First of two parts

For most people I know, home movies from one’s childhood are a dreaded bore, and something to be avoided at all costs.  For myself and the kids I grew up with, collectively known as the Madison Street Kids Committee, however, they are often the first thing we pull out when we all get together.  One Committee member’s boyfriend, upon seeing his first set of videos, declared over our riotous laughter that he thought we must have had the greatest childhood ever.  There’s probably something to that, but I think the fact that it was a great childhood had a lot to do with the fact that it wasn’t perfect.

Just as there would be throughout our lives, there were ups and downs for all of us.  Through it all, the whole neighborhood came together to celebrate the good times and help each other through the tough times, as well as to make ridiculous videos that we still watch and laugh at together.  It was this mix of bitter and sweet that has made us the relatively well-adjusted young adults we are today.

The importance of this mixture was hammered home for me recently while reading Paul Tough’s new book, How Children Succeed.  His thesis is that it is our non-cognitive abilities such as grit and curiosity that determine our success in life, not our mastery of algebra and geography.  A big part of this comes from how we are able to able to manage failure, and sadly we see more and more children today who are unable to do so.

On one end of the scale we have helicopter parents (and not the kind who build drones to walk their kids to the bus) who swoop in at the first sign of a child faltering to prop them up and get them across the line.  These largely affluent parents, studies are finding, “are more likely than others to be emotionally distant from their children while at the same time insisting on high levels of achievement, a potentially toxic blend of influence that can create ‘intense feelings of shame and hopelessness’” in their children.

Still, with the advantages that wealthy parents can offer their children, I don’t worry too much about them.  It is at the other end of the spectrum, the one-in-four children living in poverty in this country, that causes me concern.  For them, the problem is not that they have never experienced failure.  Indeed, for many of them, they have never known anything but failure.

We have failed to provide them with safe neighborhoods where they can live without fear.  We have failed them in our schools, trapping too many of them in a cycle of poverty where they have little hope of learning the skills that could lead them out.  We have failed to construct an economy where their parents (or, increasingly, their parent) can earn a livable wage to support them.

In short, it is our culture which has failed them.  In my last post, I argued that the problems we are seeing in Congress are cultural, not structural or even political.  Just as a dysfunctional culture on Capital Hill will produce dismal results, so too will we reap what we sow in the broader society.  To wit: In Promises I Can Keep, Kathryn Edin and Maria Kefalas outline “why poor women put motherhood before marriage.”  In short, it is because that is all they know.

All around them they see girls, some in their young teens, having children of their own.
Some are searching for the love they are not finding elsewhere in the arms of young men who, they recognize, are not good enough to marry, and end up pregnant as a result.  Others are deliberately trying to conceive so that they can have at least one person in this world who will love them unconditionally.

It’s easy for someone like me, who grew up in the circumstances I did, to sit back and see that these girls’ economic outlook would be so much greater if they would simply delay having children for a few years.  For them, however, growing up in a world described by Bridge as “filled with hatred, lies, deceit, hurt, and malice,” it is not so easy.  They grew up in a culture of failure, and the odds are that the children they bear at such young ages will as well.  The cycle, tragically, continues.

Just as the many problems that make up the culture of failure are complex and multifaceted, so too are the solutions.  I would suggest, however, that rather than tackling teenage pregnancy, and poverty, and drug use, and crime, and all the others individually, that instead we look at them holistically and recognize that they are almost always interconnected.  Rather than treat the symptoms, we should cure the underlying disease.  To do that we must build a culture of success, an idea I will explore further in my next post.