It Takes A Village

Yet everywhere we look, children are under assault: from violence and neglect, from the breakup of families, from the temptations of alcohol, tobacco, sex, and drug abuse, from greed, materialism, and spiritual emptiness. These problems are not new, but in our time they have skyrocketed. Against this bleak backdrop, the struggle to raise strong children and to support families, emotionally as well as practically, has become more fierce.

I have spent much of the past 25 years working to improve the lives of children. My work has taught me that they need more of our time, energy, and resources. But no experience brought home the lesson as vividly as becoming a mother myself. When Chelsea Victoria Clinton lay in my arms for the first time, I was overwhelmed by the love and responsibility I felt for her.

Bill and I Had wanted to start a family immediately after we married in 1975, but we were not having much luck. In 1979, we scheduled an appointment to visit a fertility clinic right after a long-awaited vacation. Lo and behold, I got pregnant during that vacation. (I have often remarked to my husband that we might have had more children if we had taken more vacations!)

Parents bear the first and primary responsibility for their sons and daughters-to feed them, to sing them to sleep, to make countless daily decisions that determine whom they have the potential to become. But children exist in the world as well. From the moment they are bern, they depend on a host of other “grown-ups”–grandparents, neighbors, teachers, ministers, employers, political leaders, and untold others who touch their lives. Each of us plays a part in every child’s life. As an old African proverb says: It takes a village to raise a child.

I grew up in a family that looked like it was straight out of the 1950s television sitcom “Father Knows Best.” Hugh Ellsworth Rodham, my father, was a self-sufficient, tough-minded small-businessman who ran a plant that screen-printed and sold drapery fabrics. He worked hard and never encountered a serious financial setback. But like many who came of age during the Great Depression, he constantly worried that he might.

My mother assumed an equally traditional role, providing the unlimited affection and encouragement that smoothed our path and balanced the pressures my father imposed. She organized our daily lives and fed us with her devotion, imagination, and great spirit. My parents also had a lot of help from the village in raising my brothers and me. Grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins all pitched in if illness or some other misfortune strained the family. And plenty of other adults–from librarians to crossing guards to Scout leaders – looked out for us.

Those who urge to return to the values of the 1950s are yearning for the kind of family neighborhood. I grew up in and for the feelings of togetherness they engendered. I understand that nostalgia. I feel it myself when the world seems too much to take. There were many good things about our way of life back then. But our past was not so picture-perfect. Ask African-American children who grew up in a segregated society, or immigrants who struggled to survive in sweatshops and tenements, or women whose life choices were circumscribed and whose work was underpaid. Ask those who grew up in the picture-perfect houses about the secrets and desperation they sometimes concealed.

The longing for “the way things used to be” also obscures the larger settings in which the family finds itself today, as it struggles with broken homes, discrimination, economic downturns, urbanization, consumerism, and technology. Here are some of the challenges we face–and a few ways to overcome them.

The instability of American households today poses great risks to the healthy development of children. The divorce rate has been falling slowly, but for a high proportion of marriages, “till death do us part” means “until the going gets rough” My strong feelings about divorce have caused me to bite my tongue more than a few times during my own marriage and to think instead about what I could do to be a better wife and partner. My husband has done the same.

I am not saying that there are not reasons for divorce. The abuse and violence Bill’s mother, Virginia Kelley, experienced is something no parent or child should endure. But people with children need to ask what more they can do before they call it quits. When children are involved, we should consider returning to mandatory “cooling off” periods, with education and counseling.

There I was, lying in my hospital bed, trying desperately to figure out how to breast-feed. I had been trained to study everything forward, backward, and upside down before reaching a conclusion. It seemed to me I ought to be able to figure this out. As I looked on in horror, Chelsea started to foam at the nose. I thought she was strangling or having convulsions. Frantically, I pushed every buzzer there was to push.

A nurse appeared promptly. She assessed the situation calmly, then, suppressing a smile, said, “It would help if you held her head up a bit, like this.” Chelsea was taking in my milk, but because of the awkward way I held her, she was breathing it out of her nose!

Like many women, I had read books when I was pregnant-wonderful books filled with dos and don’ts about what babies need in the first months and years to ensure the proper development of their bodies, brains, and characters. But as every parent soon discovers, grasping concepts in the abstract and knowing what to do with the baby in your hands are two radically different things. And as a nation, we are not paying enough attention to what ought to be our highest priority: educating and empowering people to be the best parents possible. Education and empowerment start with giving them the means and encouragement to plan pregnancy itself, so that they have the physical, financial, and emotional resources to support their children.

Openness about sexuality and availability of contraception in most Western European countries are credited with lowering rates of unintended pregnancy and abortion. By contrast, more than 100 million women around the world still cannot obtain or are not using family planning services because they are poor, uneducated, or lack access to care. Twenty million women seek unsafe abortions each year.

We may think our country is far from this end of the spectrum, but statistics tell a different story. Two in five American teenage girls become pregnant by age 20, and 1.5 million abortions are performed in America each year. It is a national shame that many Americans are more thoughtful about planning their weekend entertainment than about planning their families.

We also know that women who receive pre-natal care, especially in the first trimester, are more likely to deliver healthy, full-term babies, while women who do not receive adequate pre-natal care are more than twice as likely to give birth to babies weighing less than five and a haft pounds, the definition of “low birth weight.”

There’s probably no area of our lives that better illustrates the connection between the village and the individual and between mutual and personal responsibility than health care. Today there are more than 10 million children, most with working parents, who do not have health insurance. The rate will accelerate even more if Congress enacts proposed cutbacks in Medicaid.

Some families who can afford to pay for private insurance are unable to find coverage. In Cleveland, Ohio, I met a couple who have two daughters with cystic fibrosis. The family could afford private insurance, but no one was willing to sell them a policy because of the girls’ conditions. They repeated to me the words of one insurance agent-words I will never forget. “What you don’t understand,” the agent told them, “is that we don’t insure burning houses.”

I find this attitude deplorable. And if we are willing to write off these children, whose will be next? Scientists will soon be able to tell us which of our genes predispose us to cancer or diabetes or other serious diseases. Will those who carry such genes and the children we pass them on to eventually be denied insurance, too?

If you want to open the floodgates of guilt and dissension anywhere in America, start talking about child care. It is an issue that brings out all of our conflicted feelings about what parenthood should be and about who should care for children when parents are unable to. The sad fact is Americans have never sufficiently valued the work of caring for children. This is due in part to our nation’s long ambivalence about whether surrogate child care is acceptable. And Americans continue to be divided over what role, if any, the federal government should play in helping working parents pay for it.

Recent discoveries in neuroscience, molecular biology, and psychology have given researchers a whole new understanding of when and how the human brain develops. Above all, this new information makes clear that a child’s character and potential are not already determined at birth. Dr. Frederick Goodwin, former director of the National Institute of Mental Health, cites studies in which children “at risk” for developmental problems were exposed at an early age to stimulating environments. The children’s IQ scores increased by as much as 20 points. Bear this research in mind when you listen to those who argue that our nation cannot afford to implement comprehensive early education programs for disadvantaged children and their families. If we as a village decide not to help families develop their children’s brains, then at least let us admit that we are acting not on the evidence but according to a different agenda.

After a dozen years of involvement in education reform, I’m convinced that the biggest obstacles many students face are the low expectations we have of them and their schools. And nowhere is the partnership of parents and the rest of the village more crucial to the schools than in the expectation that discipline and order are necessary for learning. I agree with those who advocate dress codes and even uniforms in some districts because they appear to diminish the frictions caused by brand-name consumerism and gang identification.

And after so many years of working with and listening to American adolescents, I also don’t believe they are ready for sex or its potential consequences-parenthood, abortion, sexually transmitted diseases – and I think we need to do everything in our power to discourage sexual activity and encourage abstinence. This means adult support, including the time it takes to organize gatherings for kids, instead of turning them loose in malls, video arcades, or the streets. Homes, schools, churches, and communities should provide havens for kids who want an alternative.

These same entities have to pitch in when it comes to educating kids about sex. The available evidence does not support fears that direct discussion of sexual behavior increases sexual activity; rather, it suggests many adolescents become sexually active without having had any formal sex education at all. And no matter how great an effort adults make to convince young people to abstain, there will be some who are determined to embark on sexual experience. They need straight talk about contraception and sexually transmitted diseases to help them deal responsibly with the consequences of their actions.

I do wish we would all take a deep breath and remember that sex has been around for a long, long time and we are all here because of it. It is an important part of who we are and how we live, and there should be no shame in our children’s curiosity about it. If we could accept that, we could begin talking to children, as soon as they could understand what we were saying, about the importance of honoring their bodies and entering into relationships responsibly.

The attempt to attach labels to our lives takes us backward. Whenever we pose women’s options as an “either/or” choice–most commonly between work and family–we do a disservice all around. In earlier generations, we lost artists, doctors, and engineers. My generation lost good mothers and dedicated community volunteers among women who did not see a way to combine their work life with making a home or nurturing a family.

I have had my own experiences with the power of stereotypes, most notably when the response I gave to a reporter’s question during the 1992 campaign led to the infamous cookies-and-tea tempest. I had understood the question to refer to the ceremonial role of a public official’s spouse, and I replied that I had chosen to pursue my law practice while my husband was governor rather than stay home as an official hostess, serving cookies and tea to guests.

Now, the fact is, I’ve made my share of cookies and served hundreds of cups of tea. But I never thought that made me a good, bad, or indifferent mother, or a good or bad person. So it never occurred to me that my comment would be taken as insulting mothers (I guess including my own!) who choose to stay home with their children full-time. Nor did it occur to me that the next day’s headlines would reduce me to an anti-family-“career woman.”

I learned from the episode that when I am asked a question that relates to me personally, my answer may be measured by how people feel about the choices they’ve made in their own lives. But the incident also highlighted the energy that is wasted on sniping over women’s and men’s choices and on stereotyping.

IN THE SPRING OF 1995, CHELsea and I traveled together through South Asia. As the mother of a teenager, I felt very lucky indeed that my 15-year-old was willing to spend 10 days with me. We had an unforgettable time–including a visit to Mother Teresa’s orphanage in New Delhi–and were presented with frequent opportunities to reflect on what it means to be an American. Many of the people we met told us how much they admired our country. When Americans are reminded of the bounty and protection we enjoy, most of us are grateful. Our gratitude has its roots in a view of government that dates hack to the Pilgrims. In this view, government is an instrument both to promote the common good and to protect the individual’s rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

By the 1980s, however, faced with mounting economic and social problems, Americans began to question the ability of government to solve them. Many began to believe government itself was the problem. Even those of us who are mindful of the progress we have made through government recognize that there are limits to what it can do.

At present, the extreme anti-government position is the noisiest one–or at least the one that gets the most attention from the media. Anti-government rhetoric appears to offer a vision of greater efficiency, self-reliance, and personal freedom. (For obvious reasons, it also usually enjoys greater financial backing and better-organized support.) Unfortunately, this rhetoric argues against the excesses of government but not against those of the marketplace, where there is great power to disrupt the lives of workers, families, and communities. It even argues against the basic protections government extends to the well-being of individuals, families, and communities, without offering an alternative way of safeguarding them. In fact, its extreme case against government, often including intense personal attacks on government officials and political leaders, is designed to advance narrow religious, political, and economic agendas.

For the sake of our children, we ought to call an end to false debates between values and policies. Both personal and mutual responsibility are essential, and we should work to strengthen them at all levels of society. Let us admit that some government programs and personnel are efficient and effective, and others are not. Let us acknowledge that when it comes to the treatment of children, some individuals are evil, neglectful, or incompetent, but others are trying to do the best they can against daunting odds and deserve the help only we–through our government–can provide. Let us use government, as we have in the past, to further the common good.

Nothing is more important to our shared future than the well-being of children. For children are at our core–not only as vulnerable beings in need of love and care but as a moral touchstone amidst the complexity and contentiousness of modern life. Just as it takes a village to raise a child, it takes children to raise up a village to become all it should be. The village we build with them in mind will be a better place for us all.