Charting the Way to a World Fit for Children

Chapter thirteen focuses on small world strategies for building a new macrosystem. It proposes specific ways in which each individual can engage in positive action beginning at the local levels of family, community, municipality and region. After reviewing some big ideas that shaped this grassroots approach, including vulnerability theory, developmental equality theory, and environmental principles of sustainability and the circular economy, the author highlights six specific forms of action and illustrates them with real world examples: (1) promoting a culture of respect for children’s voices; (2) building support for a children’s rights approach; (3) building child-friendly cities, towns and communities; (4) building support for combatting climate change; (5) working to repopulate villages and farming communities one family at a time; and (6) mobilizing our individual civil rights to vote, march and litigate for change.

Building Small Worlds in Urban Spaces

Chapter twelve calls for a renewal of the “small is beautiful” movement and explores how the benefits of growing up in a village can be recreated in urban settings. The author presents E. F. Schumacher’s 1973 book Small is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered, and its relationship to contemporary concepts, such as sustainability and the circular economy. that focus on sustaining human-scaled communities rather than on growing the GDP. The author describes and compares two initiatives that mobilize the strength of collaborative community to benefit at risk children and youth. The first is set in the city of Naples, in southern Italy, where a parish priest named Antonio Loffredo tapped the energy and aspirations of young people to build a collaborative community cooperative in an inner city neighbourhood called La Sanita’, as an alternative to the lure of organized crime. The second is the Harlem Children’s Zone (HCZ), founded in the historically black neighbourhood of New York City by Geoffrey Canada, to prove that black children, given a fair start, could achieve the American dream. While similar in many ways, each initiative was shaped by and reflects the macrosystemic values of the surrounding culture.

The Magic of Mesosystems, Seedbeds of Solidarity

Chapter four explores how the activities and relationships occurring in the spaces where microsystems overlap function as seedbeds of solidarity, generating a shared sense of identity, fostering social cohesion and transforming “other people’s children” into “our children.” The author focuses on interactions among the primary social institutions comprising children’s microsystems: family, faith community, school, peer group, and neighbourhood. Drawing on observations from the villages under study, the author illustrates the dynamic created when these social institutions cooperate, collaborate and even engage in friendly competition in support of the community’s children. The chapter highlights the role of rituals and traditions in building community identity and solidarity in both villages. It explores how village identity can endure across time and distance in migrants’ attachments to their home towns. In closing, it predicts further erosion of community identity due to global economic policies and divisive political movements.

Falling Birth Rates and Rural Depopulation

Chapter five moves from ethnography at the village level to examine the demographics of declining fertility and rural depopulation plaguing many affluent nations. A failure of generational renewal threatens the well-being of individuals, communities and societies. With the story of a child who is the last child in his remote Italian village, the author illustrates the critical importance of children to each other and to their communities. After introducing demographic concepts such as birth rate and replacement rate, total fertility rate and replacement rate fertility, the book discusses the low birth rate crisis in Italy where the population is declining at an unsustainable rate. It examines factors affecting birth rates, including adolescent fertility rate, mother’s marital status, percentage of women in the workforce, and gendered division of domestic labour. In comparison with Italy, US birth rates have been relatively robust; however, after the Great Recession US birth rates declined steadily and are now well below replacement rate. The chapter closes with discussion of the interplay between politics and demographics, including rules on birth right citizenship, the role of immigration in rejuvenating populations, and the misuse of demographic data to fuel anti-immigrant, sectarian, and racial conflict.

Tools for Studying Childhood

Chapter two discusses the models, methods and value metrics used in this book. It presents the ecological model developed by sociologist Urie Bronfenbrenner, which places the child at the center of overlapping and intersecting microsystems (e.g., family, school, peer group) where children’s daily lives unfold. Encircling these microsystems are layers of exosystems (e.g., healthcare, justice systems and labor markets) where children may rarely go but that powerfully affect them. Surrounding and permeating the entire ecological diagram are macrosystemic forces, defined as the dominant ideas, values, prejudices, and powers of the surrounding society. The primary methods or frameworks for analysis deployed in the book are comparative legal method, sociology, ethnography and an environmentalist perspective, incorporating ideas like sustainability and the precautionary principle of avoiding harm. However, evaluating outcomes requires identifying a value system. Drawing on the work of Erik Erikson, the book proposes ecogenerism, a value system that treats the meeting of children’s essential needs and the welfare of succeeding generations as the paramount goals of society. The chapter closes with a description of how and why the two villages, Scanno, Italy and Cedar Key, Florida, were chosen to serve as petri dishes for comparative ethnographic study.

How the CRC Affects Actual Children’s Lives

Chapter eleven uses stories drawn from the author’s field work in Italy to rebut the charge that the CRC makes no difference in the lives of real world children. These narratives explore how specific CRC rights, including the right to play, the right to participation in civic life, the right to be heard in judicial and administrative proceedings, the rights of children accused of crimes, the right to education, the rights to identity and family, the right to adoption, and the right to inclusion of children with disabilities, have changed the lives of specific children. The author explores the connections between these children’s stories and Italy’s ratification and implementation of the CRC and how the CRC’s principles have played out in application. These examples show how a truly rights regarding macrosystem can change the ecology of childhood from the bottom up, by influencing family and community culture, as well as from the top down, by changing laws and policies.

The Great Recession Crosses the Atlantic

Chapter eight follows the economic crisis as it spreads to Europe. While the U.S. was only moderately affected, between 2008 and 2012 the worst hit European countries suffered spikes in child poverty greater than in any political or economic crisis since World War II. Children experienced declines in nutrition, life satisfaction, while levels of stress and the percentage of youth not in education employment or training (NEETs) rose dramatically. The chapter explains how the financial crisis flowed through the transmission channels of banking, labor markets and the public sector, flooding downstream to create household impact, in rising joblessness and unravelling safety nets, producing direct impact on children and youth. Unlike the U.S., Eurozone countries could not deploy monetary and fiscal policies that might have mitigated the impact on children. Instead, the EU imposed drastic austerity measures, forcing cuts in welfare and pensions and increases in taxes. A backlash followed in both the U.S. and Europe, fuelling nationalist movements like Trump’s America First, U.K.’s Brexit, and Italy’s anti-immigrant Northern League. The continuing legacy of recession is captured in current statistics on five “childhood enders”—infant mortality, malnutrition, school leaving, violence and children having children.

Children of the Great American Recession

Chapter seven examines the effects of the Great Recession on U.S. children. It opens with a discussion of various methods for measuring national well-being. Each measure, from Gross Domestic Product and the Global Competitiveness Index to the Human Development Index, the GINI Index of inequality, reflects different priorities. In measuring changes in child well-being, poverty is a key factor. The author reviews leading methods for measuring child poverty, including absolute versus relative benchmarks, market child poverty versus poverty after government benefits, the poverty gap between children and other groups, and boundaries between poverty and extreme poverty. In measuring changes in child well-being, in addition to poverty, researchers study food insecurity, housing instability, health-care gaps, and child maltreatment. In each category, the author uses a comparative lens to explore the long term effects of recession and the national response in the U.S. and Europe. At the macro level, national “politics”—defined as the authoritative allocation of values and distribution of rewards in wealth, power, and status—shaped the government response. The author documents the U.S. government’s failure to address rising levels of child poverty, malnutrition, homelessness, infant and maternal mortality, and child maltreatment associated with the recession.

The Role of Family-Supportive Policies in the Decision to Have Children

Chapter six explores the relationship between declining birth rates and family supportive policies. Research on the social construction of parenthood shows that Italians continue to desire children and see parenthood as an important and fulfilling role. Disincentives to childbearing include economic insecurity, escalating costs of childrearing, and insufficient funding of family supportive policies. Rather than avoiding parental responsibility, fathers are increasingly involved in childrearing and grandparents and extended family provide significant caregiving support. The author’s field observations in the village of Scanno confirm the positive involvement of fathers, extended family, and the community in childrearing. The principle of duty on the part of government to protect and support families is embedded in the Italian Constitution, so there is broad support for policies such as universal healthcare, paid parenting leave, subsidized day care and early childhood education, and cash subsidies for families raising children. In the United States, traditions favouring individualism and assigning responsibility for childrearing to the private family have blocked the development of universal, family-supportive policies. Despite its wealth, the U.S. lags far behind peer nations in providing public support during early childhood, exacerbating inequalities between rich and poor children.

Globalization

Chapter nine identifies the elephant in the room—the threat to children’s well-being posed by globalization. While recognizing the many benefits of globalism, the author identifies six damaging phenomena related to globalization that are degrading the ecology of childhood. These threats are (1) unrestrained capitalism, (2) runaway technological revolution, (3) rising inequality, (4) mass migration, (5) racial and ethnic conflict, and (6) the apocalyptic crisis of climate change. The author shows how these phenomena, far from being distant and abstract from children’s lives, are affecting every level of the ecology of childhood, from the microsystems of family life to the macrosystems that shape national and global agendas. Collectively, these phenomena are responsible for many of the problems already highlighted in the book, including deteriorating wages and working conditions for parents, diminished opportunity for young people to start families, the trauma of family separation and forced migration, and unconscionable rates of child poverty even in rich countries. These troubling developments, if unrecognized and unaddressed, threaten children’s cognitive and social development, undercut intergenerational solidarity, and increase children’s vulnerability to illness, natural disaster and environmental degradation.