Our Kids: The American Dream in Crisis

Philadelphia is another city that illustrates the growing class disparity. The contrasting depictions of the city in The Philadelphia Story and Rocky has grown even more stark. Social resources and neighborhood challenges vary greatly between higher-income and lower-income communities.

Higher-income parents typically have a wide range of “weak ties”—casual acquaintances in a variety of areas—who can benefit their children. Lower-income individuals usually lack these ties and rely more heavily on family and neighbors for support. In some cases, religious institutions can provide support for lower-income families, but those families are increasingly detached from religious institutions. 

In culture, society, and politics, we have swung toward the individualist, or libertarian pole and away from a focus on community, even as researchers have found that community is important to our well-being and kids’ opportunities. Social connectedness is important to well-being, but less educated Americans have more “redundant” (207) social networks—their friends know the same people they do, so they have less connections to potentially provide mentoring or support. Lower-class Americans tend to be socially isolated today. More educated Americans have wider, more diverse networks of acquaintances and other connections. These connections can often help their kids when looking for organized activities, internships, and other opportunities. They also often function as informal advisors on career paths, college majors, and other decisions. Kids in upper-class families, in turn, make more connections of this type themselves. Connections with working-class neighbors who are struggling to make ends meet are less valuable today than when they had good jobs and could refer friends to them. 

As for whether there is a “digital divide” (211), most everyone has access to the internet today, but not everyone benefits equally from that access. Upper-class individuals “use the internet for jobs, education, political and social engagement, health, and news gathering” (212). Poorer individuals tend to use it primarily for entertainment or recreation.

As for mentoring, poorer families typically have less access to informal mentors today. Formal mentoring—such as Big Brothers Big Sisters and My Brother’s Keeper—is sometimes available and can be helpful, but it is less common and less enduring than informal mentoring. As a result of having more significant and more lasting mentoring, upper-class kids are savvier about what they need to do to succeed in school and otherwise.

As for neighborhoods, just like growing up in a poor family and going to school with poor kids, living around poor families also constrains opportunities, particularly in infancy and in late adolescence. Because there is less social cohesion in those neighborhoods, there is less “communal parenting” (218) to help all the young people in the neighborhood. Social trust is also a key indicator of well-being, and more lower-class individuals are distrustful of others.

Involvement in a religious community also has positive benefits, academically and otherwise. Traditionally, there were few class differences in religious engagement, but “[n]owadays, however, poor families are generally less involved in religious communities” (224).

In this chapter, Putnam includes the profiles of two white families, “each headed by a single mom struggling to raise a pair of daughters amidst family turmoil and dissolution, grappling with issues of drugs, teen sex, and trouble in school” (192). Eleanor and Madeline live with their mother, Marnie, in an upper-middle-class area. Marnie was raised in Beverly Hills and went to an Ivy League college, and her ex-husband was a successful entrepreneur whose business failed and led to the couple’s divorce. The sisters had difficulty dealing with the divorce: Eleanor was diagnosed with severe depression and ADHD, and Madeline started using birth control in eighth grade when Marnie discovered that Madeline might become sexually active. Lisa and Amy live with their mother, Molly, in an overcrowded row house; the community used to be safe but is now riddled with drugs and violence. Molly is wheelchair-bound after suffering a stroke; Lisa became addicted to drugs and became pregnant during high school; and Amy was a promising musician, but she got involved with drugs and alcohol and also became pregnant in high school.

All sides in the debate over the future of upward mobility “agree on one thing”: “[A]s income inequality expands, kids from more privileged backgrounds start and probably finish further and further ahead of their less privileged peers, even if the rate of socioeconomic mobility is unchanged” (228). Moreover, given the growing class segregation, we are less aware how others live and therefore less empathetic. There are no villains, but these conditions also arise from social policies reflecting collective priorities.

Those who are toward the upper class should be concerned about the opportunity gap, because the “destiny of poor kids in America has broad implications for our economy, our democracy, and our values” (230). We need as much talent as we can find, and some talented lower-class kids will not get to develop their talents in the current state of affairs. There are opportunity costs to any social policy: If we pursue policies that increase social equity, for example, that comes at the cost of economic productivity. However, there is generally no downside to pursuing equality of opportunity: “[I]nvestment in poor kids raises the rate of growth for everyone, at the same time leveling the playing field in favor of poor kids” (230).

There is also a gap between the skills employers need and those that low-skilled workers have. Economic growth is increased when those low-skilled workers are employed. Today’s public debate sees this as a problem with schools, but this book lays out other causes of this problem. Assuming that promoting equality of opportunity is a valid goal, the question is when the costs of obtaining it are unacceptable. 

Upper-class individuals are more civically engaged and much more likely to vote, although the gap is narrowing in terms of other types of civic engagement, such as signing petitions and attending public meetings, because upper-class kids are becoming less involved in those activities at an even higher rate. If there is a gap in civic engagement, the political system becomes less representative of societal values as a whole, which leads to more political alienation. Those who are alienated from the community are the “most vulnerable to demagogic mass movements, such as Nazism, Fascism, Stalinism, or even McCarthyism” (239).

Religious and moral values also dictate that we should be helping the less fortunate. In terms of family structure, more effective contraception could reduce the number of single-parent families. Sustained economic revival for low-paid workers would also help, as would providing money to poor families in their children’s early years ($3,000 in the first five years). Programs to reduce incarceration for nonviolent crime and enhance rehabilitation could also help.

In terms of child development and parenting, more workplace flexibility and parental leave would help children to be raised by their own parents, which has positive effects. Increased access to high-quality day care would also help, as would professional coaching of poor parents on how to help a child’s development.

In terms of schools, “the most promising approaches in this domain involve moving kids, money, and/or teachers to different schools” (251). Publicly subsidized mixed-income housing would be one way to reduce residential segregation and thereby reduce the differences among schools. Poor kids moved to better schools generally do better. Investing more money in the schools in poorer neighborhoods could also help, by attracting and retaining better teachers and giving students more opportunities. It could also help to extend school hours to offer more extracurricular opportunities. It might also help to put social and health services in the schools serving poor children. Community groups could also help create charter schools or advocate for better schools. Catholic schools also produce high levels of achievement, even among poorer students. It would also help to have a more robust vocational education system for those students for whom college is not the best option, if the stigma were erased and students were provided adequate guidance. Increased funding of community colleges could also help, along with better student support and better connections to jobs and other local colleges.

In terms of community, making extracurricular activities available at no cost (eliminating “pay to play”) would help. Mentoring programs would also help, including church programs. Investing in poor neighborhoods and moving poor families to better neighborhoods would also improve communities. America’s poor kids are “our kids” (262). It is therefore our responsibility to help them.

For this book, Jennifer M. Silva “spent two years traveling across the United States interviewing young adults and their parents” (264). This type of qualitative research enhanced the quantitative research explained in the book. Silva conducted almost all the interviews featured in the book. The interviewers focused on young adults from age 18 to 22 to get a “glimpse into how these young adults were making sense of their childhoods and transitioning into their futures” (264). They also talked to at least one parent whenever possible.

Four-year-college graduates were classified as upper-middle-class, and parents with high-school educations were classified as lower- or working-class. Participants were offered $50 for their time, which upper-middle-class parents often refused but lower-class parents often used for immediate needs. They covered structured topics but also left room for narratives. The interviews were typically one to three hours with follow-up by phone or in person. Facebook ended up being the easiest way to keep in touch with working-class young adults, who moved a lot.

Because they wanted to pair subjects in the chapters who illustrated the contrast in that area, such as schools or the community or family life, many stories were left on the cutting room floor out of the total of 107 young adults and their parents who were interviewed. However, the goal was to offer a good cross-section of the country without introducing any substantive bias in the selection process. The narratives are meant as illustrations, however, not as proof. They are meant to illustrate the quantitative data included in the book, for which the author sometimes used publicly available data sets. The interviewers also talked to others in the communities where they profiled particular subjects.

Because of how they recruited subjects, they did not profile low-income kids who went to top universities, and they also did not capture poor kids who did not obtain a high school degree or GED, whose stories are often even more tragic than those profiled in the book. They also surveyed the author’s high school graduating class, and 68% completed it, and they were able to determine that the respondents were representative of the class as a whole. These classmates of the author were asked detailed, closed-ended questions and a few open-ended questions.