L ast summer, my kids and I spent a month in Greece, where their grandfather

lives. Time and again, I was struck by a public attitude toward children I seldom
encountered in America: unequivocal support.

On Athenian buses, women older than myself frequently gave up their seats for
my 5- and 8-year-old daughters. On one trip, an older woman hauled my younger
child up next to her and tucked her hand underneath my daughter's elbow to
prevent her from being thrown forward with every sudden stop. She held on to
her like this for the whole ride.

In America, we socialize our children to see strangers not as helpers but as

threats. Worried parents scour Nextdoor for loiterers and miscreants; neighbors
routinely call the police when parents let their kids explore outside. And when
kids aren't being treated as endangered, they're often viewed as a nuisance.
How many articles have I read about whether children should be allowed on
airplanes, or at weddings, or in restaurants?

Every country has its share of adults who pose a threat to children. But the
difference in how America treats its kids goes far beyond the "it takes a village"
attitude that prevails in countries like Greece. Virtually every other industrialized
nation provides more government aid for their children than America does. Of the
38 countries that belong to the leading Western trade alliance, the US ranks No.
32 in spending on early childhood. In Sweden, which offers single parents a
staggering 480 days of paid parental leave, preschool costs no more than 3% of
a family's gross income. America, by contrast, has no mandated paid parental
leave. It has no universal childcare. Only one-third of American families can
afford childcare, which consumes 27% of their income on average. Parents are
being forced to leave big cities because they can't absorb the costs of childcare,
while those in rural areas often can't find care at all.

America's rampant child neglect doesn't stop with its lack of day care. Infants are
more likely to die in childbirth in America than in any other rich nation, and US
newborns are more likely to grow up in poverty. Millions of children attend public
schools that are literally falling apart. Children who are neglected — a loose term
inextricably tied to poverty — are thrown into a foster-care system known for its
propensity to harm children. The shortage of foster families is so critical that
many kids wind up being temporarily housed in settings like casinos, office
buildings, and juvenile detention facilities. The US is the only member of the
United Nations that hasn't ratified the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child,
which includes the right to be free from violence and labor exploitation. In
Oregon, where I live, children as young as 9 are allowed to do agricultural work,
and many states are trying to loosen their already flimsy child-labor protections
so teenagers can be forced to work longer hours. The leading cause of death for
American children and teens is gun violence.

All of which raises the question: Why does America hate its children?

On the surface, America has always professed to love its children, and those
who raise them. Women are told from birth that being a mother is "the most
important job in the world," that "children are our future." "All I am I owe to my
mother," George Washington is said to have declared. And every May, when
Mother's Day rolls around, we are inundated with soft-focus advertisements
celebrating the family as the core unit of American life.

But in practice, the rhetoric exalting motherhood has served not as a means for
supporting children but as a tool for keeping women at home — while fending off
demands for a broader and more supportive system of child-rearing. Even as
women have become vital participants in the American workforce, the opposition
to expanding childcare has remained remarkably persistent. In 2021, state Rep.
Charlie Shepherd of Idaho made the connection explicit when he explained why
he voted against state funding for early childhood education. "I don't think
anybody does a better job than mothers in the home," Shepherd said. "And any
bill that makes it easier or more convenient for mothers to come out of the home
and let others raise their child, I don't think that's a good direction for us to be
going." (He apologized after an outcry, but everyone heard him loud and clear.)

America has often invoked the Red Scare as an excuse for abandoning its
children. In 1971, the country was one signature away from having universal
childcare. A bill had passed the House and Senate that would have created
federally funded childcare centers across the US.

But a rogue's gallery of Republicans persuaded President Richard Nixon to veto

the measure, citing the threat of communism to the American family unit. Nixon
wrote that he opposed committing "the vast moral authority of the National
Government to the side of communal approaches to child rearing over against
the family-centered approach." Kids needed to be raised by their mothers —
without any help from the state.

The one time America extended a form of universal childcare, tellingly, was
during World War II, when men were not around to perform critical manufacturing
jobs. The Lanham Act created a patchwork system of childcare provided by
churches, community centers, and large employers. But as soon as the war
ended and men returned to the workforce, the program was shuttered, even as
many women took to the streets to call for its continuation.
The situation is worse for people of color; racism is baked into the paradigm of
family life in America. The earliest cohort of American caregivers in white homes
were enslaved Black women. When President Franklin Roosevelt implemented
the New Deal, he specifically exempted domestic workers, who were more likely
to be women of color, from receiving Social Security benefits and labor
protections. Women who took care of other people's children were stripped of the
economic power they needed to take care of their own kids, let alone pay
someone else well to do it. As a consequence, childcare is still one of the lowest-
paid American professions, even while the overall cost of providing this essential
service has soared. We end up with a broken system where the majority of
American families are unable to pay a caregiver, while many childcare workers
can't live on what they are paid. Nearly one-third of childcare workers have
experienced food insecurity, and more than 100,000 have sought other forms of
employment since the start of the pandemic, desperate for better pay.

For a brief moment, the pandemic threw America's grim provisions for children
into stark relief. Teachers, leery of returning to classrooms before the advent of
vaccines, called out their schools for subjecting kids to deplorable conditions:
inoperable or toxic water fountains, widespread mold, sweltering, unventilated
spaces with windows rusted shut. Administrators and politicians, meanwhile,
unironically pointed out that schools needed to be open because they were the
only place where many children could be sure of a regular meal. In 2021, as
childcare costs soared by more than 40%, Congress provided a massive cash
infusion to states to stabilize childcare and supplied parents with both cash and
an additional tax refund to support their kids. Seemingly overnight, child poverty
dropped by 40%.

But the much-needed interventions were short-lived. When emergency federal

subsidies expired last fall — a moment policy experts have referred to as the
"childcare cliff" — an estimated 3 million kids suddenly found themselves once
again without childcare. And even with irrefutable evidence of the expanded child
tax credit's success — and loud exhortations by policy organizations, faith
leaders, and parents — Congress voted to end it as well. As a result, child
poverty jumped from 5% in 2021 to more than 12% in 2022.

It's hard to locate anything but abject hatred for kids in this decision. After
advocating for the child tax credit to lapse, Sen. Joe Manchin told a reporter he
felt no remorse. "The federal government can't run everything," he said.

In Athens, my kids and I would walk at night to a square filled with children
playing soccer, enjoying ice cream, and teasing each other as their parents
watched from restaurants or neighboring apartments. On that small stretch of
pavement, it felt like a child's world, one in which adults were tolerated guests.
That same summer, while Greek children were romping in the public square, a 9-
year-old girl named Serabi Medina was shot in the head at a leafy Chicago park
where she had been riding her bike and eating ice cream with her dad. The man
charged in the killing was a neighbor who had complained that the kids in his
building were playing too loudly. He had purchased the gun legally and used it to
shoot Serabi for the crime of existing in his presence.

Her death was no outlier. Among 38 leading Western nations, American kids
account for 97% of child gun deaths. Behind each bullet is a gruesome story. A
1-year-old killed by her 3-year-old brother with a gun left lying around. A 7-year-
old killed by a stray bullet from an argument over Jet Skis. A 4-year-old shot in
the chest by a caregiver teaching "gun safety." And it's worse for children of
color: Black children are five times as likely to die by gun as white children, often
killed in neighborhoods marked by decades of redlining and federal and state
underinvestment.

The same politicians who blame mental illness for gun violence refuse
to improve access to mental-health treatment, or adequately fund
schools or social safety nets

Then there are the mass shootings. In the tragedies of Sandy Hook, Connecticut,
and Uvalde, Texas, the gunmen were scarcely out of childhood themselves,
failed by their society and by family members they also killed or wounded. More
than 95% of American schools run active-shooter drills, and companies now sell
armored backpacks and escape pods for classrooms.

Lawmakers talk vaguely of the "mental-health crisis," particularly in the context of

gun violence, as a way to obviate any kind of restriction to gun laws. And there is
a real crisis: Even before the pandemic, the Centers for Disease Control and
Prevention found that feelings of depression and despair had been on the rise in
young people for a decade. Again, the racial disparity is pronounced. Between
1991 and 2019, suicide attempts among Black teens jumped by 80%.

But the same politicians who blame mental illness for gun violence refuse to
improve access to mental-health treatment, or adequately fund schools or social
safety nets, let alone outlaw the weapons of mass destruction being used to
murder America's children. Parents of kids in the throes of mental-health crises
are showing up at overwhelmed emergency rooms and waiting months for spots
in treatment facilities. Some desperate caregivers, facing bankruptcy, have
considered surrendering children with acute needs to the state, just so they can
be guaranteed some level of care.

This yawning absence of care — be it childcare, medical care, or even a general

sense of neighborliness — weighs heavily on American parents. Many, forced to
work long hours, have no choice but to leave their kids home alone or with
neighbors, or bring them into work. In 2019, a 3-year-old boy drowned in the
grease trap of the grocery store where his mother worked. She had no childcare
that day, and she needed the hours to keep a roof over his head.

Parents at all income levels have become hypervigilant, leading to baroque forms
of parenting that pit kids against each other in a race for scant educational and
enrichment resources — what one observer dubbed "intensive parenting," or "a
style of child-rearing fit for an age of inequality." (Watching parents battle to find
swimming lessons in my city, where there are few affordable options, is a perfect
encapsulation of this phenomenon.) And in a landscape shaped by scarcity and
competition, parents have grown reluctant to let their children find their own
forms of enrichment, lest someone report them to Child Protective Services. A
recent paper in the Journal of Pediatrics found that a primary cause of the rise in
mental-health disorders was "a decline over decades in opportunities for children
and teens to play, roam, and engage in other activities independent of direct
oversight and control by adults." We not only have no one to take care of our
children — but also do not afford them the opportunity to learn how to take care
of themselves.

Americans, especially those pushed to the margins by federal and social policy,
have long fought back against the country's isolationist approach to organizing
family life. Black women were the vanguard of early childhood education for
children excluded from all-white or nonexistent kindergartens. After World War II,
women took to the streets to keep the Lanham Act nurseries open and to push
their states to launch similar programs. In the 1960s, the Black Panthers started
a revolutionary free-breakfast program for schoolchildren, long before the federal
government took up the cause. Today, the National Domestic Workers Alliance,
led by women of color, is at the forefront of efforts to create expansive childcare
policies. Informal mutual-aid groups across the country have banded together to
serve houseless communities, many of which include families with children.

From the tumult of the pandemic, the calls for America to care more for its
children are getting louder. Teenagers are showing up in congressional offices
demanding a change to gun laws. Teachers are striking for better pay, student
supports, and classroom conditions across the country. In 2020, the county that
encompasses Portland, Oregon, passed a community-led measure to implement
universal preschool by a huge majority, paid for by a tax on the highest incomes.
In 2022, New Mexico became the first state to make childcare free for almost
every resident. And since the expanded child tax credit was scuttled last year, six
states have created new child tax credits, and five others have expanded
preexisting credits.
But it will take more than piecemeal public policy to change America's almost
pathological child neglect. At root, we must overthrow the persistent delusion of
rugged individualism — the perverse American mythology that everyone must
fend for themselves, no matter the cost. To raise children with the care and
comfort they deserve, we must learn to think of ourselves in concert with others.
We must, in short, nurture the ideal of community that America's policies have
worked to tear apart.

I think of the woman on the bus in Athens, holding my daughter's arm to keep her
safe, and I am reminded that raising a family was never supposed to take place
in isolation. As parents, we have been pitted, by our national ethos, against every
other family, all of us desperate to keep our children safe and eke out the best
opportunities we can provide them. But we aren't alone. And for the sake of our
kids, we must make sure that they aren't, either.

Lydia Kiesling is the author of the novels The Golden State and Mobility. Her
essays and nonfiction have been published in outlets including The New York
Times Magazine, The New Yorker online, and The Cut.