Why does the United States have so much contempt for its children? | Opinion

In the last few months, listening to politicians and experts discuss President Joe Biden’s Build Back Better plan, I kept asking myself: Why does the United States have so much contempt for children?

No other developed country provides so little for early childhood health, education, and welfare. And yet, too many Americans are opposed to the basic provisions the bill provides in order to reduce that gap, such as the enhanced child tax credit, mandated paid family leave, and support for early child care and universal prekindergarten.

Despite the claims of some politicians, our country can afford to care for children and their families. Not doing so is not only cruel but also economically irrational. Because — surprise! — children eventually grow up to be adults. And adverse events that occur during childhood can have substantial, detrimental effects on later mental and physical health. Similarly, children who take part in a good early education program are less likely to turn to crime as they grow up, diminishing human misery as well as saving future expenditures to fight crime and fund prisons.

Children who are well cared for propel the future economy; those who are not, drain it.

» READ MORE: Pennsylvania’s child care and staffing crisis, by the numbers

I am a psychoanalyst, and as I walk through the city, I see many people who are struggling, who need help. But all too often, we, as a nation, fail to acknowledge them.

And this, I think, is part of a much larger problem.

I believe that the tremendous emotional opposition to caring for our children has to do with our national character. Our country has long idealized rugged individualism and complete self-sufficiency. We do not like to admit that we need other people. We never want to admit that we need help, even when we do. We like to pretend we can manage everything ourselves, whether it’s raising a family or policing the world.

I see this in many patients — they need help and want help, but have trouble allowing themselves to ask for it or receive it.

Abhorrence of neediness is deeply embedded in our history and our culture — which is a problem when it comes to children, especially babies, who by nature are needy and dependent.

“Abhorrence of neediness is deeply embedded in our history and our culture — which is a problem when it comes to children.”

Just look at the qualities we admire in babies. I teach an anthropology course on childhood and have learned that Americans want babies to stop being needy much faster than in most other cultures: We prefer babies who walk and talk early, sleep through the night alone, and feed themselves. We make little provision for parents to miss work when babies or children need extra care because they are ill.

So how does this contempt for neediness affect our politics, to the disadvantage of our children and our economy? On a deep, unacknowledged level, many Americans consider those who need assistance as morally inferior, and therefore undeserving of assistance. We withhold help from new parents, the poor, and the sick. We are the only large, rich country without universal health care, and our poverty rate is the highest of any developed country. And our children bear the biggest brunt of our hidden hostility. (By contrast, the wealthy, who aren’t the least bit needy, are frequently rewarded with tax breaks, subsidies, and the benevolent assumption that their wealth is derived from individual, self-sufficient hard work.)

In our hyperemphasis on self-sufficiency, large swaths of our population, and an even larger proportion of our politicians, feel that taking care of each other, especially our children, detracts from personal responsibility and verges on radical socialism. Yet humans depend on collective action for survival. Unless we can work together, the health and welfare of our children, and therefore of us all, will fall further behind other societies that collectively value caring for each other more than we do.

If we truly want our country to be great, we need to provide for our children so they can grow up to be successful adults. When we fail to invest in our children, we undermine our future. The future will belong, instead, to those countries who better love, feed, care for, educate, and protect their children.

Lawrence Blum is a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst. He teaches in the departments of anthropology and psychiatry at the University of Pennsylvania and at the Psychoanalytic Center of Philadelphia.