VI. Appendices Appendix

Appendix C: Family Issues

Although violence among school children is not limited by socio-economic class, the environmental factors affecting poorer children may be more difficult to resolve. Poverty in combination with such factors as single parenting, teen pregnancy,C1 and lack of education, can be a formula for poor parenting skills and or resources. “Forty-two percent of U.S. families with children start out with one, two, or three strikes against them,” said psychologist Nicholas Zill of Child Trends, Inc., a Washington organization that studies social changes affecting children.

“The first strike is lack of education: The mother has not finished high school by the time she has her first baby. The second strike is lack of commitment: The mother and father are unmarried when they have their first child together. The third strike is lack of maturity: The woman is under twenty when she gives birth for the first time. One new family in nine has all three strikes against it.”C2

Parenting is a difficult job that demands internal and external resources. Internal resources include emotional stability, positive role modeling and education. External resources include such things as a strong network of supportive adults, financial stability, health care, and a safe neighborhood.

You can tell a caring single mother that it is not healthy for her child to be babysat by the television, but if the mother is making minimum wage, and does not have access to adequate childcare, her choices are limited and the television may continue as babysitter.

But changes in family life are not limited to poorer families. “Another major change for children in the past 25 years is the amount of time they are left on their own, away from parents and other caring adults. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, in 1973 half of the mothers of school-age children were in the work force; today 77 percent are. More children now live in households where all the adults work outside the home. Many children spend less time with their parents and are often unsupervised for hours each day before their parents return from work. In total, nearly 5 million school-age children are left home alone each week.”C3

This phenomenon, referred to by some as “time poverty,” has implications for youth violence. “The lack of stimulating experiences and intellectual enrichment is a problem not only in poor neighborhoods. It has spread through middle-class and wealthy populations, as the dramatic upheavals in the traditional family cast an increasing number of youngsters adrift.

Unlike many European and Asian societies, which invest time and energy in their children, American society is apparently becoming less willing to do that.

The enemy is “time poverty,” said Felton Earls, professor of human behavior and development at the Harvard School of Public Health, and professor of child psychiatry at the Harvard Medical School. Many parents, regardless of their income, do not have enough time to organize a stimulating environment for their children.”C4

When a child is not spending time with a parent or another supportive adult, he or she is not receiving the nurturing, discipline, and positive reinforcement necessary for healthy development.

Appendix C Footnotes:

C1. Every day about 1,000 unwed teens become mothers. Robert C. Cloud, Ed.D., Federal, State, and Local Responses to Public School Violence, 120 West Ed. Law Rep. 877 (Nov. 1997) citing United States Department of Justice, Juvenile Offenders and Victims: 1996 Update on Violence., Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention, Office of Justice Programs (OJP), February 1996.

C2. Ronald Kotulak, Inside the Brain at 40 (1997).

C3. Children’s Defense Fund, The State of America’s Children: Yearbook 1998, at 79 (1998).

C4. Supra note C2 at 55.