(Photo: Simon & Schuster)
By Napp Nazworth , Christian Post Reporter
The American dream, that anyone can get ahead if they work hard enough, is increasingly out of reach for the children of poor families, Robert Putnam wrote in his new book, Our Kids: The American Dream in Crisis. In an interview with The Christian Post, Putnam shared that these children, about one-third of all kids in the United States, are distrustful of everyone due to their isolation from family, churches and their community.
"Love hurts, trust kills," one of the kids who he interviewed for the book posted on Facebook, Putnam said in a Friday phone interview. "If you think what it means to grow up in an environment where you think you can't trust anybody, that's a devastating kind of environment to grow up in."
Putnam is the Peter and Isabel Malkin professor of Public Policy at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government and is also the author of American Grace: How Religion Divides and Unites Us (2010) with Notre Dame professor David Campbell, and the bestselling Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community (2000).
In reviews, Our Kids has often been compared to Charles Murray's Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010 (2012). Both authors hold different ideological perspectives — Murray describes himself as libertarian while Putnam describes himself as communitarian — yet they came to similar conclusions about the plight of the working class in the United States today.
In this part one of his CP interview, Putnam describes the growing opportunity gap between rich and poor kids and responds to the comparisons with Murray. In part two, Putnam talks about the important role that churches and religious groups can play in addressing the opportunity gap, and responds to a review by professor Brad Wilcox, director of the National Marriage Project at the University of Virginia, and explains his views on school choice.
Here is a transcript, lightly edited for length, of part one of that interview:
CP: What is the main take away you hope readers get from your book?
(Photo: Martha Stewart)Robert Putnam, Peter and Isabel Malkin professor of Public Policy at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government.
The growing gap shows up in many different indicators of children's well-being. The stability of their families — kids coming from college educated homes are overwhelmingly likely to be living in two-parent families, whereas kids growing up in high school educated homes, that's over one-third of the American population, two-thirds of them now are growing up in single parent families.
The growing gap shows up in the amount of time and money that parents invest in their children. In terms of money, the gap has grown very rapidly over the years so that the average kid coming from a college educated home has spent on him or her roughly seven times as much in dollars, on things like summer camp and piano lessons and high quality day care, and so on.
It shows up in the quality of the schools kids are attending. It shows up in the amount of education kids complete. It shows up in test scores that kids have. Test scores in college educated homes, the upper third, are rising, whereas they are not for kids coming form high school educated homes.It shows up in the amount of time that parents can spend with their kids, in what we call "Goodnight Moon time," that is the amount of time parents spend playing with the kids, reading with them or whatever. As recently as 1975 there wasn't any social class difference in that, but now kids coming from college educated homes get 45 minutes a day more time with mom and dad. The latest brain science makes clear that has very serious long term consequences for the kids.
And it shows up in the amount of support that kids get from their communities. So that, for example, church attendance is down for all kids in America, that's a more general trend, but it's down much more rapidly for working class kids, so working class kids are quite unlikely to be regular church goers, so the kids are increasingly detached from the support of a religious community, and other communities, too, I'm using that as just one example.
The bottom line is, kids coming from what we used to call the working class are increasingly isolated from everybody — from their parents, because they likely have only one parent in the home, from their school, from neighbors, from community organizations, from church, and they lack the kind of support that all kids used to get, from adults in their environment. So these kids, remember I'm not just talking about homeless kids, I'm talking about the lower third in society, they're very skeptical and suspicious of everybody.
A young woman we talked to from a working class background in my own hometown, a tiny little town in Ohio, recently posted on Facebook, "love hurts, trust kills." If you think what it means to grow up in an environment where you think you can't trust anybody, that's a devastating kind of environment to grow up in.
CP: This book has drawn many comparison's to Charles Murray's Coming Apart. Murray is libertarian, you're liberal, but you've drawn some similar conclusions about poverty, working class families and class differences. What do you think of the comparison?
Putnam:
Actually, that's not completely true. Charles' book does not focus on
kids at all. Kids are not part of his story. He's talking about the
adults, but I mean to be focusing on kids and the effects of these
growing gaps on kids. His is a valuable book. I'm not being critical of
it. It just doesn't happen to focus on the kids. Whereas I'm
relentlessly focusing on the effects on kids.
But secondly, he is a little agnostic about what caused the problem and he definitely does not think we can do anything to fix it, except maybe he thinks upper class people should preach at lower class people to get their act together. I'm much more inclined to think that there are both cultural and structural, or economic, reasons for this trend.
But it's true, it's striking that both a libertarian and a communitarian, like me, agree. We certainly agree about the basic facts of the collapse of the working class family. That we certainly agree on. Frankly, neither of us discovered that. That's been in the literature. But it's an important development.
It's not the only thing. It would be wrong to think that the only thing that has happened is the collapse of the working class family.
It's also true that there's a growing social segregation in America, where comfortable people are living more and more around other comfortable people. When I say comfortable, or rich, I mean people of college educations like me. People from college educated backgrounds and relatively affluent people are more and more living around other affluent people and poor people are more and more living around other poor people. That has powerful consequences for whom we know and for who our kids know, and for the kinds of schools they go to.
So it is certainly true that the cultural change that [Murray] emphasizes is an important factor. I think it is not the only thing that is going on. It's a perfect storm from the point of view of these poor families.
But secondly, he is a little agnostic about what caused the problem and he definitely does not think we can do anything to fix it, except maybe he thinks upper class people should preach at lower class people to get their act together. I'm much more inclined to think that there are both cultural and structural, or economic, reasons for this trend.
But it's true, it's striking that both a libertarian and a communitarian, like me, agree. We certainly agree about the basic facts of the collapse of the working class family. That we certainly agree on. Frankly, neither of us discovered that. That's been in the literature. But it's an important development.
It's not the only thing. It would be wrong to think that the only thing that has happened is the collapse of the working class family.
It's also true that there's a growing social segregation in America, where comfortable people are living more and more around other comfortable people. When I say comfortable, or rich, I mean people of college educations like me. People from college educated backgrounds and relatively affluent people are more and more living around other affluent people and poor people are more and more living around other poor people. That has powerful consequences for whom we know and for who our kids know, and for the kinds of schools they go to.
So it is certainly true that the cultural change that [Murray] emphasizes is an important factor. I think it is not the only thing that is going on. It's a perfect storm from the point of view of these poor families.
Rich/Poor Opportunity Gap: Kids Need Two Parents, Churches Can Do More Than Government (CP Interview 2/2)
Churches and other religious groups can play an important role in reducing the opportunity gap between rich and poor kids in the United States, professor Robert Putnam said in an interview with The Christian Post about his new book, Our Kids: The American Dream in Crisis.
While
churches already play an important role by promoting the importance of
marriage, they can do more by getting involved in the lives of the poor
children in crisis, explained Putnam, Peter and Isabel Malkin professor
of Public Policy at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, and the
author of American Grace: How Religion Divides and Unites Us (2010) with Notre Dame professor David Campbell, and the bestselling Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community (2000).
In part one of his CP interview, Putnam spoke about the isolation from family, churches and community experienced by poor children, or the bottom one-third of all children in the United States, and he responded to comparisons made with Charles Murray's Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010 (2012).
In this part two of his CP interview, Putnam responds to a review of the book published in The Wall Street Journal. Professor Brad Wilcox, director of the National Marriage Project at the University of Virginia, praised the book for offering a powerful and poignant account, with "considerable empirical support," of the problems faced by poor children due to the growing opportunity gap between rich and poor. Putnam, does not, however, give "adequate weight" to the cultural shifts, such as the decline of marriage, that led to that gap, Wilcox added.
Putnam also spoke about school choice reform proposals. In the book, Putnam places much emphasis on education reforms. He did not, however, advocate school choice, a reform offered by many conservatives as a way to help close the opportunity gap. In his CP interview, Putnam explained that he does not have an ideological opposition to school choice but he has seen no evidence that school choice would help close the opportunity gap.
Here is a transcript, lightly edited for length, of that interview:
CP: Professor Brad Wilcox, director of the National Marriage Project at the University of Virginia, wrote a review of the book for The Wall Street Journal. He argued that you didn't give enough weight to the role that marriage can play in reducing the class differences you describe. What's your response to Wilcox?
Putnam: I don't think it's true. To the contrary, I have a whole chapter about family structure. I'm speechless. Many people think I've given too much attention to family structure.
Wilcox's review was a very kind review. And he believes the collapse of marriage among the working class is an important part of the problem, and so do I. If you read the book, that's what I say. The first substantive chapter is a long chapter about how marriage has changed, how the structure of the working class family has changed, and how that's bad for kids.
CP: To address that [decline of marriage], there's probably not much government can do, right? Are we talking about a cultural shift that needs to happen?
Putnam:
I think, yes. There have been people who have talked about the
government somehow promoting marriage. I wouldn't be opposed to that in
principle, but the problem is we don't know any way to do that.
The programs that have been tried — this is not a disagreement, I actually don't think that Brad Wilcox and I have that much disagreement — the programs that have tried to promote marriage and family stability and so on, most people agree they haven't had the effect that people hoped they would have. So, I agree, it's not easy to see what government can do about the marriage issue.
But I do think that putting more cultural emphasis on the fact that kids need two parents — kids need stability in the family environment. In so far as there is increasing instability in the family life of poor kids, there clearly is, we ought to do something about that.
I think that might be more a domain that churches, frankly, can play a role in — reemphasizing the importance of not having kids unless you have a stable partner that you're prepared to live with and raise those kids with.
I don't quite have a magic wand for doing that, because, as you well know, the culture has changed a lot.
In part one of his CP interview, Putnam spoke about the isolation from family, churches and community experienced by poor children, or the bottom one-third of all children in the United States, and he responded to comparisons made with Charles Murray's Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010 (2012).
In this part two of his CP interview, Putnam responds to a review of the book published in The Wall Street Journal. Professor Brad Wilcox, director of the National Marriage Project at the University of Virginia, praised the book for offering a powerful and poignant account, with "considerable empirical support," of the problems faced by poor children due to the growing opportunity gap between rich and poor. Putnam, does not, however, give "adequate weight" to the cultural shifts, such as the decline of marriage, that led to that gap, Wilcox added.
Putnam also spoke about school choice reform proposals. In the book, Putnam places much emphasis on education reforms. He did not, however, advocate school choice, a reform offered by many conservatives as a way to help close the opportunity gap. In his CP interview, Putnam explained that he does not have an ideological opposition to school choice but he has seen no evidence that school choice would help close the opportunity gap.
Here is a transcript, lightly edited for length, of that interview:
CP: Professor Brad Wilcox, director of the National Marriage Project at the University of Virginia, wrote a review of the book for The Wall Street Journal. He argued that you didn't give enough weight to the role that marriage can play in reducing the class differences you describe. What's your response to Wilcox?
Putnam: I don't think it's true. To the contrary, I have a whole chapter about family structure. I'm speechless. Many people think I've given too much attention to family structure.
Wilcox's review was a very kind review. And he believes the collapse of marriage among the working class is an important part of the problem, and so do I. If you read the book, that's what I say. The first substantive chapter is a long chapter about how marriage has changed, how the structure of the working class family has changed, and how that's bad for kids.
CP: To address that [decline of marriage], there's probably not much government can do, right? Are we talking about a cultural shift that needs to happen?
(Photo: Martha Stewart)Robert Putnam, Peter and Isabel Malkin professor of Public Policy at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government.
The programs that have been tried — this is not a disagreement, I actually don't think that Brad Wilcox and I have that much disagreement — the programs that have tried to promote marriage and family stability and so on, most people agree they haven't had the effect that people hoped they would have. So, I agree, it's not easy to see what government can do about the marriage issue.
But I do think that putting more cultural emphasis on the fact that kids need two parents — kids need stability in the family environment. In so far as there is increasing instability in the family life of poor kids, there clearly is, we ought to do something about that.
I think that might be more a domain that churches, frankly, can play a role in — reemphasizing the importance of not having kids unless you have a stable partner that you're prepared to live with and raise those kids with.
I don't quite have a magic wand for doing that, because, as you well know, the culture has changed a lot.
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