Feature: Diffusing America's Generational Time Bomb

INSTITUTE AT MSU SEEKS TO DIFFUSE AMERICA'S GENERATIONAL TIME BOMB

The growing problem of youth at risk is the focus of the Institute for Children, Youth, and Families at MSU, which seeks to pioneer an exciting multidisciplinary approach to research and outreach. America is facing a peril perhaps as great as any it confronted during the height of the Cold War. However, this peril is not one of nuclear power. Rather it involves a crisis of unprecedented dimensions confronting the youth of our country.

There is nothing short of a generational time bomb ticking away rapidly. If unattended, not only will the youth of our country be at dire risk, but indeed the entire fabric of our society will be shredded. That is one reason the Institute for Children, Youth, and Families (ICYF) at MSU has emerged as such a critical unit with a national role to play. The Institute's mission--consistent with Michigan State's land-grant tradition--is to study and understand the dynamics of this growing problem so that it can be arrested in time. And clearly, time is running out.

Today in America there are 28 million children between the ages of 10 and 18. Consider for a moment the four major categories of risk behavior during this age period: 1.drug and alcohol use and abuse; 2.unsafe sex, teenage pregnancy and teenage parenting; 3.school underachievement, school failure and dropout; and 4.delinquency, crime and violence. Fully half of the children and youth in this age range engage in two or more of these risk behaviors. In other words, half of the next generation of our nation's adults, or its pool of voters, workers, and parents, engage in behaviors of such risk that not only are their life chances threatened, but their chances of simply having a life are diminished. Some of the specific instances of risk are both startling and sobering.

• One out of ten American 10- and 18-year-olds engage in all four categories of risk behavior.
• Ten percent of sixth graders have initiated alcohol use .
• 25 percent of 12- to 14-year-olds are current users of alcohol.
• 92 percent of high school seniors report some experience with alcohol and one third use alcohol daily.
• By age 18, 25 percent of all American females have been pregnant at least once.
• About 40,000 babies are born each year to unwed mothers less than 15 years of age.
• By age 19, 15 percent of African-American males have fathered a child.
• The corresponding rates for Hispanic-Americans and for European- Americans are about 11 percent and 7 percent, respectively.
• Youth between the ages of 13 and 21 years accounted for about 36 percent of all non-traffic related arrests in the United States during the 1980s; however, this age group accounts for only about 14 percent of the population.
• Between three-quarters of a million and one million youth run away from home each year.
• Over 6 percent of these runaways have positive serum tests for the AIDS virus.
• During the 1980s, school dropout rates for African-Americans living in the inner city increased to between 40 and 50 percent.

In addition to these behavioral indices of risk, another risk factor is perhaps the most damaging--poverty. Poverty in childhood is the single, most significant risk factor affecting the development of children. As Lisbeth Schorr has pointed out, poverty is often associated with rotten outcomes -- early school dropout, lack of preparedness for jobs, arrests for crimes (often of a violent nature) and long-term welfare dependency. During the 1980s more than 28 million Americans were below the poverty level and about 50 percent of these were children and adolescents. Moreover, approximately 47 percent of all African-American youth, as compared to about 13 percent of all European-American youth, are poor. In less than a decade, the children who are at risk right now in America will be the adult members of our society. They will be our voters and the people to whom we must turn in the 21st century for leadership. They will be our potential employees--if they are alive and if they are not in jail. Is this the America that we want? Is this the America that we worked to create? Despite all this bad news, however, there is a very significant ray of hope: Scientists and interventionists have combined to show that it is possible to build successful programs preventing these outcomes. They have shown that it is possible to diminish, indeed in some cases to eliminate, the risk behaviors that are involved in pervasive and persistent poverty.

Building a route to such solutions is the mission of the ICYF. To explain the goals of the Institute, I should point out that the scholarly and societal issues involving America's children and families are indisputably complex. For their resolution, they require collaboration among those professionals that conduct science and those that design, deliver, and evaluate service. The Institute for Children, Youth, and Families at Michigan State University has been created to foster these integrations among current MSU faculty and youth- and family-serving professionals and within the next generation of these scientific and service groups. The mission of the Institute is to integrate research, policy and programs designed to increase our understanding of, and service to, children, youth, and families. Children and youth differ from each other in many ways, as do families, communities and cultures. The variety of settings in which children, youth and families live is wide. The Institute seeks to explain how such individual diversity and environmental variation influence development across the life span and to develop community programs that help members of these groups interact in positive, healthy ways.

The Institute is supported by MSU's W. K. Kellogg Foundation Lifelong Education grant, as well as many other sources, including the College of Human Ecology, the Provost's Office, and the Agricultural Experiment Station. Governing IYCF is an Executive Board of Deans, chaired by the Dean of Human Ecology, in collaboration with other units, including University Outreach and Graduate Research and Studies. Over the last two decades the study of children and their families has evolved in at least three significant directions.

1. First, children have come to be understood as active producers of their own development. These contributions are believed to occur through the relations children have with their parents and with other significant people in their environment, for example, other family members, caregivers and teachers, and peers. These 'child effects' are individually different in character. Based on their specific behavioral, psychological, physical, social and cultural characteristics, children evoke different reactions in other people, reactions that provide feedback to them and influence the further individual character of their development.
2. Second, during the 1970s and 80s scientists showed a renewed interest in human development across the life span. This interest led to the recognition that parents, as well as children, develop. For instance, parents develop as adults in general, and, more specifically, in regard to their familial and extra-familial (for example, vocational or career) roles. The influence of a child on his or her parents will depend in part on the prior experience the adult has with the parental role and on the other roles in which the parent is engaged, such as worker and/or adult-child and--with increasing frequency in our society--caregiver for an aged parent.
3. Third, the study of children and their parents has become focused on a concern with the 'real life' situations within which children and families exist, and with the study of the relations between the family and the other social settings within which children and parents function.