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Of course, there are exceptions; among hundreds of thousands of black, Chicano and Indian families, among many of Appalachia's people and in our urban ghettos, which seem to grow and grow, one finds children who are hungry, malnourished, plagued by a variety of untreated illnesses and certainly not catered to—not at home, not at school, not in the neighborhood. There are even children in this country in this century who are born in circumstances no better than those obtained in 1775. If medical knowledge was, at best, primitive at the time of the American Revolution, the first-rate medical care now available for pregnant women and children is of no consequence at all for many migrant farm families or black tenant farmers or poor white people up the hollows of West Virginia and Kentucky or Indians on various reservations. I have worked with children who were delivered under the saddest and most dangerous conditions —delivered not even by midwives but by a nearby friend or neighbor of their mother, and in cabins that lacked running water, electricity, even a semblance of decent sanitation. Those same children never see a doctor, often go only fitfully to school, experience a confused, harassed and in some cases uprooted childhood, and have a life expectancy much lower than that of other children. Their parents are not "child-centered"; their parents are frightened, vulnerable, grim and themselves hungry, jobless, constantly apprehensive. It is one thing to live in a world that altogether lacks good sanitation, electricity or good medical care, as did colonial Americans, but in compensation to feel the self-respect that goes with being an accepted and welcome member of a particular community. It is quite another thing to watch one's children suffer and live extremely marginal lives while other children have quite different, vastly better prospects.
If the poor are lucky to get by from day to day, middle-class parents have their eyes on something else—the future, which becomes concretely symbolized in the child: through him, through her, one can get hold of the future, secure it, possess it, mold it, ensure it. With the decline of religion and an increasing affluence, the happiness, security and welfare of children become for many a major obsession which, in turn, has a broad and strong impact on the way children look, play, get educated and, not least, are treated at home. In our middle-class suburbs, infants and children often have more toys and gadgets, more clothes than they or their parents know what to do with. Often those children have more food, too, than their bodies can effectively use—with obesity the result. After 15 years of work with the children of America's poor and working-class families, I have, in recent years, been getting to know boys and girls of affluent parents, and it has been some adjustment for me—especially when I have heard mothers and fathers of even nursery-school children talk about what they want from a school, what they hope to see happen in a school. The answer, in a word, is everything—loving attention, learning that competes successfully with that offered anywhere else, character building, athletic excellence and, of course, psychological health (whatever that is).