Everyone looks back on their early formative years with strained memories as we grow older. 

Most of us would agree that children need certain things in order for later life to be meaningful.  Children need to be protected from the elements, both natural and environmental; they need nourishment that will grow strong bones and bodies; time to play in safety with others their age; immunizations; they need to learn social skills, to read, to count, to function both alone and in groups so that they are confident, to become something we call well-rounded.  Each family chooses its own path of values and perspective that become the basis of children’s world view on which they build their own as they grow older.  Children need role models and a sense of place.

That’s what we talk about.

What has happened?

Working people in general and working women who care for their children on their own have suffered declining wages and declining opportunity themselves for the longest period in US history.  Meaningful and sustainable employment is harder and harder to find, so parents, single or not, must work more hours than any adults in the industrialized world to try to make ends meet.  Among the most significant effects on the child’s youth is the lack of time parents have to be parents.  Let’s then add the reality of high percentages of single-parent child-rearing, and in most cases the fact that this responsibility falls to the women of divorce and separation.  We know that women’s wages are still lower than men’s for comparable work. Lower and lower we go.  More hours spent to achieve less…

The kids suffer the most

As we advance as a society, it is also clear that so many of these elements that we call essential for the nurturing and development of our youth are in severe decline and availability.  Lack of nutrition, lack of health care, lack of safe neighborhoods, lack of nurturing and supportive day care and pre-school programs all impact children directly, and most harshly.

Most everyone agrees that children will have a very hard time later in life if any of these requirements are missing. There is plenty of evidence to support the relationship between early childhood opportunity and opportunity later in life.

I think it is safe to say that our current language and our reality are at odds.  We cannot talk about healthy kids when we are actually destroying them!

When we discuss the enormity of the social, economic, educational, and environmental crises of the day, we feel pretty overwhelmed.  No one could have imagined our large and “richest society in the world” being so strapped to be able to provide security for our people…especially our kids.

We have to figure out what to do

One of the themes I try to bring into every one of these blog entries is the need to change our language before we can change much of anything.  We need to change the conversations necessary to create the conditions for positive change.  We’ve got to admit that there has been a lot of talk over the last 40 years as our nation has gone from one of opportunity and security to one of neither. It’s been the wrong talk, the wrong conversation, the wrong language.

So, here’s one suggestion.  It comes from the brilliant political economist at Princeton University, Professor Uwe Rheinhardt.  In his powerful speech at this year’s Institute for Health Care Improvement Forum in December presented to 5,000 in attendance, he suggested that if we as a people are serious about change that we ought to build that change around what he called the two most important people in our society:  mothers and teachers.

 If we all agree on what is pretty obvious, that ALL children must have certain basic needs met, and that most of the time they spend in their formative years are with mothers and teachers, then let’s measure how well we do as a nation to see to it that all mothers and all teachers have the support needed to nourish our children’s bodies, minds, and spirits.  We could measure this pretty easily to see if our language meets our intent.

Tough choices can be made easier to make.  But first we must learn to talk about which choices to make.  That requires new language.