In Vermont today 15 percent of children grow up in poverty, and still more families are living on the edge. They’re unable to afford advantages like tutoring, after school programs or even the precious time to read to children.
The increasing wage gap is hurting low income children and their chances of success, says Robert Putnam, a Harvard social scientist and author of the book, Bowling Alone.
His new book, Our Kids: The American Dream in Crisis, argues that poor kids have fewer opportunities for upward mobility than earlier generations.
Putnam recently visited Vermont to speak at the annual meeting of the Vermont Community Foundation in Manchester. He writes about how the country has seen what he calls an “opportunity gap” emerge over the last 25 years.
“When I say there's a growing opportunity gap between rich kids and poor kids, what I mean is on a whole range of measures of the resources that are available to kids,” is shrinking, says Putnam.
“It's not just that rich kids have more resources than poor kids, it's that gap is growing rapidly. And an important part of that is the amount of time that parents can invest in their kids,” he says.
Upper class children get time and support from caring stable adults, including what he calls “Goodnight Moon time,” which is time parents spend reading to their kids.
After school care increasingly unaffordable
Putnam says decreasing access to quality, accordable childcare is also an important part of the problem. Vermont parents spend anywhere from 20 to 40 percent of their income on child care, which can be crippling for some families' budgets.
Putnam says that’s why universal early childhood education and high-quality daycare are so vital.
And he says it’s critical to invest in schools where there are concentrations of low income kids, to end the wage stagnation for the working class, and to make community college much more accessible.
But equally important, says Putnam, is to pay attention to what he calls "the most common feature of the life of poor kids in America today":
“They are alone. They're disconnected from their families, they’re disconnected from their communities. They are really alone. They lack adult support.”
Putnam says that includes, for example, extracurricular programs. He says that kind of gap we could address at the local level without waiting for some big national economic reform.
Coming together for solutions
Putnam says his book is advocating for change, but he isn’t espousing any one political party’s ideas.
“I always say, and have said, that this is a purple problem,” Putnam says.
“There are parts of this problem that you can see most clearly through blue, progressive lenses like those that Senator Sanders has advocated. But there are parts of the problem that you can see more clearly through red conservative lenses, like that for example the collapse of the working class families.”
Putnam says that now two-thirds of all kids were growing up in what we used to call working class homes are growing up in single parent homes.
“This is not just somebody else's problem,” says Putnam. As an example, he mentions his town of Jaffrey, New Hampshire.
“There are poor kids living not more than 3 miles from the quite comfortable neighborhood in Jaffrey that I currently live in, and there are poor kids all over New Hampshire … So we should get in the position of thinking this is somebody’s else's problem, it’s our problem, even right here in northern New England.”
A sense of community
Putnam says small, local efforts do make an impact. He gives the example of the Rotary Club in the Monadnock region that began a program called QUEST, which provides summer supplementary education for poor kids and combines it with summer camp activities.
”In effect it's kind of summer camp for the Have-Not kids in town, and summer camp is another one of those areas where participation by affluent kids is rising, but summer camp is no longer something that is typically available to poor kids.”
Putnam says that's something that begins to close the connection gap. And it gives the children in the community the sense that they're surrounded by a community of caring adults.
