Why America hates its children

Last summer, my kids and I spent a month in Greece, where their grandfather lives. Time and again, I was struck by a public attitude toward children I seldom encountered in America: unequivocal support.

On Athenian buses, women older than myself frequently gave up their seats for my 5- and 8-year-old daughters. On one trip, an older woman hauled my younger child up next to her and tucked her hand underneath my daughter's elbow to prevent her from being thrown forward with every sudden stop. She held on to her like this for the whole ride.

In America, we socialize our children to see strangers not as helpers but as threats. Worried parents scour Nextdoor for loiterers and miscreants; neighbors routinely call the police when parents let their kids explore outside. And when kids aren't being treated as endangered, they're often viewed as a nuisance. How many articles have I read about whether children should be allowed on airplanes, or at weddings, or in restaurants?

Every country has its share of adults who pose a threat to children. But the difference in how America treats its kids goes far beyond the "it takes a village" attitude that prevails in countries like Greece. Virtually every other industrialized nation provides more government aid for their children than America does. Of the 38 countries that belong to the leading Western trade alliance, the US ranks No. 32 in spending on early childhood. In Sweden, which offers single parents a staggering 480 days of paid parental leave, preschool costs no more than 3% of a family's gross income. America, by contrast, has no mandated paid parental leave. It has no universal childcare. Only one-third of American families can afford childcare, which consumes 27% of their income on average. Parents are being forced to leave big cities because they can't absorb the costs of childcare, while those in rural areas often can't find care at all.

America's rampant child neglect doesn't stop with its lack of day care. Infants are more likely to die in childbirth in America than in any other rich nation, and US newborns are more likely to grow up in poverty. Millions of children attend public schools that are literally falling apart. Children who are neglected — a loose term inextricably tied to poverty — are thrown into a foster-care system known for its propensity to harm children. The shortage of foster families is so critical that many kids wind up being temporarily housed in settings like casinos, office buildings, and juvenile detention facilities. The US is the only member of the United Nations that hasn't ratified the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, which includes the right to be free from violence and labor exploitation. In Oregon, where I live, children as young as 9 are allowed to do agricultural work, and many states are trying to loosen their already flimsy child-labor protections so teenagers can be forced to work longer hours. The leading cause of death for American children and teens is gun violence.

All of which raises the question: Why does America hate its children?

On the surface, America has always professed to love its children, and those who raise them. Women are told from birth that being a mother is "the most important job in the world," that "children are our future." "All I am I owe to my mother," George Washington is said to have declared. And every May, when Mother's Day rolls around, we are inundated with soft-focus advertisements celebrating the family as the core unit of American life.

But in practice, the rhetoric exalting motherhood has served not as a means for supporting children but as a tool for keeping women at home — while fending off demands for a broader and more supportive system of child-rearing. Even as women have become vital participants in the American workforce, the opposition to expanding childcare has remained remarkably persistent. In 2021, state Rep. Charlie Shepherd of Idaho made the connection explicit when he explained why he voted against state funding for early childhood education. "I don't think anybody does a better job than mothers in the home," Shepherd said. "And any bill that makes it easier or more convenient for mothers to come out of the home and let others raise their child, I don't think that's a good direction for us to be going." (He apologized after an outcry, but everyone heard him loud and clear.)

America has often invoked the Red Scare as an excuse for abandoning its children. In 1971, the country was one signature away from having universal childcare. A bill had passed the House and Senate that would have created federally funded childcare centers across the US.

But a rogue's gallery of Republicans persuaded President Richard Nixon to veto the measure, citing the threat of communism to the American family unit. Nixon wrote that he opposed committing "the vast moral authority of the National Government to the side of communal approaches to child rearing over against the family-centered approach." Kids needed to be raised by their mothers — without any help from the state.

The one time America extended a form of universal childcare, tellingly, was during World War II, when men were not around to perform critical manufacturing jobs. The Lanham Act created a patchwork system of childcare provided by churches, community centers, and large employers. But as soon as the war ended and men returned to the workforce, the program was shuttered, even as many women took to the streets to call for its continuation.

The situation is worse for people of color; racism is baked into the paradigm of family life in America. The earliest cohort of American caregivers in white homes were enslaved Black women. When President Franklin Roosevelt implemented the New Deal, he specifically exempted domestic workers, who were more likely to be women of color, from receiving Social Security benefits and labor protections. Women who took care of other people's children were stripped of the economic power they needed to take care of their own kids, let alone pay someone else well to do it. As a consequence, childcare is still one of the lowest-paid American professions, even while the overall cost of providing this essential service has soared. We end up with a broken system where the majority of American families are unable to pay a caregiver, while many childcare workers can't live on what they are paid. Nearly one-third of childcare workers have experienced food insecurity, and more than 100,000 have sought other forms of employment since the start of the pandemic, desperate for better pay.

For a brief moment, the pandemic threw America's grim provisions for children into stark relief. Teachers, leery of returning to classrooms before the advent of vaccines, called out their schools for subjecting kids to deplorable conditions: inoperable or toxic water fountains, widespread mold, sweltering, unventilated spaces with windows rusted shut. Administrators and politicians, meanwhile, unironically pointed out that schools needed to be open because they were the only place where many children could be sure of a regular meal. In 2021, as childcare costs soared by more than 40%, Congress provided a massive cash infusion to states to stabilize childcare and supplied parents with both cash and an additional tax refund to support their kids. Seemingly overnight, child poverty dropped by 40%.

But the much-needed interventions were short-lived. When emergency federal subsidies expired last fall — a moment policy experts have referred to as the "childcare cliff" — an estimated 3 million kids suddenly found themselves once again without childcare. And even with irrefutable evidence of the expanded child tax credit's success — and loud exhortations by policy organizations, faith leaders, and parents — Congress voted to end it as well. As a result, child poverty jumped from 5% in 2021 to more than 12% in 2022.

It's hard to locate anything but abject hatred for kids in this decision. After advocating for the child tax credit to lapse, Sen. Joe Manchin told a reporter he felt no remorse. "The federal government can't run everything," he said.

In Athens, my kids and I would walk at night to a square filled with children playing soccer, enjoying ice cream, and teasing each other as their parents watched from restaurants or neighboring apartments. On that small stretch of pavement, it felt like a child's world, one in which adults were tolerated guests.

That same summer, while Greek children were romping in the public square, a 9-year-old girl named Serabi Medina was shot in the head at a leafy Chicago park where she had been riding her bike and eating ice cream with her dad. The man charged in the killing was a neighbor who had complained that the kids in his building were playing too loudly. He had purchased the gun legally and used it to shoot Serabi for the crime of existing in his presence.

Her death was no outlier. Among 38 leading Western nations, American kids account for 97% of child gun deaths. Behind each bullet is a gruesome story. A 1-year-old killed by her 3-year-old brother with a gun left lying around. A 7-year-old killed by a stray bullet from an argument over Jet Skis. A 4-year-old shot in the chest by a caregiver teaching "gun safety." And it's worse for children of color: Black children are five times as likely to die by gun as white children, often killed in neighborhoods marked by decades of redlining and federal and state underinvestment.

Then there are the mass shootings. In the tragedies of Sandy Hook, Connecticut, and Uvalde, Texas, the gunmen were scarcely out of childhood themselves, failed by their society and by family members they also killed or wounded. More than 95% of American schools run active-shooter drills, and companies now sell armored backpacks and escape pods for classrooms.

Lawmakers talk vaguely of the "mental-health crisis," particularly in the context of gun violence, as a way to obviate any kind of restriction to gun laws. And there is a real crisis: Even before the pandemic, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that feelings of depression and despair had been on the rise in young people for a decade. Again, the racial disparity is pronounced. Between 1991 and 2019, suicide attempts among Black teens jumped by 80%.

But the same politicians who blame mental illness for gun violence refuse to improve access to mental-health treatment, or adequately fund schools or social safety nets, let alone outlaw the weapons of mass destruction being used to murder America's children. Parents of kids in the throes of mental-health crises are showing up at overwhelmed emergency rooms and waiting months for spots in treatment facilities. Some desperate caregivers, facing bankruptcy, have considered surrendering children with acute needs to the state, just so they can be guaranteed some level of care.

This yawning absence of care — be it childcare, medical care, or even a general sense of neighborliness — weighs heavily on American parents. Many, forced to work long hours, have no choice but to leave their kids home alone or with neighbors, or bring them into work. In 2019, a 3-year-old boy drowned in the grease trap of the grocery store where his mother worked. She had no childcare that day, and she needed the hours to keep a roof over his head.

Parents at all income levels have become hypervigilant, leading to baroque forms of parenting that pit kids against each other in a race for scant educational and enrichment resources — what one observer dubbed "intensive parenting," or "a style of child-rearing fit for an age of inequality." (Watching parents battle to find swimming lessons in my city, where there are few affordable options, is a perfect encapsulation of this phenomenon.) And in a landscape shaped by scarcity and competition, parents have grown reluctant to let their children find their own forms of enrichment, lest someone report them to Child Protective Services. A recent paper in the Journal of Pediatrics found that a primary cause of the rise in mental-health disorders was "a decline over decades in opportunities for children and teens to play, roam, and engage in other activities independent of direct oversight and control by adults." We not only have no one to take care of our children — but also do not afford them the opportunity to learn how to take care of themselves.

Americans, especially those pushed to the margins by federal and social policy, have long fought back against the country's isolationist approach to organizing family life. Black women were the vanguard of early childhood education for children excluded from all-white or nonexistent kindergartens. After World War II, women took to the streets to keep the Lanham Act nurseries open and to push their states to launch similar programs. In the 1960s, the Black Panthers started a revolutionary free-breakfast program for schoolchildren, long before the federal government took up the cause. Today, the National Domestic Workers Alliance, led by women of color, is at the forefront of efforts to create expansive childcare policies. Informal mutual-aid groups across the country have banded together to serve houseless communities, many of which include families with children.

From the tumult of the pandemic, the calls for America to care more for its children are getting louder. Teenagers are showing up in congressional offices demanding a change to gun laws. Teachers are striking for better pay, student supports, and classroom conditions across the country. In 2020, the county that encompasses Portland, Oregon, passed a community-led measure to implement universal preschool by a huge majority, paid for by a tax on the highest incomes. In 2022, New Mexico became the first state to make childcare free for almost every resident. And since the expanded child tax credit was scuttled last year, six states have created new child tax credits, and five others have expanded preexisting credits.

But it will take more than piecemeal public policy to change America's almost pathological child neglect. At root, we must overthrow the persistent delusion of rugged individualism — the perverse American mythology that everyone must fend for themselves, no matter the cost. To raise children with the care and comfort they deserve, we must learn to think of ourselves in concert with others. We must, in short, nurture the ideal of community that America's policies have worked to tear apart.

I think of the woman on the bus in Athens, holding my daughter's arm to keep her safe, and I am reminded that raising a family was never supposed to take place in isolation. As parents, we have been pitted, by our national ethos, against every other family, all of us desperate to keep our children safe and eke out the best opportunities we can provide them. But we aren't alone. And for the sake of our kids, we must make sure that they aren't, either.

Lydia Kiesling is the author of the novels The Golden State and Mobility. Her essays and nonfiction have been published in outlets including The New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker online, and The Cut.