I’ve been feeling very ranty and argumentative lately. It must be the heat or that I’m not writing academic papers anymore. Here’s another brain dump for ya.
I read a timely study this morning about how childhood adversity changes a person’s brain – like the structure of it and the way it operates. I say this is timely because just last night I had a friendly conversation about the personal responsibility vs. social support debate. I feel very strongly that as a society, we need to provide safety nets and social support, and my position comes from personal experience as much as from reading studies like the one I read this morning.
Like I explained last night, I come from a working class family and I identify very strongly with the working class, even though I have an advanced degree and sit in front of a computer hardly working all day. I say that I hardly work not because I don’t do what I’m supposed to do at work. I do research and produce reports and make fancy spreadsheets, but compared to the work I’ve done (and the work other people do everyday), this is not hard work. And I’ve noticed that each job I get as I move up the social strata gets easier and nicer, which is actually very troubling to me. Like I deserve good benefits, a decent wage, a flexible schedule, and nice working conditions because I have a degree, and those people without a degree don’t deserve these nice things. We are valued differently as human beings, which I find morally repugnant.
And I really hate it when people say that if you just work hard, you’ll “make it” because I’ve known lots of people who work very hard all their lives and never make it. The reasons people struggle all their lives has nothing to do with how hard they work. It does have something to do with opportunities, which is something I don’t think people really understand. We assume that people think the same way we do and grow up in the same type of culture as ours and then can’t understand why people don’t respond to things the same way we do.
So this study I read, which came out of the Psychology Department at Harvard, shows that kids who come from adversity don’t perceive rewards as positively as kids who don’t have a background full of adversity. So basically their brains no longer recognize positive experiences as being positive (or not as much as other people). We already know that kids experiencing adversity are more likely to be diagnosed with mental illness, but the kids in this study had not been diagnosed. These kids were adjusting relatively well, but their brain scans still showed marked differences in the way they responded to positive experiences. I don’t think I need to explain the consequences this could have on a person’s (especially a young person’s) life, but you can imagine that it has the potential to snowball pretty quickly. Yet we expect these kids to somehow pick themselves up by the bootstraps and behave the way we want them to even though we have abandoned them at every turn.
I worked in a middle and elementary school for a very brief time and got just a glimpse into the lives of “disadvantaged” kids, and I learned a lot about how different people’s lives can be. I once asked a girl how many siblings she had, and she had a hard time answering that question. She had to sit down and count all of her brothers and sisters – some lived with her and some didn’t. Her parents were not together, and each had multiple children with multiple partners. I think her final estimate was something like 12 or 13. At 12 years old, she got pregnant. Wonder why. I asked another boy where he lived, which was also not quite as straightforward as I had assumed because he lived wherever there was a place for him to stay at any given time. I was amazed that some of these kids were even able to make it to school on a regular basis.
People who grew up in stable homes assume that most parents are basically there for their kids. You hear about deadbeat dads and parents not being involved enough in kid’s lives, but the number of drug-addicted parents all but abandoning kids is astounding. These kids grow up in poverty, go to crappy schools, are raised on the streets, often by gangs, and then we wonder why they can’t just get jobs and be productive members of society. These kids are victims of a society that allows them to fall through the cracks and then punishes them for not abiding by laws that never protected them in the first place. Laws do not protect poor people. They protect rich people from poor people. And the social support systems we do have are good, but they’re like sticking a finger in a leaky dyke. They rarely address the underlying causes of social problems; they just put band-aids on symptoms.
And I do empathize. I grew up pretty darn poor. Neither of my parents graduated from college, and they couldn’t support me financially when I decided that I wanted to go. I worked full-time, paid all my own bills, and by some act of God, managed to graduate with good grades. And you know what? It was hard, but my parents were very supportive in other ways, and they were highly involved in my life growing up. They instilled certain values in me, and took interest in my development in a way that many parents do not. So even though I can relate to how difficult economic stress can be, I know I still had it better than most.
And sometimes I do resent kids whose parents pay for every penny of college and then give them spending money so they don’t have to work. College campuses are awash with rich kids who don’t work hard, graduate with crappy grades, and then believe that they are entitled to a job that pays them well and has all kinds of perks and benefits. Meanwhile, working class people work their asses off and are forced to accept substandard working and living conditions just because they’re poor, which I think should be a crime. Clearly, I’m not hiding my biases here. Of course there are rich kids who work hard and appreciate what they have and are good people, and there are poor kids who slack off and don’t care about anything, but they aren’t the ones I’m really worried about. It’s that we expect poor kids to think, learn, and behave like rich kids even though they have vastly fewer resources upon which to draw.
So what’s my point? Wild tangents are brewing, and I’m all over the place, so I’ll try to reign this in before it gets out of hand.
I guess I should conclude with what I think can be done about this mess, but even that gets sticky once you look at our political climate. Bleeding heart liberals (like me) want to see a comprehensive support system and a welfare state in order to “lift all the boats.” Hearts of ice conservatives preach personal responsibility and consequences. And somewhere in the middle is the system we have – a system of compromise between two political parties, where the liberals get what they want by having social programs and the conservatives get what they want by putting limits and restrictions on these programs. Win-win, right? Well, except that while these programs help people in the short-term, they rarely help people in the long-term, and they certainly don’t address underlying causes.
And I guess that’s why I’m a Green. We don’t accept comprises if it means that the root of the problem goes unaddressed. We don’t like band-aids nearly as much as we like antibiotics. And truth be told, even antibiotics aren’t proactive enough, but I risk sounding like a hippie if I start talking about wholesome food to nourish our bodies, but that’s really where the analogy should go. The wholesome food is healthy communities, where I think we have to start. The solutions to these problems are disturbingly basic. It’s like we forget that a safe neighborhood, decent housing, and a good education is a good start. Instead, we run expensive tests on kid’s brains to show that growing up with adversity, adversely affects kids. No kidding.
