The children's suicides

Fascinating interview in Saturday's New York Times with the writer A.S. Byatt on her new novel, The Children's Book. The central character is a writer of children's books, and Byatt says the idea of the novel came to her because she had been thinking about how child-rearing changed in the late-Victorian era.

“People began talking to their children as people,” Byatt tells interviewer Charles McGrath. “They even took tea with them. That’s a change — you wouldn’t find it in Dickens or Jane Austen. And this also coincides with Freud’s deciding that everything comes from childhood and discovering all sorts of little dark things there, even if they weren’t true.”

I don't know much about that, but her comment made me instantly interested. Then I read on a few more grafs, and found this: Byatt says she was struck by “all the children of the children’s writers who killed themselves."

Alison Uttley is one writer she mentions, who wrote stories about rabbits and hedgehogs. Her son grew up and married a woman Uttley didn't like. The son drove his car off of a cliff.

Where are the fathers?

Time and again, I've noted studies and situations in which I was surprised to find little or no discussion of fathers. But I'm still surprised and, shocked, I guess, when I see new examples of it.

The American Bar Association, according to the University of Houston's Children and the Law blog, is holding two meetings in Washington in May: The First National Parents' Attorneys Conference, and The 2009 National Conference on Children and the Law.

I did not do a sophisticated study of the programs; I merely searched the titles and abstracts for the word "father." I found only one instance, on a long, long web page. It was in a session about getting fathers more involved in welfare cases. In other words, the only mention of fathers was in a situation where fathers are delinquent.

I must add a very important caveat; the word "mother" does not appear at all in the document, which talks mostly about parents. So this isn't the clean example I'd like it to be. Still, I worry. Is the ABA, in its deliberations and discussions about children and the law, including fathers as a resource?

Octuplets story takes a dark turn

CBS News has reported that the family of the California octuplets had abandoned a home and filed for bankruptcy a year-and-a-half ago.

It is also widely being reported that the mother of the octuplets, whose identity hasn't been revealed, already had six children, between about two and seven years old.

The bankrupt woman, who is also apparently homeless, now has 14 children under eight years old.

The birth of the octuplets was not planned, but it also was not an accident. According to reports, she had eight embryos implanted in her womb.

Although it's tempting to judge this woman, we should resist. We don't know the facts yet, and it's likely we will learn more in the coming days.

But she was evidently in the care of a fertility specialist. If you're tempted to judge that specialist, go ahead--give in. It's even clearer now than it was when I first posted on this story: This is a case, if not of malpractice, than of a serious error in medical judgment.

Consider the future for these children. They weighed about one to three pounds each. According to a fact sheet from the March of Dimes, babies weighing less than 2 pounds, 3 ounces will "require treatment with oxygen, surfactant and mechanical assistance to help them breathe" and because they are too young to suck, they must be fed intravenously. It continues: "About 25 percent of these very premature babies develop serious lasting disabilities, and up to half may have milder problems, such as learning and behavioral problems."

They are also at risk for respiratory distress, bleeding in the brain, heart failure, severe intestinal disease, blindness, anemia, and infections.

The birth, first reported as a medical miracle, is, in truth, a tragedy.

Bailing out the economy--and children

The Washington Post reports today that requests for state health insurance for children are soaring in the Washington, D.C. area. From the Post's story:

The increases are particularly pronounced in the region's largest and wealthiest jurisdictions as employers cut benefits and eliminate jobs. In Fairfax County, for instance, requests for the state's insurance program for children, Family Access to Medical Insurance Security (FAMIS), were up 16 percent between November 2007 and November 2008. In Alexandria, caseloads increased 20 percent, and in Loudoun, they were up 16.5 percent.

It's not just the poorest families that can no longer afford insurance. The House has just passed an expansion of the state children's health insurance programs, and the Senate will look at the issue soon. President-elect Barack Obama has said he will sign it.

The Post's story today suggests that health care reform should not take a back seat to financial and auto-company bailouts. Interestingly, in last week's otherwise discouraging Labor Department unemployment figures, health care was one of only two industries that actually added jobs last month.

The new administration has a chance to boost an industry--health care--that not only is doing well, but directly affects our children.

Interestingly, the other industry that also added jobs last month--at a time when the nation lost 524,000 jobs overall--was education. That's another that is aimed directly at our children.

Boosting spending for children would be a wonderful way to stimulate the economy.

Unemployment rate at 16-year high

As of Friday's Labor Department report, 11.1 million Americans are unemployed, 50 percent more than a year ago.

The unemployment rate is now higher than at any time since the end of the administration of George Bush, Sr., 16 years ago.

The New York Times leads the paper with this story this morning and devotes an entire inside page to analyzing the consequences, the effects on the economy, and so on. Our concern here, however, is the effect on fathers, mothers--and especially children.

Every lost job represents another family that could tumble into poverty. And the consequences of poverty on children have been well documented. Poor children are more likely to drop out of school, get involved in crime, abuse drugs or alcohol, and wind up in jail.

Recessions and unemployment have real consequences for parents and children. Sometimes it's important to take the smaller, family-level view, than to focus exclusively on the economic statistics and forecasts.

The greedy Wall Street financiers whose reckless lending and fraud caused this collapse--and the government regulators who failed to stop them--deserve the blame for what happens to perhaps millions of children, whose opportunities are--right now--being snatched away from them.

Latest figures on kids in juvenile detention

The Justice Department has just released its latest figures on the number of American children held in detention.

The figures date from 2004. (It's now 2009, five years later; apparently collecting figures on juvenile detention was a very low priority in the Bush Justice Department.) They show that 94,875 children under 21 were being held in 2,809 detention centers. Fewer than half of the centers are publicly operated, but they held more than two-thirds of the juvenile offenders.

Of those 2,809 detention centers, 860--or 31 percent--were at or over their capacity, or relied on makeshift beds.

The facilities reported 27 deaths over 12 months, of which 16 were suicides.

Cheerleading Dad

Thanks to my buddy Deborah Siegel at Girl With Pen for the heads-up on this video. It's funny, and who could disagree with the message? But it sparked some unfavorable--and understandable--concern at Girl With Pen.

Watch the video and let me know what you think: Is a government campaign to push responsible fatherhood (a Bush initiative, as it turns out) a good idea?