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Damaged goods
The parents of a murderer sue adoption workers, claiming they should have been told about the boy's mentally ill birth mother.
By Beth Broeker
[02/24/00]

Be fruitful and multiply
Infertile couples who are members of strict religious organizations often find themselves vilified by the church.
By Michael Kress
[02/23/00]

Don't call me Mrs.
When the local Catholics couldn't face my surname, I went church shopping.
By Donna Cornachio
[02/23/00]

Brother knows best
Dave Eggers talks, with some reluctance, about the staggering work of being a genius parent.
By Amy Benfer
[02/22/00]

Breaking the silence
It is time to tell the secrets and share the pain of Japanese internment.
By Rahna Reiko Rizzuto
[02/18/00]

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I want to cry, because I have taught my son a lesson that most middle-class children never have to learn: It is possible to grow up to be nothing at all. It's not just that he doesn't have any idea of what kind of jobs are out there -- even if he did, he wouldn't dare to want one. He lacks the confidence that he can get what he wants and what he needs. You're either born into that kind of confidence, or you're not. This is the kind of confidence that -- unlike human capital -- does indeed develop over generations.

Moreover, social capital trumps human capital every time. Read the same New York Times Magazine for any amount of time, and you'll see periodic stories about the tricks middle-class parents will resort to, and the money they must spend -- to get their 4-year-old into private school, or their teenager's SAT scores up to snuff -- when the human capital the kid has accumulated just isn't sufficient to guarantee he doesn't fall out of the class he was born into.

As my son grows, I see that I have been unable to avoid bequeathing him some sort of capital, but it is the negative capital of poverty. No amount of reading or reasoning with him is going to change that. What I wish I had known 14 years ago is that poverty hurts children in ways I am powerless to prevent, despite my education, despite my love and good intentions.

Today I know the ways that poverty hurts children. I know things that a writer for the Times would not. Just one example, of many, will suffice.

For eight years, from the time my son was 4 until he was 12, I tried to find a better and cheaper place to live than our expensive, roach-infested, 400-square-foot slum tenement. I thought that my son should have his own room. I did the math and knew that with rent increases we'd become homeless sooner or later if we didn't move.

We looked at hundreds of apartments. No one would rent to me: They did their math and said I didn't have enough money to pay the rent -- even when the apartment was hundreds of dollars cheaper than the one we had. They wouldn't rent to someone without a job. I had no one to guarantee a lease. My son watched me try hard -- and fail -- to get the simplest thing, the thing that almost everybody else on earth seemed to have: a place to live. We came within a breath of homelessness and he knows it.

I don't know what this did to him. I know what it did to me. I know that I stood on 110th Street one day after a particularly humiliating interaction with a real estate broker and screamed at him, "Just go away! I can't take care of you!"

I know he hasn't forgotten this, even though they finally got to our name on the subsidized housing waiting list and had to take us in. Our new apartment isn't any bigger, but it's affordable. My son never got his own room. Neither of us expects that he ever will.

Poverty does not lower your child's test scores or make you a bad parent. Poverty teaches you, over and over, that you cannot have what you want or even what you need. You learn that you are not in control of your own life, in large ways and in small. You try to play by the rules -- work hard, try harder, be honest -- but the rules don't work for you. You learn that no matter how hard you try or how smart you are, it doesn't do much good. Eventually, you learn not to try. You try to learn not to want. You never expect.

If poverty hurts children, even or especially children who are what Traub calls "middle-class cognitive," then the solution is to get children out of poverty. The only way to do this is by addressing the economic needs of their (overwhelmingly single) mothers. Anything else is not going to be enough. Taking children away from poor mothers at birth to give them to middle-class mothers is a surefire solution, but not a workable, humane or politically feasible one.

That leaves us with housing, health care, child care, jobs programs -- the kind that provide a living wage and long-term employment. All of these solutions are dismissed early in Traub's article. (Oh yeah, some child support from my son's wealthy father would do nicely too, but the last time I was in family court, they were not bothering to enforce child-support orders.)

That would make a difference for us. Yes, that would do it, Mr. Traub and all you social scientists. You should have asked us ghetto mothers in the first place. Oh, right ... that would be too radical. If you ask us, we might want too much. We might tell you what our kids really need.
salon.com | Feb. 25, 2000

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