Anya Kamenetz and "The Stolen Year"
An interview with journalist Anya Kamenetz about the generational harms of COVID-19, the ugly history of American childcare and education, and the cold arm of child protection agencies.
Anya Kamenetz is an award-winning education reporter who you have probably heard on National Public Radio. Her latest book, “The Stolen Year: How COVID Changed Children’s Lives and Where We Go Now” (forthcoming in August 2022 and now available for pre-order) is a gripping look inside the lives and homes of some of the American families that were forever altered by the pandemic, and the fragility of our nation’s systems of care for children and families.
Tell us about “The Stolen Year” — what motivated you to write this book? What did you want readers to take away from it?
When schools closed in March 2020, I had a front-row seat as a national reporter for NPR, and I had a background in reporting on the school closures that happened as the result of Katrina, which is in my hometown, as well as some reporting on education in developing countries. So I knew the profound impacts that school closures were going to have on children.
As we know, the U.S. became an international outlier on the prolonged nature of its school closures, and other ways in which the pandemic response in particular was harming children and families, especially the most vulnerable. That really pushed me to document what was going on, and tell the story through family experience.
My motivation, what I hope people take away, is that these impacts are profound, and they are generational. In other words, we’re going to be seeing the results of the pandemic on children for the next 20 years, and it will then come to influence everything, from our economy to our general health. So we need to understand that and adapt to it.
And the corollary is that children deserve our investment and our attention. They deserve to be our priorities. There is time for children to recover and rebuild, so this isn’t a book written to say that any kid is doomed, but that we need to mobilize. There’s already been a few waves of political and policy responses to the pandemic, but we can’t let the ball drop. There’s a huge opportunity here to remake America’s social contract.
You write about this long-running American indifference to the plight of children and families — what do you think has allowed this indifference to continue? Do you think COVID broke through any of that indifference, anywhere that matters?
We have a capitalist society and children are not productive members of that society. They're not workers and they’re not voters. There have been democratic reforms around the world that have tried to institute child rights and recognize that we need a special understanding of children’s rights, like the UN Declaration of the Rights of the Child, but we haven’t had that in the United States.
Why are we outliers among rich countries in the construction of our welfare state? We don’t spend money on paid leave, child care subsidies, preschool and we have kind of a paltry health care system and we also have very little family support so we have really high levels of child poverty. All of these things combine to put children in a very precious position.
So there’s a conservative thread around this, about welfare queens and the bipartisan welfare reform that happened after Clinton, but the other part that was interesting to discover was the way that we have responded to these issues for centuries has been through wealthy white women philanthropy and these charitable efforts.
Sonya Michel writes about this idea of maternalist politics — it’s sort of like a nanny state, but it’s a moralizing nanny state where there’s an ambivalence about the idea that mothers need to work. Wealthy white Victorian women who established day nurseries for mothers thought it was kind of a shame that mothers would have to do this. Around the same time, there was a movement to create mother’s pensions. It was the idea that, if she has given a child to the nation, the nation owes something to her. But they never wanted to set those pensions high enough to actually live on. We don’t want to undermine marriage, we just invented wage labor, you have to have someone earning cash money out of the house all day, so if we had this mother’s pension program that was generous to live on, women would leave their husbands.
There’s a zigzag politics to it. It’s the same thing you see in the 1940s, when we set up this beautiful federally funded child care system with so many women going into the work force, and then we dismantled it immediately because there was this very strong push to have women back in the home and out of the work force.
Capitalism functions through an ideological assertion that care work is not work. If you had to wage care work, it would be unaffordable.
Just like you can pollute and destroy clean air and water and not have to pay a dime for those resources, your factory can depend on women who are staying home and working for free and you don’t have to pay a dime for that. A guy who started the school lunch movement, Edward Atkinson, his whole point was, If only we could teach these housewives to spend less money on food, we wouldn’t have to raise the wages of men. That’s how we got the discipline of home economics. The idea was, We’re going to teach these women to economize with this money we’re making.
I went very deep into history with this book because I just felt like I needed more answers, and here’s the ugliest face of it. Here’s the ugliest face of it. We talked about the rationale for having limited help for mothers, but the corollary is that there’s a lot of energy around removing children, especially marginalized children, from their families. The idea is that you can rescue the child from a bad lineage or a bad heritage that they come from. “Kill the Indian and save the man” is probably one of the most horrific expressions of that idea, but also the Orphan Train Movement that brought immigrant children out of the cities to toil on farms for strangers. The whole idea is, rather than putting any energy whatsoever into keeping families together and supported, we lift up children as innocent angels, as long as their mothers are blocked out of the picture. This leads directly into the family welfare system that we have today.
That was a discovery for me. I had done scattered reporting on the family welfare system, but I was able to understand, through the stories of the families I interviewed for this book, just how profound those impacts are on so many families. One of the families I covered took in an emergency foster child, another family had a foster investigation because of something that happened, and a third told me about her own experiences as a foster child. The system touches one in two Black children in this country and one in two Native children (this is according to a California study). So they'll feel the cold arm of family services, but very seldom will that come with any services.
What do you see as the way forward? For education leaders, for policymakers, what do you see as the most urgent priorities to change the status quo?
It’s very hard to pick one thing. Our public schools got money, but they are in total crisis. They have burned-out teachers, staff shortages, and they didn’t have a recovery year this year because of the chronic absenteeism that happened. Kids are still behind; they’re even more behind, there’s no reason to expect they would have gained ground, especially the kids we’re most concerned about. But schools can’t do it alone — that’s one of the biggest messages of the book. Schools cannot and should not stand as the sole pillar of the welfare state for children. So the simplistic answer is, we should have income support for families.
We had a child tax credit that drove down child poverty significantly. Going back to that would be huge. I think that’s the one thing that people argue back and forth about — different ways of structuring subsidies — but it’s pretty simple. There’s a lot of research that says, when you give families money, children have more food to eat and more security. We’re rushing into an inflation crisis and a housing crisis, and if I could just do one thing, it would be that. Because of things like the cost of child care, people actually work more when they get support.
Is there anything that’s giving you hope right now?
There’s an effort in Congress right now, with some GOP backers, to introduce child care as a standalone provision. There’s been expansion on state levels of preschool programs, and people trying to get that done, which I think is really important. Those are two areas I would say are bright spots.
I think the mental health conversation is also really important. We’re just at the very beginning of being able to deal with this. There’s never been an investment in child mental health. Talking about it now is great. But there’s a danger in the way we individualize mental health. A lot of these problems are societal problems that are impacting children’s mental health.
And on the personal level, I see incredible resilience among the children I've met. When I visited them in the spring of 2021 after we had gotten vaccinated, I got the opportunity to sit with each family I had interviewed, and they all had positive things to say about how they had pulled together. For some of the women I spoke with, this is the only time they had home with their kids because there’s no paid family leave in this country. And they valued that time. And that’s something I see happening on a nationwide level. There’s so many families that can see positive things when the machine stops.
How many kids are in your family, and what are their ages?
We have two girls, and they’re 5 and 10 years old.
When you’re working, where are your kids?
The older one is in a middle school in the city, so she’s fairly independent — we drop her off at the train in the morning. And the 5-year-old, we have in an after-school program two days a week, and then we have a sitter for the other days.
What’s challenging about parenting for you at this time?
We made a conscious choice to have our kids at this spacing, and it made things a lot easier in the early years, but I think now something I find challenging is just planning for time with both girls — things that are whole-family activities and then giving each of them time to do things they want to do. The younger one can kind of come along, but the older one has her own friends and wants to do her own things. This weekend, one has a birthday party, the other has a music performance. It’s very “first world problems.”
Compared to the household you grew up in, what’s one thing you’re doing differently as a parent?
My parents were both college professors and writers, they’re both artists, and I think I have made a conscious choice to have a little more routine and order in the house and sort of predictability. Part of that also has to do with merging my style and my husband’s style. He was raised with a mother who worked part-time until he was older.
What factors do you look at to choose the right school for your kids?
Distance is probably the first one - I was really conscious of not wanting our commutes to ruin our lives. That’s a very fraught situation in New York City with the amount of housing segregation. We had a move, and then the pandemic, so we’ve been through more schools than I would have liked for my two kids. But I did make different choices with the older and the younger one.
It’s really balancing the desire for an academic program that’s challenging for them with the desire for diversity and to be an upstanding member of the city that I live in. I feel like I’ve threaded that needle better with my older one — she was able to be in a Spanish immersion program, which is kind of the best bet as far as balancing diversity and academic achievement. Research shows they feel challenged, and kids from different cultures feel celebrated. My younger is in a French immersion program.
Tell me something wonderful about your kids:
They’re both really great kids, what can I say? The older one is just exceptionally kind and reasonable and curious. She’s very fun to be around. My younger one is just a delight. Her energy is really infectious. We just came from her dance performance. She was having such a good time up there and really loving performing.
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