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Recently in Salon Mothers Who Think

Damaged goods
The parents of a murderer sue adoption workers, claiming they should have been told about the boy's mentally ill birth mother.
By Beth Broeker
[02/24/00]

Be fruitful and multiply
Infertile couples who are members of strict religious organizations often find themselves vilified by the church.
By Michael Kress
[02/23/00]

Don't call me Mrs.
When the local Catholics couldn't face my surname, I went church shopping.
By Donna Cornachio
[02/23/00]

Brother knows best
Dave Eggers talks, with some reluctance, about the staggering work of being a genius parent.
By Amy Benfer
[02/22/00]

Breaking the silence
It is time to tell the secrets and share the pain of Japanese internment.
By Rahna Reiko Rizzuto
[02/18/00]

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I had my son a year after I became disabled. When my son was born, I was at the beginning of the long slow slide down the social ladder that usually accompanies disability in America. I'm not going to say that the experience of being disabled in America is the same as being black because I cannot speak for black people. I do know that the prejudice we experience every day is devastating to mind, body and soul.

But Traub never talks about prejudice and discrimination. He cites a Harvard sociologist who in l972 wrote that "Labor markets were so biased against blacks that academic success hardly paid off," only to point out, approvingly, that by 1998 the sociologist had changed his mind and now felt the solution to black poverty lay in changing the child's home environment.

Each day, I remember that I had a chance to buy my son a one-way ticket to the middle class. Yes, you can change mothers -- if you do it at birth. Many of us who became pregnant when we were single and without resources considered adoption, at least briefly. I could have given my son up. By definition, every couple seeking to adopt in America is middle class or better -- sometimes very much better -- since only middle-class couples can pass an agency's screening or afford a private adoption.

The cost of that ticket was that I would never see my son again. I would never know what happened to him. I thought the price was too high. In any case, I was unable to pay it. Anyway, I thought, using the classic flawed reasoning of desperate women, I loved my son and that meant he would be OK. Right? Love would conquer all.

Fourteen years later I believe, on most days, that I made the wrong choice. I see the evidence in front of my eyes. I think that James Traub would agree that I made the wrong choice in choosing to raise my son. And that is why Traub's article pushes my buttons: He plays on my worst fears and guilt. I love my son. But by choosing to keep him, I have greatly circumscribed his chances to succeed -- or even to survive -- in life.

Not because I have squashed his curiosity, or because he is not doing well in school. (He is.) Because he is poor. Because poverty hurts children, period, no matter what else they are born with -- or however much they are loved.

It takes more than love to raise a child. It takes what Traub, citing social scientists Theodore Shulz and James Coleman, calls "capital." Traub is interested in distinguishing between two kinds of capital: "human capital" and "social capital."

By human capital he means the kinds of things he thinks schools and "middle-class parenting practices" teach: "human capacities, developed by education, that can be used productively -- the capacity to deal in abstractions, recognize and adhere to rules, to use language at a high level." Human capital, he says -- like family fortunes -- takes generations to develop.

I strongly disagree. I wasn't raised by a mother practicing middle-class parenting, in fact quite the opposite. I was raised in a working-class household in which education was not a priority. I was the first person in my family ever to go to college. Someone always has to be the first, after all, if you believe -- as Traub obviously does -- that education can get you into the middle class. The catch is, according to him, it only gets you in if you're already there. All the middle-class professional parents he admires apparently had middle-class professional parents, and so on, going back forever, for Traub has no other explanation for how human capital develops.

I've got a simple one: We're all born with those human capacities, to a greater or lesser degree, and they're not correlated with skin color or income level. Traub comes, in my mind, dangerously close to saying children from poor families can never be smart. He implies that they don't, and can't, have these capacities: They don't have them because their parents and grandparents didn't have them, and they can't get them today because of their "child rearing habits and oppositional peer culture."

My son's got quite a lot of human capital. What my son hasn't got because he is poor is social capital: The "strong social bonds, social networks" which come from "the support of a strong community." According to Traub, social capital "hardly exists in the inner city" where children are isolated and "institutions have disintegrated."

What Traub won't acknowledge is that "social capital" is independent of, and can be lacking in the presence of, the type of "middle-class" parenting practices he advises. No amount of intellectual stimulation can make up for not having social capital, and without it, even smart children don't have much of a chance. Social capital is the network of privilege and mastery that middle-class people take for granted. It is connections. It is the safety net that lets you fall and get back up. It is the family who covers for you, the friend who gets you into school or offers a lead on a job, the someone who knows someone who can get you an apartment.

Next page | "Just go away! I can't take care of you!"