What emerges is a portrait of a generation living in fear. The security of their parents’ generation, and the optimistic view of the future, is no longer taken for granted by today’s young people. For them, the poll found, the American Dream may be dying. Only one third of the children surveyed believed they would be financially better off than their parents. Many had anxieties their parents could never have imagined: of guns, drugs, divorce, poverty or finding themselves without health insurance. And although the responses were most dramatic in urban centers, the interviews underscore how deeply violence, or the fear of it, permeates the lives of children, not just in inner cities, but also in small towns and suburbs across America.
Asked what concerns them and their families most, adults and children say they fear:
CHILDREN PARENTS 56% Violent crime 73% against family member 53% An adult losing a job 60% 43% Not being able to afford food 47% 51% Not being able to afford a doctor 61% 47% Not being able to afford shelter 50% 38% Family member having 57% drug problem 38% Their family won’t stay together 33%
“I’m shocked at how many kids have grown-up worries,” said Sharon Daly, Children’s Defense Fund director of government and community affairs. “We think they should only have to worry about their algebra test.”
Some feel lucky just to make it to school. Reflecting a measure of violence almost unimaginable a generation ago, one in five children polled said they don’t feel safe walking in their neighborhoods after dark. And while most feel “very safe” at school, just 45 percent of their parents agree. Not surprisingly, fears soared in minority, urban and poor communities. But even rural America, where unlocked doors were once commonplace, is not immune. Only 31 percent of children in small cities and towns and 47 percent of those in rural areas sense they are very safe in their own neighborhoods at night. “One of the basic necessities of childhood is a feeling of security,” says child psychologist James Garbarino, president of the Erikson Institute of Chicago. “And if 20 percent say they don’t feel safe, that is a lot of kids I worry about.”
Beyond fear, significant numbers of children experience crime close up. Asked if they were ever victimized, if they ever saw or knew someone who was a victim, the children’s experiences included:
CRIME YES Money or property stolen 68% Being attacked or beaten up 46% Being threatened with a gun 24% Being threatened with other weapon 27% Being shot with a gun 17%
Compared with media-hyped portraits of communities under siege day and night, some of the numbers seem tame, but crime needn’t be an everyday fact of life to paralyze. As Garbarino put it, “All it takes is a shooting in your community a few times a month to get you in the frame of mind of [living with] a chronic threat.” The backdrop to that grim scenario is the sound of gunfire. As with other studies of violence, the NEWSWEEK-CDF poll found that children, especially teenage boys, have an alarming familiarity with guns. Kids were asked how easy it was to get a weapon:
YES NO 31% Knows where to got a gun 68%
Not all of the weapons are sawed-off shotguns bought on the street. Since many small-town families keep guns for hunting or protection, the poll found that kids in rural areas are actually more likely to know where to get a gun–usually, from Dad–than their big-city counterparts. Still, 10 percent of the children said they’ve handled a pistol or handgun without an adult around. Among 14- to 17-year-old boys, the numbers are even higher: 28 percent have handled a gun and 53 percent know where to get one. Even more worrisome, nearly one in five children said they have brought a gun to school or know someone who has.
Kids who watch a lot of television may be desensitized to its violence. Yet, when asked if there is too much violence on television and in the movies today, parents and kids offered widely disparate views:
CHILDREN PARENTS 59% on television 90% 67% in movies 91%
Though the single largest group of children–40 percent–said they watched only one to two hours of TV a day, 69 percent of kids polled regard television, movies and pop music as important influences on their lives. Significantly, the study showed that children whose families tend to be most at risk–minorities, the poor, the least educated–watch more TV on school nights than their white, more affluent counterparts.
Yet for all of their exposure to television and popular culture, when it came to naming the most powerful forces shaping their characters, young people order their childhood influences very much as their parents remember their own. Here, kids prove relatively conventional. While it may seem as though Ice-T and Guns N’ Roses are raising our children, parents remain the most potent role models. Asked who had a “very important” influence on them (or, for parents, who influenced them when they were their children’s age) respondents answered:
CHILDREN PARENTS 86% Their parents 81% 56% Grandparents 47% 55% Place of worship 55% 50% Teachers 48% 41% Children their own age 37% 23% Community organizations 17% 22% TV, movies and music 20%
Even so, many families feel they don’t see enough of each other. Divorce, two-worker households and other societal changes have caused the American family some growing pains. The poll found, though, that parents feel it more than the kids. Asked whether they spent enough time together, children and their parents answered:
CHILDREN PARENTS 64% Right amount 46% 30% Too little 50% 5% Too much 3%
Perhaps given this uneasiness in the home, most families do not look for simple solutions to the problems of guns and violence. When asked how best to protect children in their communities, parents were more likely to cite more after-school programs (34 percent) than more police (31 percent), tougher gun control (17 percent) or better drug and alcohol treatment programs (8 percent). And that, says CDF founder Marian Wright Edelman, is an encouraging sign. “You’ve got to give children positive alternatives to the street. If the only way they feel important is to have a gun or to engage in antisocial behavior, the call is for community alternatives, for after-school programs. We have to give young people a sense of hope again, a sense of future.” How well communities succeed may determine whether this decade is forever marked as the violent ’90s.
FOR THIS SPECIAL NEWSWEEK-CDF POLL, PRINCETON SURVEY RESEARCH ASSOCIATES TELEPHONED 758 CHILDREN AGE 10-17 AND 758 OF THEIR PARENTS OCT 18-NOV. 7. MARGIN OF ERROR: +/- 4 PERCENTAGE POINTS. (C)1993 BY NEWSWEEK, INC.
