3. Our Lost Children

Although we Americans in recent decades have grown richer, our children have grown poorer. Many families no longer adequately perform the nurturing and supporting function that children need, emotionally and intellectually.

The evil consequences for children are not in dispute. The rate of suicide among children aged ten to fourteen is twice as high as it was twenty years ago. For children aged fifteen to nineteen, the rate has tripled.

Since 1963, crimes by children have been rising at a faster rate than the juvenile population. About half of such crimes involve the traditional youthful offenses of theft, breaking and entering, and vandalism, but serious, violent crimes, though still involving a relatively small proportion of children, are going up at a startling rate. The rate of armed robbery, rape, and murder by juveniles has doubled in a decade.

The Senate Juvenile Delinquency Subcommittee surveyed 750 school districts and reported the following changes between 1970 and 1973.

Dropouts increased by 11 percent. Drug and alcohol offenses on school property were up 37 percent. Burglaries of school buildings were up 11 percent and assaults on teachers up 77 percent.

Among those who are thought of as "normal" children, lower reading scores and scholastic aptitude scores reveal intellectual impoverishment. Beyond all this loom the apathy and waste of the counterculture. Its existence is no longer news, but its ranks are still swelled each year by thousands of pathetic runaways and dropouts.

What forces are producing the increasingly severe stresses on today's children?

The phenomenon is complex and baffling, but several developments seem to be interacting. Urbanization is a factor. Children who might have made it on a farm or in a village, despite adverse family circumstances such as extreme poverty or a father's desertion, encounter disaster in a big city with its anonymity and diverse temptations.

Births by unwed mothers and divorce, two trends that are both rising steadily, result in depriving children of the stable, two-parent support that they need in their growing years. One out of every six children under eighteen today is living in a single-parent family. This is almost double the proportion in 1950.

Many divorced or widowed parents obviously succeed with their children, but ideally, rearing a child is a two-person job. When one parent is missing, the risk of failure increases. Indeed, it is best if a child has grandparents or other supportive relatives on the scene as well.

Instead, what has happened is the near disappearance of the extended family and the substitution of television, the hopelessly inadequate electronic baby-sitter. One study, for example, revealed that fifty years ago half of the households in Massachusetts included at least one adult besides the parents. Today the figure is only 4 percent. In a small child's life, "Captain Kangaroo" is no substitute for a devoted grandmother.