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It is a truism that children can't vote, but Sylvia Ann Hewlett, author of When the Bough Breaks: The Costs of Neglecting Our Children, has discovered that their parents don't vote either. In the last national election, only 39% of adults with children at home cast a ballot, as compared with 61% of the elderly. During the 1950s, says Hewlett, who runs a nonprofit organization aimed at getting parents to the polls, 65% of parents voted.
In their interviews, the legislators indicated that if children's advocates are to be effective, they will need to organize themselves more like the National Rifle Association and the American Association for Retired Persons--with well-defined goals, politically active members, and lobbyists who work throughout the entire legislative session. (The Children's Defense Fund operates on an annual budget of $13 million, compared with $66 million for the N.R.A.; AARP has annual revenues of $300 million.)
The latter comparison is particularly apt since the elderly may have strengthened their own safety net at the expense of the young. "Is there a disproportionate amount of money being spent on people over the age of 65 versus under the age of three?" asks one legislative leader. "Yes, unquestionably. Is it in part a function of their lobbying efforts? Yes, unquestionably. Is it largely a function of their need? No, it is not." Yet as Ira Schwartz, dean of the School of Social Work at the University of Pennsylvania, notes, "Seniors and those in the work force don't understand that the survival of the Social Security system is really dependent on the future of our children." Or perhaps they do: aarp has endorsed the Stand, in part, says spokesman Peter Ashkenaz, because so many grandparents are rearing children.
In the end, the most pressing question for children's advocates is the one that Saturday's march intentionally sidesteps: setting a common agenda. It is a daunting task, not just because children's issues are so numerous and so fragmented, but because no one is certain what solutions, if any, will work. Even people committed to reducing teen pregnancy may disagree vehemently about the means to that end. Some feel that social trends like no-fault divorce pose the greatest threat to children.
"One of the biggest problems we have is that it's so hard to show results," says Frank Sanchez Jr., who runs delinquency-prevention programs for the Boys & Girls Clubs of America. The child who doesn't get into trouble is the dog that doesn't bark. "We don't have a lot of studies to build a broad, knowledgeable base," agrees Kristin Moore, executive director of the research firm Child Trends Inc., because most of the efforts to help kids are "too late, too shallow, too brief and too cheap."