George Bush knows how to talk about children. With a sure sense of childhood’s mythology, of skinned knees and candy apples and first bicycles, he campaigned for office in a swarm of jolly grandchildren and promised justice for all. In this year’s State of the Union address, he mentioned families and “kids” more than 30 times — the electronic equivalent of kissing babies on the village green. “To the children out there tonight,” he declared as he built to his finale, “with you rests our hope, all that America will mean in the years ahead. Fix your vision on a new century — your century, on dreams you cannot see, on the destiny that is yours and yours alone.” Forget the next century. Just consider for a moment a single day’s worth of destiny for American children. Every eight seconds of the school day, a child drops out. Every 26 seconds, a child runs away from home. Every 47 seconds, a child is abused or neglected. Every 67 seconds, a teenager has a baby. Every seven minutes, a child is arrested for a drug offense. Every 36 minutes, a child is killed or injured by a gun. Every day 135,000 children bring their guns to school. Even children from the most comfortable surroundings are at risk. A nation filled with loving parents has somehow come to tolerate crumbling schools and a health-care system that caters to the rich and the elderly rather than to the young. A growing number of parents with preschool children are in the workplace, but there is still no adequate system of child care, and parental leaves are hard to come by. Mothers and fathers worry about the toxic residue left from too much television, too many ghastly movies, too many violent video games, too little discipline. They wonder how to raise children who are strong and imaginative and loving. They worry about the possibility that their children will grow wild and distant and angry. Perhaps they fear most that they will get the children they deserve. “Children who go unheeded,” warns Harvard psychiatrist Robert Coles, giving voice to a parent’s guilty nightmare, “are children who are going to turn on the world that neglected them.” And that anger will come when today’s children are old enough to realize how relentlessly their needs were ignored. They will see that their parents and grandparents have left them enormous debts and a fouled environment. They will recognize that their exceptionally prosperous, peaceful, lucky predecessors, living out the end of the millennium, were not willing to make the investments necessary to ensure that the generation to follow could enjoy the same blessings. The natural case for taking better care of children would be made on moral grounds alone. A society cannot sacrifice its most vulnerable citizens without eroding its sense of community and making a lie of its principles. But having been left behind by a decade of political shortcuts, child advocates have < adopted a more practical strategy. "If compassion were not enough to encourage our attention to the plight of our children," declares New York Governor Mario Cuomo, "self-interest should be." Marian Wright Edelman, the crusading founder of the Children's Defense Fund, goes further. "The inattention to children by our society," she warns, "poses a greater threat to our safety, harmony and productivity than any external enemy."
