How Are The Children?
By Emmett D. Carson
Members of the Maasai tribe in Africa always greet each other in the same way. They ask, "How are the children?" The customary response is, "The children are well."
With this tradition, the members of the tribe have achieved the two most important goals of every child advocacy organization. First, the tradition ensures that every member of the community continually asks about each child's well-being as if that child were his or her own. Second, the reply—"the children are well"— reinforces the community's goal of protecting and nurturing its children.
Unfortunately, most child advocacy organizations in the United States have yet to mobilize the necessary level of public interest to make the welfare of children an overriding concern in every citizen's life. Especially disturbing is how much work remains to be done before we can say that all of our children, regardless of race or household income, are well. Despite the unprecedented economic prosperity of recent years, here are some sobering statistics to consider:
- 17 percent of all children in 1999 (12.1 million children) lived in households where family income is below the federal poverty level ($17,200 or less for a family of two adults and two children) (U.S. Bureau of the Census 2000).
- 14 percent of all children in 1999(10.0 million children) did not have health insurance (Current Populations Reports 2000).
- 37 percent of fourth graders scored below basic reading levels in 2000 (National Center for Education Statistics 2001).
- A survey of research through 1996 showed that one out of six boys had been sexually abused before the age of 16 (Hopper 2001).
- Approximately 1 million children were victims of substantiated or indicated child abuse and neglect in 1995 (U.S. Department of Health and Human Services 1997).
This volume examines the history and experiences of child advocacy organizations in safeguarding and improving the welfare of children. Its objective is to explore how child advocacy organizations can more effectively raise the public's awareness of children's issues and advance public policy at the federal, state, and local levels.
The volume is divided into two sections. The first section examines the current infrastructure for child advocacy organizations, including the scale and scope of child advocacy organizations, the extent to which these organizations can rely on financial support from foundations, and the role of these organizations in the democratic decision-making process. The second section looks at how child advocacy organizations have historically worked at creating and maintaining constituencies and at the prospects for creating a self-sustaining, constituent-based child advocacy movement in the future. Before discussing each section in more detail, it is useful to briefly examine how child advocacy organizations have shaped the public's evolving perspective of the government's role in protecting children.
Historical Background
The prevailing view of what best serves the interests of our children has evolved along with society. As popular views changed, so did the policy agenda of child advocacy organizations.1 Concerns about protecting poor children can be traced to colonial times and the English Poor Law of 1601. At that time, most people believed that misbehaved children needed to be removed from the negative influence of their parents. Accordingly, troubled children were placed in institutions or indentured to other families and forced to work. Many children were sent to almshouses, which emerged in the 1800s to assist the poor and where many died or were subjected to significant abuse. Child advocacy organizations raised public concern over these abuses and helped prompt several states to enact laws providing public financing for the care and support of children. By the late 1800s, owing to the advocacy of anticruelty societies, many states had also enacted laws outlawing abuse of children. Before such laws existed, there were more legal safeguards for animals than for children.
By the early 1900s, more than 300 anticruelty societies had emerged. These groups worked from the belief that, in most cases, children should not be permanently removed from their parents, but that the overall family unit should be strengthened to enable the parents to properly care for their children. Such assistance was seen as especially important for widows raising small children (but not yet for divorced or unwed mothers). These views contributed, in part, to the Social Security Act of 1935, which contained provisions for aid to widowed women with children and funding for state programs to develop protective services for children (U.S. Congress 1998).2 Other laws have followed, including Head Start (1964), the Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment Act (1974), Title XX of the Social Security Act (1975), the Social Services Block Grant (1975), the Indian Child Welfare Act (1978), the Adoption Assistance and Child Welfare Act (1980), the Family Preservation and Support Initiative (1993), and the Adoption and Safe Families Act (1997).
Child advocacy organizations can take considerable credit for both the passage of these laws and the positive impact each has had on improving children's lives. As discussed in the sections that follow, future successes will depend largely on strengthening the infrastructure for child advocacy, developing and sustaining a constituency for child advocacy groups, and understanding the implications of various legislative strategies to further advance the welfare of children.
The Infrastructure for Child Advocacy
It is not easy to identify the universe of child advocacy organizations or to determine what kinds of advocacy methods are the most effective for advancing children's issues. Advocacy encompasses a variety of activities, including lobbying in support of specific legislative action, public policy research and dissemination to influence public opinion and policymakers, advertising campaigns to educate the public, and efforts to mobilize citizens to vote for specific candidates or otherwise participate in the political process. Each of these methods has been used in the past to help improve children's quality of life. The chapters that make up this first section examine the breadth and scope of child advocacy organizations, the extent to which they receive financial support from foundations, and how they contribute to the political process and civil society.
In "Nonprofit Organizations Engaged in Child Advocacy," Carol J. De Vita, Rachel Mosher-Williams, and Nicholas A. J. Stengel identify the organizations that are speaking out for children's rights today. They use a statistical database constructed from several sources to describe the broad scope and activities of nonprofit organizations engaged in child advocacy. Although the authors are careful to note methodological limitations, they estimate that "there is one nonprofit service provider and child advocacy organization for every 1,300 children in the United States." These nonprofit groups cover an array of services, including education, human services, recreation, youth development, health, and the arts. This statistic is likely to heighten existing concerns about the effectiveness and duplication of effort by so many organizations and the difficulty of marshalling their collective strengths to advance a child policy agenda.
Sally Covington, in her chapter "In the Midst of Plenty: Foundation Funding of Child Advocacy Organizations in the 1990s," contends that the type of financial support received by organizations might hurt child advocacy outcomes. Through a review of existing data and a collection of supplemental information, she finds that foundation support for advocacy is extremely limited. Follow-up interviews with selected child care advocates suggest that foundations' focus on single issues, their reluctance to fund community organizing for constituency-building activities, and an emphasis on grants for specific projects rather than for general operating support have contributed to the frailness of the children's movement.
Limitations in funding often lead child advocacy organizations to focus their advocacy efforts on one level of government (federal, state, or local municipalities). Although many large child advocacy groups advance policies that ultimately lead to national legislation, some observers assert, because of the recent devolution of social programs, meaningful action on children's issues will occur at the state and local levels. Regrettably, few national organizations have the state-level infrastructure to advocate for children in all 50 states simultaneously or to coordinate the activities of potential coalition partners. While influencing change from the state and local levels appears daunting, child advocates have had significant success in securing protections for children this way. In many instances, local successes have provided the measurable results that led to the passage of similar laws at the national level.
Sara Rosenbaum and Colleen A. Sonosky provide a compelling case study of the State Children's Health Insurance Program (SCHIP), in "Child Health in a Changing Policy Environment." The authors describe how two groups of child advocates found themselves holding very different views about the values and long-term impact of SCHIP, which gave states a non-Medicaid option to provide insurance to poor children. The chapter also highlights the issues inherent in devolving greater responsibility to the states for creation and management of programs under broad federal guidelines. Child advocates will likely find themselves increasingly divided on future issues of federal versus state program management when the long-term outcomes for children are unclear.
The broader role of child advocacy organizations within the democratic decision-making process is explored in Elizabeth Reid's chapter, "Building a Policy Voice for Children through the Nonprofit Sector." The chapter explores advocacy's multiple facets and discusses how these ideas have been implemented by national and local child advocacy organizations. Reid suggests that child advocacy organizations should consider pursuing more active involvement in the electoral process, including full participation in the campaign and agenda-setting process. She also believes that child advocacy organizations should better use parents' and children's input to influence the decisions of elected officials.
Creating and Sustaining a Movement for Child Advocacy
One major challenge to child advocacy groups has been the breadth of issues they cover and the limited interaction between advocacy organizations that work on different issue areas. This has been a major barrier to developing and sustaining a unified focus on children's issues. As child advocacy has evolved to consider children's well-being within the context of the family structure, an increasing number of organizations have become involved in issues that touch children's lives. Education, health care, child protection services, and housing, for example, have each spawned advocacy groups that focus on particular issues and, at times, voice concerns or promote policies aimed specifically at children. While the variety of institutions may help ensure that children's interests are considered, such a broad mix of organizations pursuing different strategies makes it more difficult to develop and sustain a cohesive children's movement.
The history of child advocacy organizations is the subject of Theda Skocpol and Jillian Dickert's "Speaking for Families and Children in a Changing America." Skocpol and Dickert trace the evolution of the child advocacy movement from its early reliance on volunteers to the development of organizations that use full-time professional staff to implement programs and strategies. The authors provide case studies on the formation and development of top-down national organizations, such as the Parent-Teacher Association and the Children's Defense Fund, as well as bottom-up organizations, such as the Texas Industrial Areas Foundation. Skocpol and Dickert suggest that both types of organizations face tremendous challenges in moving a child advocacy agenda forward, because of cultural, demographic, and political factors.
Barbara Beatty's " The Politics of Preschool Advocacy: Lessons from Three Pioneering Organizations" describes how early advocates rose to such challenges. Drawing on advocates' successful efforts to universalize kindergarten programs, she derives several lessons that will be useful to today's child advocates. She compares the philosophical perspectives of the National Federation of Day Nurseries, the National Kindergarten Association, and the National Association for Nursery Education, and finds that the success of the kindergarten movement was the result of focusing on a single issue, creating an inclusive coalition across different income groups, and connecting the provision of early childhood care to the resolution of other public concerns, such as securing support for women in the labor force and eliminating the stigma of out-of-home care. Beatty provides several examples of local actions that were initially supported by local government and private financing alone but that ultimately won enough political support to secure public tax dollars.
All of these chapters bring us to a larger question: What combination of social, political, and economic factors is needed to foster the development of a new social movement for children? Doug Imig looks for an answer in "Mobilizing Parents and Communities for Children," Imig is perplexed as to why the relatively high poverty rate of children has not resulted in the development of a parent-led mass movement for children. He reasons that three developments have hampered the emergence of such a children's movement. First, the growing distance between urban centers and outer suburbs has prevented parents from organizing around common concerns for the welfare of their children. Second, child advocacy organizations have not developed the necessary national and state infrastructure that could help parents identify common issues affecting their children. Third, advocacy organizations' prior legislative successes may have had the unintended consequence of eroding the very passion and energy volunteers need to sustain momentum for new advocacy efforts.
Concluding Observations
In many ways, the conclusions in these chapters reflect several larger issues confronting child advocates: There is no consensus on the central issues facing children. There is little agreement on the long-term value of community organizing or on the most successful strategies that child advocacy organizations should consider. There is also no agreement about whether child advocacy organizations should focus their efforts at the national, state, or local level, or about the implications of pursuing one or more of these approaches. Each chapter suggests that significant changes in how organizations conduct their work will have to occur before children will get the effective advocacy that they deserve.
This statement is not intended to diminish the enormous dedication or past successes of existing organizations. Rather, it suggests that the most significant challenge to keeping children's issues on the public and legislative agendas is managing the conflicting interests and strategies of the large number of child advocacy organizations. Indeed, groups whose primary motivation is looking out for children's interests may need to consider that the existence of fewer child advocacy organizations could lead to better coordination, more effective advocacy, and increased, stable funding, all of which contribute to better outcomes for children.
Without question, America's poorest children remain in desperate need of an effective voice to speak on their behalf. Child advocacy organizations need to undertake the difficult process of identifying the two or three critical issues that they believe will most improve the lives of children, given the current political and economic climate. The identification of a small number of strategic issues might help to pierce the media noise related to other issues that compete for the public's attention. Of course, the idea of fewer organizations and greater clarity of purpose is not new. As the chapters in this volume document, child advocacy organizations have already made several successful efforts to collaborate and share information. But until we can reply that all of the children are well, no one should be content with maintaining the status quo.
References
U.S. Bureau of the Census. 2000. Poverty in the United States: 1999, P60-210. Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office.
Current Population Reports. 2000. Health Insurance Coverage, Consumer Income: 1999, P60-211. Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office.
Hopper, Jim. 2001. "Prevalence of the Sexual Abuse of Boys." At Child Abuse: Statistics, Research, and Resources. http://www.jimhopper.com/abstats. Boston University School of Medicine and The Trauma Center at HRI Hospital, Brookline, Massachusetts.
National Center for Education Statistics. 2001. The Nation's Report Card: Fourth-Grade Reading Highlights. http://wwwnces.ed.gov/nationsreportcard/reading/results.
U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. 1997. Child Maltreatment 1995: Reports from the States to the National Child Abuse and Neglect Data System. Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office.
Schene, Patricia A. 1998. "Past, Present, and Future Roles of Child Protective Services." The Future of Children: Protecting Children from Abuse and Neglect 8 (1): 23–38.
U.S. Congress. 1998. House Committee on Ways and Means. Green Book. Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office.
Notes 1. See Schene (1998) for a discussion of the changing role or child advocacy groups.
2. These laws are documented in U.S. Congress (1998) on pp. 109, 772, 723, 723, 814, 734, 781, 738, respectively.
Who Speaks for America's Children? The Role of Child Advocates in Public Policy, edited by Carol J. De Vita and Rachel Mosher-Williams, is available in paperback from the Urban Institute Press (6" x 9", 236 pages, ISBN 978-0-87766-704-9, $26.50).
