{"id":806,"date":"2012-08-08T23:50:12","date_gmt":"2012-08-08T21:50:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/fascinating-america.com\/blog\/?p=806"},"modified":"2015-04-27T16:02:01","modified_gmt":"2015-04-27T14:02:01","slug":"those-poor-children","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/fascinating-america.com\/blog\/those-poor-children\/","title":{"rendered":"Those poor children"},"content":{"rendered":"

As children in America, we learned an English nursery rhyme<\/span> that begins:<\/p>\n

\n

“There was an old woman who lived in a shoe.
\nShe had so many children she didn’t know what to do.”<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

This description is unfortunately a lot more current than it sounds. According to the National Center for Children in Poverty<\/a>, 44 percent of American children live in families that cannot cover basic expenses. Imagine that: half of American kids are poor.<\/p>\n

Raising children in a country without an adequate social safety net can be extremely difficult. A girl I knew \u2014 let’s call her Alice \u2014 found this out when she got married at age 20 and started having children a year or two later. Alice agonized<\/span> over whether or not to keep her job. “If I stay home to raise my kids,” she said, “all of us will have to live on my husband’s income. If I go back to work, I will earn only enough to pay someone else to raise my kids.”<\/p>\n

For two years, she was a stay-at-home mom. But when her husband turned violent, she had no choice but<\/span> to take the kids, move back in with her mother \u2014 1,000 miles away \u2014 and get a full-time job.<\/p>\n

I’m sure everything turned out all right, but I do feel sad that Alice’s life turned so serious so quickly. She was a hard-working student with ambitions of using her German degree to travel to Europe. Her main justification<\/span> for getting married so early was that in the Midwestern state she came from, “20 is almost too old”.<\/p>\n

If she’d made it to Germany, she could have waited a while and had years of paid leave<\/span>, a guarantee of returning to her job, and much larger tax deductions<\/span>. While Americans are given a small amount to offset<\/span> their expenses, Germans are basically paid to have children \u2014 and German children have a pretty good life.<\/p>\n

The difference in fertility rates<\/span> explains it. In America, where the average woman<\/a> has 2.05 kids, children are a given<\/span>. You expect to see them all the time. People buy large, sturdy<\/span> cars so they can transport them comfortably. Kids are everywhere. Single people and older adults often try to get away from them at restaurants, swimming pools, and outdoor events.<\/p>\n

In Germany, where the average woman has 1.41 kids, children are given an almost mystical reverence<\/span>. Some parents even seem to expect a pat on the back<\/span> for doing their part to prevent German extinction<\/span>. Baby carriages<\/span> are pushed around with pride. Former co-workers<\/span> regularly turn up in our office to display their new offspring<\/span>, as if to say, “Look! I made this!”<\/p>\n

Of course, some of these same mothers then spend years worrying about whether their children will ever get into day care<\/span>.<\/p>\n

In America, day care is widely available. Unfortunately, you have to be able to afford it \u2014 and not live in a shoe.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

As children in America, we learned an English nursery rhyme that begins: “There was an old woman who lived in a shoe. She had so many children she didn’t know what to do.” This description is unfortunately a lot more current than it sounds. According to the National Center for Children in Poverty, 44 percent of American children live in … >><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[42],"tags":[187,116],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/fascinating-america.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/806"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/fascinating-america.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/fascinating-america.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/fascinating-america.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/fascinating-america.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=806"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/fascinating-america.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/806\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1571,"href":"http:\/\/fascinating-america.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/806\/revisions\/1571"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/fascinating-america.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=806"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/fascinating-america.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=806"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/fascinating-america.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=806"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}