1994, the Carnegie Corporation issued a comprehensive report,
Starting Points,
which details the conditions that are undermining the development of America's youngest citizens—its infants and toddlers. In the report, child development expert Dr. David Hamburg, the Carnegie Corporation's president, describes the ideal landscape in which to plant a child: an “intact, cohesive, nuclear family dependable under stress.” That description calls to mind the family in which I grew up.

My parents also had a lot of help from the village in raising my brothers and me. Our community was a visible extension of our family. We were in and out of our friends' yards and houses constantly. We played softball, curb ball, and a form of tag called chase-and-run, and we staged elaborate team contests modeled on the Olympics, all under the watchful eyes of parents.

On summer nights, our parents sat together in one another's yards or on porches, chatting while we kids played. Sometimes a few of the fathers dressed up in sheets and told us ghost stories. We marched with our Scout troops or school groups or rode bikes in holiday parades through our town's small downtown, to a park where all the kids were given Popsicles.

Our relatives were a visible, daily part of the village as well. Grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins all pitched in if illness or some other misfortune strained the family. When my brother Tony had rheumatic fever at nine, he had to stay in bed for months, recuperating. Our grandfather came from Scranton and sat for hours at Tony's bedside, playing card games and reading aloud until he lost his voice.

There were plenty of other caring, responsible adults who did their best to see that all the children in the community were getting the attention they needed. From librarians to crossing guards to Scout leaders, adults looked out for us, made sure we had enough to do and a place to do it.

There was a consensus among adults that they needed to present a united front when dealing with children. Adult authority gave us both a structure to our lives and a target to rebel against. We knew what the rules were, even if we sometimes broke them.

Community resources were managed for the benefit of children. The land surrounding each school served as a park and playing field for kids all year round. The schools were open summer mornings for sports and arts-and-crafts programs run by teenagers.

The church was an important presence in our lives. My brothers and I went faithfully to Sunday school and were usually back at church at least once more during the week for youth group meetings, athletic competitions, potluck suppers, or play rehearsals.

Our church exposed us to the world beyond our all-white middle-class suburb. Sunday school teachers taught us that prejudice was wrong in the sight of God and explained that the reason God made so many different kinds of people was to enjoy their diverse beauties and gifts, like a garden's various fruits and flowers. Those simple but powerful lessons were reinforced by our youth minister, who took us to meet black and Hispanic teenagers in downtown Chicago for service and worship exchanges. He also arranged for a group of us to meet Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., when he came to Chicago to speak.

Because my village was so secure, I had a hard time imagining what life was like for those in less fortunate circumstances. My church gave me concrete experiences that forced me to confront the reality of inequity and injustice. Without my knowing it at the time, my village was starting to expand. The stability of family life that I knew growing up was not limited to my privileged little pocket of the world, of course.

I've talked with my friend Marian Wright Edelman, president of the Children's Defense Fund, about her childhood in segregated Bennettsville, South Carolina, during the 1940s and 1950s. In her books
The Measure of Our Success
and
Guide My Feet,
she describes the web of relationships that her family sustained and was sustained by. Her father and mother not only raised five children and ran a church; they also took in foster children, tended the sick and elderly, and were leaders in the black community. Marian and her family encountered brutal instances of racism, but they had something much stronger to lean on: their religious faith and their commitment to one another. They were a strong family anchored in a village that supported them against the evil and injustice of the larger society.

For good or ill, our families and the environments in which we live are the backdrop against which we play out our entire lives. Families shape our futures; our early family experiences heavily influence, and to a degree determine, how we forever after think and behave. At the same time, our families are shaped by the forces at work in the larger society—and by the village, whether it is a suburb or a ghetto, in which the family lives. That is why it is important for us to try to understand the personal and social forces that formed our own families, and how they shaped—and continue to shape—both our lives and the village around us.

 

T
HOSE WHO
urge a return to the values of the 1950s are yearning for the kind of family and neighborhood I grew up in and for the feelings of togetherness they engendered. The nostalgia merchants sell an appealing Norman Rockwell–like picture of American life half a century ago, one in which every household was made up of stable parents, two kids, a dog, and a cat who all lived in a house with a manicured lawn and a station wagon in the driveway. Life seemed simpler then, and our common values clearer.