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Are You Now or Have You Ever Been a Child?

Robert Godwin
The Journal of Psychohistory V. 25, N. 2, Fall 1997

• The Scapegoat Generation: America's War on Adolescents, Mike A. Males. Monroe, Maine: Common Courage Press, 1996, 329pp. $17.95 (paper)

Any book with "scapegoat," "war" and "adolescent" in the title seems tailor-made to arrest the attention of psychohistorians. Males, a longtime liberal activist, believes that politicians, private interests, and the media unfairly scapegoat adolescents for virtually all of America's ills, including drugs, crime, venereal disease, welfare dependency, suicide, and teen pregnancy. He uses a blizzard of statistics to make what are, I believe, his main points: That no matter how badly teens are depicted by the media, the hypocritical adults are worse; that grown-ups have knowingly (not unconsciously) rigged this whole system so as to deflect attention away from themselves and onto children; and that whatever you do, please don't believe anyone who says they're concerned about teenage violence, pregnancy or drug abuse, because really all they're doing is scapegoating teens by focusing on these spurious problems.

But after completing the book, I was puzzled as to why it seemed of so little use to psychohistorians despite the promising title. In the end, I was forced to conclude that Males is so instinctively committed to a liberal agenda of salvation by economics alone, that he is unable to transcend the polarized but mutually supporting planks of left and right, or righteous victim and malevolent oppressor.1 Most psychohistorians would probably agree that the histrionic debate between left and right (certainly during the last two decades) is a noisy diversion that allows us to feel good about our side while projecting the bad elsewhere, a psychological exercise that leaves the fate of children relatively unaffected. But to quote another researcher,

The correction of our national problems requires neither right nor left, neither moderation nor extremism. The polemical debate needs a new dimension: reality.... We should do what we know how to do, but that's limited. One crucial example is that we have no real idea how to keep children in problem families from becoming problem parents starting new problem families.2

Because the more conspicuous excesses of the political right are so easy to caricature, the left in this country tends to get a free ride on issues of child care. A common problem with the left is that its agenda is often not actually child-centered but subtly adult-centered. But in order to develop normally, children have objective, irreducible needs that have nothing to do with what adults want or feel they are entitled to. For example, feminist groups put a self-serving spin on studies showing the damage inflicted on children by forcing them to spend twelve hours in day care, while policies encouraging unfit or incapable single mothers to put their children up for adoption are derided by the left as an attack on "reproductive rights." Black children languish in orphanages and foster homes because the National Association of Black Social Workers literally regards it as genocide to give them up to the white adoptive parents who would love them.3 And you will never hear the left invoke the right of a child to be raised by a mother and father, let alone by parents who are emotionally and financially capable of raising her. But when something goes wrong in the child's development violence, academic failure, teen pregnancy it is never the fault of the parent or culture but of the government, of racism, of the white power structure, etc. In particular, cultures cannot be pathological or dysfunctional because that would violate the academic law of cultural relativism. Thus, everything bad in Males' world is ultimately caused by poverty: "The fact that teenagers are more likely to live in poverty than adults in their 20's and 30's fully explains the higher rates of violent crime among teenagers."

Males ends up arguing not so much that children should be treated better by their parents, but that adolescents should be treated better as adults by society. Leave them alone! Drawing any attention to the perils of teen pregnancy amounts to "punitive crassness," writes Males. Why, maladjusted teenage girls actually become more stable when they have an infant to care for, according to Males. But from a psychohistorical standpoint, the problem here is that no infant should bear the burden of being a projective receptacle for maintaining their mother's emotional stability, for such a child will undoubtedly grow up in search of a similar container for her own intolerable projections, perpetuating the inter-generational cycle of pathology.

Males blames the government for violence and poverty, even while acknowledging studies demonstrating that "today's divorced parents, particularly fathers, are far less likely to help their grown children financially" or that "child abuse is a factor in at least 40 percent of the nation's violent crime." Males is correct that children are under attack, but like most liberals, cannot bring himself to name the primary culprit. He places absolutely no responsibility upon parents who choose to have children before they are emotionally and financially able to do so. No, if parents beat their children or if their fathers don't support them, the blame lies elsewhere: "Youth violence is a straight-line result of the high and rising rates of poverty imposed on the young..."4 But since most poor people do not abuse their children, Males is at a loss to put forth an explanatory theory bridging the conceptual chasm between poverty and child abuse. In short, he cannot see child abuse as an independent historical variable, one that is surely influenced by other factors, but independent nonetheless.

The more complex truth of the situation that economic class is not identical to psychoclass is welcomed by neither the left nor right. Susan Mayer, a (liberal) sociologist at the University of Chicago, has published the findings of her study, entitled "What Money Can't Buy," concluding that "as a society, we are fairly helpless to correct the worst problems of child poverty."5 In specifically focusing on the importance of money in enabling children to escape poverty, her meta-study reviewed other studies and attempted to correlate parents' incomes with children's outcomes, but concluded that the deciding factor had to do with certain parental attributes honesty, reliability, diligence and not income.

Males makes the point that the U.S., while the richest nation in the world, has a much higher child poverty rate than other industrialized nations, 21% here as compared to less than 5% in Belgium, Germany or Austria. But he fails to point out vast differences in the rates of single parenthood and out of wedlock births. Among industrialized nations, the US has the highest rate of teenage births, 64 per 1,000, compared with just 4 per 1,000 in Japan. More American children live in single-parent homes than in any other part of the West; four in five black children spend at least part of their childhood in a single-parent home, compared with 4% in Italy or 8% in Belgium.6 Not only is an American child living in a mother-only home five times more likely to live below the national poverty line, but such households are strongly associated with poorer school performance, greater risk of teen pregnancy, higher rates of delinquency and a worsening of mental health. But in Males' view, this discussion is off the table, because when we talk about unwed mothers we are covertly invoking race, secretly hoping to scapegoat black teens.

But who is promulgating a racist ideology here? In viewing African-American lives as nothing more than a by-product of objective economic relations, Males seems like nothing so much as an anti-Limbaugh, reducing blacks to mindless automatons who can do nothing to get out of their own way. Never mind that in parts of urban black culture we are witnessing a truly unprecedented psychohistorical experiment, that is, an almost complete separation of marriage and childbearing. Nearly 70% of black children in the US are born out of wedlock and more than 50% of black households are headed by women. Only a third of black children live with both parents even during the critical first three years of their lives.7 But in Males' view it is nothing more than veiled racism and an attack on women to suggest that all children, but especially boys, require an intimate relationship with a father for the best chance to develop optimally. Yes, poverty is an abomination, but fighting for the right of poor urban teens to have more babies does not strike me as a truly liberal position.

Males cites the interesting statistics that among teen mothers, 40% of the fathers are high school seniors and 50% are post-high school adult men averaging 5-6 years older, that two thirds of pregnant and parenting teens have been sexually abused or raped, and that most abusers are adult male family members. Furthermore, childhood sexual abuse has been the single biggest predictor of teen pregnancy over the past 40 years. But I am still at a loss to understand how this is the fault of the government or the "white power structure." What it suggests to me is that at a certain point these teens are no longer "passive" victims per se; sad but true, there is such a thing as the repetition compulsion, which essentially programs the abused child to seek out the man who will continue victimizing her later in life. And in the case of these stubborn inter-generational cycles of abuse, there is next to nothing a government can do to intervene before the abuse occurs. Even in intensive therapy it is difficult to stop someone from acting out such pathological patterns.

At times it is difficult to tell whether Males is arguing that adults scapegoat children for problems they don't really have, or that they do have serious problems but that the problems are all caused by a vague collective, i.e., the government, the economy, the culture, etc. Long about mid-book he momentarily deviates from his agenda and offers two insights, 1) that "Screwed-up kids have even more screwed-up parents," and 2) that "Screwed-up parents often beat, abuse, abandon, serve as rotten role models for, and otherwise mistreat their kids, producing screwed-up kids." If only the remainder of the book were informed by such understated psychohistorical insight.

Instead, Males "de-psychohistoricizes" his subject by placing a misleading and arbitrary dividing line between those over and under eighteen, and then making the unrealistic assertion that since 1970 the over-eighteens have engaged in an all-out war on children for which "no precedent appears to exist in any society" [emphasis mine]. First, this model suggests a static state between generations, when in reality, all of the "victims" born between 1970 and 1979 are now "oppressors," with thousands more crossing that Rubicon daily. Second, it suggests that this is somehow a new development, when it is obvious that the oppressors who were around in 1970 were born in 1952 or before. What made them hate children so much?

Psychiatrist and child researcher Stanley Greenspan, in his excellent new book The Growth of the Mind (1996), concludes that crime, drug addiction, school performance, teen pregnancy and family disintegration all "stem from a single festering woe: the large number of families utterly incapable of equipping their children emotionally and intellectually to function as productive members of society" (p. 252). Unlike Males, Greenspan is coming not from a political perspective but from a truly developmental one. Thus, he understands the strictly limited ability of government programs to cure "so deep and intractable a pathology" (p. 253). His research into emotional and economic risk factors underlying academic failure and behavioral difficulties considered such variables as depressed parents, low income, poor education, and low occupational standing. But in isolating the single factor most responsible for different outcomes, "the way adults respond to their child's emotional and social cues emerged as decisive" (p. 254). His politically incorrect but psychohistorically dead-on conclusion: "Let me emphasize again that poverty alone does not account for the human wreckage of the underclass; countless people raised in impoverished circumstances live good and responsible lives" (ibid.). Males would dismiss this type of non-ideological thinking as "social science tunnel vision."

My point here is that any political solution to cultural pathologies must begin with a thorough appreciation of developmental psychology. The left's perennial effort to reduce psychopathology to economics is just as wrong-headed as the right's reduction of economics to good moral hygiene. The problem with a strictly liberal, economic approach to cultural problems is that, more often than not, a victim given power simply uses that power to become an oppressor.

A case in point is the late rap star Tupac Shakur, gunned down in Las Vegas in 1996. Convicted in 1994 of the sexual assault of a nineteen-year-old woman, Shakur was nevertheless an unapologetic gangster who flouted his violent behavior: "It would be an honor to die in the hood, where I get my love."8 Now, one of the functions of civilization is to turn men into husbands and fathers, for it is young, unattached males who cause most of the violence and mayhem in society.9 Shakur had some limited insight into this connection, even blaming his criminal activity on that very fact and revealing to a writer the acute pain of growing up fatherless.10

Without a real father figure to model mature manhood, it is common for adolescent boys to internalize a perverse version of overly aggressive masculinity, utilizing whatever is handy to do so. In Shakur's case, he identified with his intimidating mother, a former Black Panther: "My mother had a strong reputation. It was just like having a daddy because she had a rep. Motherfuckers get roasted if you fuck with [my mother] or her children. Couldn't nobody touch us."11 Expressed in Shakur's sentiment is the denial of sexual differences, the failure to individuate from an essentially feminine identification, and the co-optation of his unfulfilled masculinity by magical, pre-oedipal rage. In the same article, this young millionaire raged against an America that had permanently "fucked" him, but unconsciously he knew full well that the rage was actually meant for his mother and for the father who had abandoned him. Emblazoned across his abdomen was the jail house tattoo, THUG LIFE, an acronym, he said, for The Hate U Give Little Infants Fucks Everybody. Lloyd deMause has been saying the same thing for three decades, but can't even swing a recording contract (not to mention a book deal).

Dr. Godwin, a clinical psychologist, has contributed numerous articles to this journal. He may be reached at P.O. Box 8962, Calabasas, CA 91372, or e-mail: [email protected]

footnotes Below

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footnotes:

1. See R. Godwin, 1996, "The Exo-psychic structure of politics," Journal of Psychohistory, 23:252-259.

2. Robert Levine, "The empty symbolism of American politics," Atlantic Monthly, October 1996.

3. S. Pressley, "Facing the color barrier," Los Angeles Times, January 12, 1997.

4. I feel compelled to remind the reader that I am not making a conservative argument here. There are good enough reasons for fighting poverty without reducing all social and psychological ills to economic epiphenomena.

5. Robert J. Samuelson, "Family Income Does Not Define Child's Outcome," Los Angeles Times, May 5, 1997.

6. "U.S. Child Poverty Worst Among Richest Nations," Los Angeles Times, June 12, 1966.

7. Adam Walinsky, "The crisis of public order," Atlantic Monthly, July 1995.

8. Veronica Chambers, "Conversations with Tupac, Esquire, December 1996.

9. See, for example D. Courtwright, Violent Land (1996), Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press. "Where there is violent and disorderly behavior there are plenty of men, largely young and single, often armed and intoxicated."

10. See footnote 8.

11. Ibid.

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