The Ecology of Childhood

How Our Changing World Threatens Children's Rights

Barbara Bennett Woodhouse

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780814794852
• Topic: Sciences sociales
• Subtopic: Études des enfants en sociologie

How globalization is undermining sustainable social environments for children
This book uses the ecological model of child development together with ethnographic and comparative studies of two small villages, in Italy and the United States, as its framework for examining the well-being of children in the aftermath of the Great Recession. Global forces, far from being distant and abstract, are revealed as wreaking havoc in children's environments even in economically advanced countries. Falling birth rates, deteriorating labor conditions, fraying safety nets, rising rates of child poverty, and a surge in racism and populism in Europe and the United States are explored in the petri dish of the village. Globalization's discontents—unrestrained capitalism and technological change, rising inequality, mass migration, and the juggernaut of climate change—are rapidly destabilizing and degrading the social and physical environments necessary to our collective survival and well-being. This crisis demands a radical restructuring of our macrosystemic value systems. Woodhouse proposes an ecogenerist theory that asks whether our policies and politics foster environments in which children and families can flourish. It proposes, as a benchmark, the family-supportive human-rights principles of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child. The book closes by highlighting ways in which individuals can engage at the local and regional levels in creating more just and sustainable worlds that are truly fit for children.

PART 1

Comparative Ecologies

1

How a Comparative Study of Childhood Became a Story of Global Crisis

This is the story of an environmental crisis on an unprecedented scale. It examines how the very environments necessary to the regeneration and survival of the human species are being placed at risk by destructive human forces. It is not the story I set out to write. When I began this project over a decade ago, I was on sabbatical from the University of Florida, where I was director of the Center on Children and Families at the Levin College of Law. The year was 2007 and, having won a Fernand Braudel Senior Research Fellowship at the European University Institute in Florence, I was embarking on a multiyear research project.

My project was relatively straightforward. In studying comparative and international family law, I had observed how human-made laws and policies at the macro level affect the intimate environments in which children grow. Children in developing nations are especially at risk of harm from the effects of poverty, war, famine, and environmental degradation. However, developed nations have no cause for complacency.

Too many children in rich countries are also suffering from political, economic, and environmental neglect. A series of “Report Cards” from UNICEF’s Innocenti Research Centre measuring child well-being in developed nations highlighted the wide variations among developed nations in rates of child poverty, access to education, health, infant mortality, and many other measures of child well-being (UNICEF 2000; 2001a; 2001b; 2002; 2003a; 2005; 2007; 2008; 2010; 2012; 2013; 2014b; 2016; 2017; 2018a). Using the ecological model of child development, a widely accepted method of studying children in social context, I had designed a research project that would compare the ecologies of childhood in two contrasting “first-world” environments. The ecological model, introduced by sociologist Urie Bronfenbrenner, asks us to examine child development in the context of the “systems” in which children are embedded (Bronfenbrenner 1979). The first diagram represents the microsystems where children spend their time, from family and faith community to neighborhood, school, and peer group. Often these microsystems overlap and intersect. Consider a school where faith community, neighborhood, family, and peer group overlap; these zones of intersection are called mesosystems and are especially important to children’s social development.

Figure 1.1. Ecology of childhood diagram, microsystems and mesosystems. B. B. Woodhouse, adapted from Bronfenbrenner (1979).

In figure 1.2 we see that the ecological model acknowledges the indirect impact on children of exosystems that encircle the children’s intimate worlds but are where children may rarely go. Examples include parents’ workplace, health-care systems, housing and financial markets, and justice systems. Finally, the ecological model identifies the overarching influences of the social macrosystem, identified by a permeable line of dashes at the outer circle of the diagram. The macrosystem is defined as the complex of ideas, values, prejudices, and powers that permeates a particular ecosystem.

My research question would be, “How do social policies (those exosystemic factors) affect the ecology of childhood?” Of course, I realize that there are many childhoods. “Childhood” is a socially constructed concept and differs from place to place, time to time, and child to child (Woodhouse 2008a). But the term “childhood” remains a useful category for thinking about policies affecting children. My thesis, supported by the Innocenti Report Cards, was that policies such as universal health care, robust labor laws, access to child care, and early childhood education, as well as family supports such as paid parenting and medical leave, when supported by progressive tax policies and a commitment to children’s human rights, were associated with higher rates of child well-being and lower rates of children’s exposure to deprivation and trauma. I proposed to use Italy as an example of a European style social welfare approach, and the United States to exemplify a more individualistic free-market approach.

Why Italy? Why not Sweden or Finland? Because Italy is not perfect. Italy, like the United States, belongs to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). In short, both countries are members of the international club of affluent nations. Italy, as a founding member of the European Union (EU), differs from the United States in that its laws and policies are shaped by EU law and international human-rights principles that do not bind the United States. But Italy is far from being a socialist “children’s paradise” like Finland or Sweden, and thus it is less easily dismissed as an unrealistic comparison. Many middle-class families in Italy, as in the United States, have trouble making ends meet and struggle to overcome social, ethnic, and regional inequalities. Both Italy and the United States have relatively high rates of child poverty, but in Italy these rates have generally been somewhat mitigated through social-welfare spending. Of course, my choice of Italy was also influenced by the match between my skills and the projected research. I am fluent in the Italian language and familiar with Italian culture, having spent three years studying in Italy before attending law school and I have maintained my ties with Italy over the past four decades, putting down roots in the Italian academic community.

Figure 1.2. Ecology of childhood diagram, exosystems and macrosystem. B. B. Woodhouse, adapted from Bronfenbrenner (1979).

As I studied child law and policy in both countries, I was struck by many examples of concrete situations in which differences between the individualistic policies in the United States and the more communitarian policies in Italy resulted in starkly different outcomes. Here is but one example: a case study I used to illustrate my grant proposal was that of a low-income family with two children, where the mother was the sole breadwinner and the father primary caretaker because of unemployment. Add to this scenario that one of the two children was terminally ill with cancer and the father was struggling with substance abuse and had been caught stealing to support his habit. When I presented the fact pattern to seasoned child advocates in the United States, they invariably predicted that the unavoidable tragedy of the child’s death would be compounded by an avalanche of other troubles. A year from now, they predicted, the father would be incarcerated and the mother would have lost her job for missing too many days of work to care for her dying child. She would lose her home to foreclosure or be evicted, if she were renting, and, lacking housing and income, would be at great risk of having her surviving child removed to foster care by Child Protective Services, an event that would start the statutory clock ticking toward termination of her parental rights. The laws in most states require child-protection agencies to move for permanent termination of the rights of a parent who has not corrected the situation within fifteen months of the child’s placement in care (Woodhouse 2002).

Then I asked my US colleagues to imagine the outcome in an environment where the family has access to free medical care, paid family and medical leave, job protection for caregivers dealing with family crisis, access to low-income housing, free, timely, and effective residential drug-treatment programs, as an alternative to incarceration of the addicted parent, and in-home social services including nurses and teachers for children unable to attend school. When I posed these changes to our hypothetical, my colleagues laughed and asked, “Where are we? In paradise?” “No, we are in Italy,” I would reply. This example illustrated more clearly than any string of data points the differences that can be made by robust and responsive social-welfare policies.

I anticipated challenges to my assessments of the relative benefits of social welfare versus free-market approaches. Anyone who surfs the web or listens to the news understands the philosophical and political divide between those who advocate social-welfare spending and those who condemn it as a waste of money and a drain on a nation’s economy. However, at the start of my project, the storyline seemed straightforward. It would be a tale of two systems—one committed to social-welfare rights and the betterment of society through public support of the vulnerable, and the other committed to individual rights and betterment of society through personal freedom and market competition.

What I did not anticipate when I started my project was the bursting in 2008 of the US housing bubble and the near-collapse of American financial markets. Economic crisis and soaring inequality revealed the fragility and vulnerability of social environments and social policies, much as global warming and species extinctions have exposed the fragility of our natural environments. Humankind has clearly overestimated the resilience of forests and oceans when exposed to stressors created by industrialization and technological change, and the same may be true of the resilience of humans when exposed to economic and social stressors. Common sense tells us that even the strongest organism is susceptible to the toxic effects of a degraded ecosystem. The more vulnerable the organism, the greater the harm. This is what I see happening to the ecology of childhood.

When Wall Street crashed, I did not foresee the effects this would have on children in Italy. I should have known better. As the Italians like to say, “When the United States sneezes, Italy catches pneumonia.” There were certain obvious differences between the economies and cultures of the two countries. Granted, Italy had a rather high national debt in comparison to its GDP, and Italy’s greedy political class had been spending way beyond its means. But the Italian people, unlike the people in the United States, had avoided a housing bubble and had a high rate of personal savings and very little consumer debt. The bedrock of the Italian economy was not big banks and multinationals, but small family businesses and traditional farms. It was not long, however, before the spillover effects of our Great Recession triggered an even deeper economic crisis in Europe. By 2009, Italy was in deep trouble (Coletto 2010).

Differences between the two countries have become more pronounced in the wake of the crisis. In the United States, the Republican Party’s focus on reducing the national debt and opposition to government spending on social programs and infrastructure prevented the robust response many experts contended was needed to overcome the effects of the crisis. The size of the Obama administration’s initial fiscal stimulus was limited, and subsequent developments, including the “Sequester,” resulted in deep cuts to social programs that were not strong to begin with.

As my research project progressed, the political environment in both Italy and the United States evolved rapidly and in unexpected directions. In the United States, the Obama administration (2009–17) had managed to enact and defend the Affordable Care Act against strong pushback from Republicans. Advocates for stronger social-welfare programs and greater investment in infrastructure and trade expected that the election of 2016 would strengthen their hand. Instead, front-runner Hillary Clinton won the popular vote but lost the Electoral College, for reasons too complicated and clouded in mystery to address in these pages. Donald Trump’s anti-elitist, anti-immigrant, and anti-trade messages hit a nerve among voters who had suffered during the recession and demanded radical change. With promises to “drain the swamp” in Washington, DC, create jobs, and enact tax cuts for the middle class, real-estate magnate Donald Trump carried several postindustrial “rust belt” states that had traditionally gone to Democrats. In its first six months, the Trump administration, despite the distraction of the “Russiagate” investigation, acted aggressively to clamp down on immigration and to suspend, repeal, or obstruct many of the social-welfare programs of the Obama administration. The Trump administration’s first budget proposed drastic cuts to social welfare programs, including health care, nutrition assistance, public housing, and public education. Critics claimed that these cuts, rather than increasing efficiency, would increase the national debt while giving massive tax cuts to the very rich.

In Italy, meanwhile, during the first years of the recession, there was no stimulus to counter rising economic distress. Italy could not use deficit spending or monetary policy to cushion the shocks of recession because Italy had no control over the euro, which is controlled by the EU. Instead, austerity measures, forced upon the Italian leadership by Germany and other fiscal conservatives in the EU, were the only tools available. By 2014, it had become increasingly clear that these austerity measures were tearing at the very fabric of the Italian society that I had been studying. Existing social welfare programs had been slashed, and even commitments that were explicitly embedded in the Italian constitution, including protections for workers and families and rights to education and health care, were on the chopping block. While the United States was slowly climbing out of recession, the EU was still deep in crisis. Italy was seen as one of the EU’s sickest members, with a youth unemployment rate twenty points higher than the average among euro currency countries. As of 2016, the youth unemployment rate in the United States had fallen to 10.9 percent while in Italy it was at 38.3 percent (World Bank: Unemployment, youth total 2016).

In a rapid succession of new governments, a string of different Italian leaders tried to unite the country behind a policy that would relieve the fiscal crisis and turn the economy around. By April 2017, Italy declared that the recession was at last over, but the country, hampered by lingering political and economic stressors, was still struggling to catch up to other EU nations. The Movimento Cinque Stelle (Five Star Movement), an upstart left-of-center populist party founded by Italian comedian Beppe Grillo, had dominated many of the headlines and captured the popular imagination of many dissatisfied citizens. The crisis also strengthened a right-wing, fiercely anti-immigrant separatist movement, called the Lega del Nord (the Northern League), which originated in the northern provinces. In Italy’s March 2018 elections, these two antiestablishment parties won half of the vote in what observers characterize as a “wake-up call” for the European establishment (Mazzini 2018).

In addition to the economic crisis, another development has complicated my storyline. In the past decade, the study of the relative roles of nature and nurture has been revolutionized. Scientists have learned that exposure to social and physical trauma can inflict permanent brain damage and even result in changes to the victims’ genes—changes that are transmitted to succeeding generations (National Scientific Council on the Developing Child 2010; Delude 2014). We once drew lines between nature and nurture, or the effects of genetics and effects of environment. During the past decade, scientists have made quantum leaps in the study of how physical and social environments affect child development. We already knew that a healthy childhood begins long before birth and even before conception and that we had to address the health of future parents if we wanted healthy children.

Recently, however, scientists have discovered unimagined ways in which environment and nature interact to shape human development. Epidemiologists, neuroscientists, and other developmental scientists have established a correlation between adverse experiences in childhood (ACEs) and the risk of poor health and social outcomes in childhood and adulthood (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention 2010; Landrigan 2016). ACEs include domestic and neighborhood violence, sexual abuse, separation from caregivers, parental divorce or separation, and various other traumas. While adverse experiences are not uncommon for children, multiple such experiences can reach a toxic level. If such compounded trauma is not attended to, children may not just heal and get on with their lives. ACEs do not dictate consequences etched in stone; fostering resilience can counteract the effects. But without purposeful and strong support, the effects of trauma—especially during the period of explosive brain development in early childhood—can lead to lasting and quantifiable damage to individuals and to society. Thanks to the work of biologists and neurologists, we now also understand that the DNA of an individual is not set at birth; it is actually vulnerable to mutations due to adverse conditions, just as it can be positively affected by a supportive environment. Neurologists can now map changes in the human brain as it develops and can show the actual effects of trauma and adversity on the architecture of the developing brain (National Scientific Council on the Developing Child 2010; Delude 2014).

These discoveries, in both the economic and scientific spheres, call into question some widespread conceptions of the individual as an autonomous, discrete organism operating freely in an environment where the major variable is individual merit and strength of character. The reality is inescapable: social and political developments and these scientific discoveries affirm the importance of an environmental perspective on the study of childhood. Any such inquiry must begin by recognizing the role played by intimate physical and social environments, but must extend to macro forces such as...