INFANTILIZING AMERICA: MARILYN PENN
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Exclusive: Infantilizing America
During the great waves of immigration to this country, it was not uncommon for teenagers
to arrive at our shores on their own, learn English, find work and manage to forge a life for themselves in a new land. Wars which brought 18-year-old boys into the army also played a large part in forcing young people to face extreme situations with adult responses. The Great Society of Lyndon Johnson marked a turning point in our national attitude; it advocated coddling needy people by giving welfare handouts instead of salaries in exchange for work. This backfired into a culture of learned helplessness in which the underprivilegedhad no incentive to develop skills to manage their own environment and soon became progressively more unqualified to compete for jobs or assume responsibility for themselves or their offspring.Â
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Beginning with the 1960s, this attitude filtered into our educational system where learning was coupled with two adjectives that produced devastating results: relevant and fun-filled. “Sesame Street†paved the way for dispensing with rote memorization in favor of snappy jingles and the merging of pedagogy into the new field of “edu-tainment,†where fewer educational goals were actually attained. As rigorous standards were relaxed and a plethora of concessions were made (not least of which was the bogus self-perpetuating policy of teaching students in their own languages instead of English), we began to create a culture of entitlement and radical demands. The failure of 1960s authority figures  to stand up to the militant tantrums on campus has had ramifications that continue to this day as we institute hate speech codes but fail to deal with repeated disruptions of freedom of speech at universities across the country. The legacy of educational dumbing down has resulted in the wholesale need for freshman remediation at even the most privileged and elite colleges and universities.
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This brief overview sets the stage for two programs that have come to attention this week and bear directly on each other. The first can be found in our new health bill, where an allocation of $1.5 billion has been granted for a home-visiting program for pregnant teens. This program, spaced over five years, will provide a nurse to go to the home once or twice a month before delivery and for several years thereafter to teach parenting and coping skills. Apparently this has proved to cut child abuse though it isn’t clear why these skills can’t be learned at a school, clinic or shopping center where many teens could be serviced at once, more efficiently and inexpensively. Is pregnancy now equivalent to a disability which renders teenagers unable to transport themselves to a destination outside the home? And are these skills so variable that they merit exclusively personal attention for a period of years? Would it not reinforce the notion of personal responsibility to have the teenager commit to getting to the program rather than have the program get to her? On the one hand, we have social service agencies objecting to the need for parental notification of abortion; on the other, we have the opposite presumption that though competent to make life and death decisions on their own, pregnant teenagers must be treated as invalids and cosseted at home.
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The second program is one spearheaded by New York City’s mayor three years ago; it involved paying parents and children to perform ordinary tasks that were in their own self-interest. For example, a teenager could earn as much as $600 for simply passing a Regents exam and a parent could earn $100 for going to the dentist. Bloomberg did not use public money for this experiment but approximately $40 million was raised and spent before revealing that there were no gains for high school students who performed below proficiency standards to begin with and there were no attendance or educational gains among elementary and middle school students regardless of their proficiency levels. This was certainly an expensive way to learn the obvious lesson that infantilizing people of any age above toddler-hood is counter-productive.
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The mayor would have done better to pay attention to the success of Alcoholics Anonymous, which starts with the premise that people must take ownership of their own situations. The failure of children in school primarily begins with the failure of their home lives before they get to school. Those pregnant teenagers who continue to procreate without benefit of marriage usually end up in poverty, living in crime-ridden neighborhoods were drugs and violence are rampant. We are only fooling ourselves to believe that the problems their children will face can be addressed with Band-Aids such as handouts for minor accomplishments. To make any sort of dent, the program teaching parenting skills must also teach job
skills so that teenagers who opt to become parents have a way of supporting themselves and their children. They need to learn the harsh realities of what single parenthood portends and how lasting a decision that becomes. Without this, the cycle of dependency, despondency and despair will keep repeating while we throw good money after bad while searching for gimmicks instead of facing bold truths that are both elementary and obvious.
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FamilySecurityMatters.org Contributing Editor Marilyn Penn is a writer in New York who can also be read regularly at Politicalmavens.com.
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