Our Kids: The American Dream in Crisis by Robert Putnam

Abstract

 2015 Children, Youth and Environments Children, Youth and Environments 25(2), 2015 Book Reviews Our Kids: The American Dream in Crisis Robert Putnam (2015). New York: Simon & Schuster, 400 pages. $28.00 (hardcover); ISBN 978-1476769899. For those Americans who have been paying attention to children's welfare over the past several decades, these are sad times. The poverty rate among children in the USA, according to the Pew Research Center (DeSilver 2014), is approximately 22 percent (up from 14 percent in 1969); but this is just a number. In the course of day-to-day living, way too many American children experience systemic stress, indignity, and misery—in the form of poor nutrition, violent neighborhoods, jobless parents, and insultingly empty classroom testing. Perhaps most painful for these children is the absence, or improbability, of optimism—of seeing and living out a scenario in which things get better. Robert Putnam's book Our Kids: The American Dream in Crisis explores the current state of American childhood, with a focus not so much on poverty per se, but on inequality and class: on the startling divisions between those children whose homes provide the elements of a middle-class (or better) upbringing, in the form of energetic schooling, attentive parenting, extra-curricular activities and clubs, and supportive human networks, and those children who lack most or all of those advantages. The guiding narrative of Putnam's book is that these divisions did not always exist, at least with the same ferocity, in American society. He begins his book with a look back at his own hometown of Port Clinton, Michigan, in 1959, the year that he graduated high school. His high school classmates were not free of doubt, or stress, but as a group they did not exhibit nearly the same bimodal distribution of opportunity. Even the less advantaged among the 1959 Port Clinton high school kids could look forward to a strong possibility of a well-lived life. There is much to learn from, and a great deal to admire in, Putnam's book. It gives voice to children in widely divergent circumstances, and in doing so performs an urgent service. It is a thoughtful and at times painful discussion of issues that are key to understanding American (and probably Western) society in general. At the same time, it feels crucially incomplete in its treatment and analysis of these issues. The book is in fact a frustrating subject for review. It is praiseworthy and disappointing; important and maddeningly incremental; scholarly, but hobbled by its patterns of selective attention and language. I recommend the book warmly, and fervently hope that it gets an attentive reading among educational policymakers ; but if that's all that happens, if the book is only successful on its own Book Reviews 291 terms, my own anxieties on behalf of American children will not be, I'm afraid, much assuaged. ********** Our Kids alternates, structurally, between what might be called close-up and bird'seye views. In the former, Putnam recounts interviews with families (or individual youngsters) at different strata of the American class system. Children from AfricanAmerican , Latino, and white families are interviewed (generally along with their parents), and the families vary geographically as well. A recurring theme among these interviews is the centrality of class, represented (as Putnam explains) roughly but reliably in the division between parents with or without a college education. Other factors matter in the lives of children—race, for example. Still, as Putnam's interviews with three black families in and around Atlanta illustrate, even within a particular racial group, class divisions loom large. At the upper-middle-class end, parents Simone and Carl and their son Desmond exemplify a style of parenting that would be familiar to better-off families all around the country: Desmond recalls that education was a priority for his mom, too. ‘She used to give me these workbooks, like Hooked on Phonics,’ he says, ‘and I would sit at the table before dinner, or maybe after dinner, and do work.’ The emphasis his parents put on education made Desmond take for granted that he would continue his education after high school and become a professional. ‘I always thought...