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Covid-19: A new billionaire has been minted nearly every day during the pandemic - CNN

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covid-19: a new billionaire has been minted nearly every day during the pandemic - cnn

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A new billionaire has been minted nearly every day during the pandemic

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The Covid-19 pandemic has been good for the wallets of the wealthy.

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The Price Kids Pay: Black students far more likely to be ticketed by police for school behavior – Chicago Tribune

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At Bloom Trail High School in Chicago's south suburbs, the student body is diverse: About 60% of the 1,100 students are Black or multiracial. Another 27% are Latino. And 12% are white.

But when you look at the group of students who get ticketed for misbehavior at school, the diversity vanishes.

Police, in cooperation with school officials, have written 178 tickets at the school in Steger since the start of the 2018-19 school year. School district records show that six went to Latino students. Five went to white students. And 167 went to Black or multiracial students - 94% of the total.

Such racial disparities in ticketing are part of a pattern at schools across the state, an investigation by ProPublica and the Chicago Tribune has found. In the schools and districts examined, an analysis indicated that Black students were twice as likely to be ticketed as their white peers.

Reporters set out to analyze police ticketing in nearly 200 districts throughout Illinois, which together enroll most of the state's high school students. Most local officials either did not specify race on tickets or refused to provide the information, but the news organizations obtained documentation of the race of students for about 4,000 tickets issued at schools in 68 districts.

After excluding places where ticketing was rare, schools in 42 districts remained, representing more than one-fifth of the state's high school students. The analysis found that about 9% of those students are Black but nearly 20% of tickets went to Black students.

Analyzing tickets received by members of other racial or ethnic groups is more difficult, in part because the Tribune and ProPublica identified anomalies in the way school districts and police recorded information about white and Latino students. But students in those groups don't appear to have been ticketed at high rates compared to their share of school enrollment.

Student ticketing in Illinois, or any other state, has never been examined on this scale. In fact, while Illinois officials have focused on whether schools are suspending or expelling Black students in unequal ways, they have not monitored police ticketing at schools. Neither has the division of the U.S. Department of Education that oversees civil rights issues.

The first installment of the Tribune-ProPublica investigation "The Price Kids Pay" detailed how student ticketing flouts a state law meant to prevent schools from using fines to discipline students. The investigation, which was based on school and municipal records from across the state, documented at least 11,800 tickets during the past three school years. It found that schools often involve police in minor incidents, resulting in harsh fines, debt for students and families and records that can follow children into adulthood.

In response, Illinois' top education official told school leaders to "immediately stop and consider both the cost and the consequences of these fines," and Gov. J.B. Pritzker said conversations already were underway with legislators "to make sure that this doesn't happen anywhere in the state of Illinois."

Illinois lawmakers tried in the past to pass legislation that would require school districts to collect and share student race and ethnicity data compiled by police when they intervene at schools for all types of disciplinary reasons, including such minor offenses as tobacco possession, tardiness or insubordination. But those efforts have stalled.

House Speaker Emanuel "Chris" Welch, a Democrat, said the legislature should take action if school ticketing is harming students.

"If these tickets are being issued disproportionately to people of color, we need to address that. That can create larger problems for students of color, problems that we've become accustomed to for far too long," Welch said in an interview.

The U.S. Department of Education collects data nationally in alternate years about the race of students referred to and arrested by police. But it didn't do so during the 2019-20 school year, when in-person learning was interrupted by the pandemic. In 2017-18, the most recent year data was collected, Illinois stood out for the gap between the percentage of students who are Black and the percentage of students referred to the police who are Black. No other state had a bigger disparity.

In response to similar data on expulsions and suspensions, the state last fall put a group of districts including Bloom Township High School District 206 on notice to reform how they handle discipline.

In an emailed response to reporters' questions, district officials said they were concerned about the racial disparities in ticketing identified at Bloom Trail. The district's response asserted that Black students and white students receive the same consequences for the same offenses and that the school has been affected by "a rise in violent crime and gang activity" in the communities the school serves.

Officials at Bloom Trail, which employs security guards to work inside the school, call Steger police when there is a fight that school officials think warrants a citation. Police bring the students' tickets to the school, and officials give them to the students or their parents.

Greg Horak, Bloom Township's director of climate, described the citations as a supplement to school discipline. "Dealing with the police, we hope this shows parents that this is a very serious situation," Horak said in an interview.

Rodney and Elizabeth Posley, whose sons Josiah and Jeremiah attend Bloom Trail, didn't realize students could get ticketed by police until it happened to their children in the fall. They said the boys were treated too harshly after they were part of a school fight that got out of hand.

The brothers were suspended and ticketed for disorderly conduct, and one was threatened with expulsion - extreme measures, Elizabeth Posley said, for teenage mistakes. The Posleys enlisted the help of a lawyer, their church and school employees to advocate for their sons, noting that neither boy had been in trouble at school before and the younger of the two receives special education services.

"They're young Black men. They stereotyped them," said Elizabeth Posley, who works as a pretrial officer at the Cook County Circuit Court. "They're not into gangs, where they're tough and they're bad. We pray as a family."
***
Last fall, during his freshman year at Bradley-Bourbonnais Community High School, southwest of Chicago, a 14-year-old Black student named Isaiah felt like school employees were closely watching him. Then an administrator reported him to Bradley village police after catching a glimpse of another student handing Isaiah a vaping device in a bathroom.

At the high school, which is patrolled by 10 security guards and a police officer, 10% of students are Black. But Black students received 21% of the 137 tickets written there from the start of the 2018-19 school year through the end of October. White students, who make up more than 68% of enrollment, got 60% of the tickets.

In Bradley, as in many other Illinois communities, students ticketed in schools are funneled into quasi-judicial hearings designed for adults and overseen by the local municipality. At the hearing for Isaiah's ticket at Bradley's village hall in November, the hearing officer asked Isaiah to "admit" or "deny" that he had a vaping device at school. Isaiah's mom encouraged him to say "deny" so the hearing officer would allow him to describe what led to the ticket.

Isaiah explained that he had immediately handed the vaping device back to his friend. He said he had been searched by administrators - including being made to remove his socks and shoes - and no device was found.

The hearing officer found Isaiah not liable for possession of an electronic vaping device - a rare vindication in a ticketing case. But the village imposes a $50 fee for attending the hearing, which Isaiah still had to pay.

Isaiah's mother, Catherine Hilgeman, said in an interview that she was upset school officials had questioned and searched her son without contacting her. She said she told her son he had learned a lesson: "You are a young Black male. You already have something against you. You shouldn't, but you do - it's the color of your skin. When somebody looks at you they automatically think, 'They're up to no good.'"

Christian, a multiracial student ticketed in the fall, described a strikingly similar incident. Another student, who saw in a mirror that a school administrator was walking into the bathroom, quickly handed his vape pen to Christian, who put it in his pocket, the family said.

Christian, 16, was required to appear at a ticket hearing in Bradley on a January afternoon. Most of the people ordered to attend that day were high school students, and most of them, including Christian, had been ticketed for possession of vaping devices. The hearing officer ordered Christian to pay $175 - a $125 fine plus a $50 hearing fee - and then asked if he would pay that day or if he needed time.

"Take some time," Christian said. He is paying the fine off with money he earned at his job at Little Caesars. By early May, he had paid $113, his mother said.

If students don't pay their fines quickly, Bradley is one of many Illinois municipalities that have sent the debt to collection agencies or to a program run by the state comptroller's office that deducts money from tax refunds or payroll checks.

At DeKalb High School, west of Chicago, nearly half the tickets issued during the past three years went to Black students, even though only about 20% of the students are Black. Between the start of the school year and mid-November, police wrote about 30 tickets to students, and Black students received 22 of them, or 73%. Most of the tickets were for fighting, followed by cannabis possession.

Tickets were also written at the two middle schools in DeKalb Community Unit School District 428, to students as young as 11, city records show. Black students make up about a quarter of the enrollment at each school, but at Huntley Middle School at least 63% of tickets went to Black students during the last three school years. At Clinton Rosette Middle School, tickets did not always specify race, but at least 40% went to Black students.

At four DeKalb hearings that reporters attended in the fall and winter, nearly all of the students were Black or Latino. All of the adults involved in the hearing process - the prosecutor, the clerk, the bailiff, the hearing officer - were white.

Records from the last three school years show that DeKalb students were most commonly cited for fighting, a violation that comes with a minimum $300 fine. The city gives students a choice: Pay within 21 days of getting the ticket, or attend a hearing. At the hearing, students can contest the ticket or plead liable, which usually results in an order to do community service. Hearings are held twice a month at 9 a.m. at the police station, and students have to miss school to be there.

If the students don't pay and don't show up on their hearing date, the fine increases to the maximum allowed by state law: $750, plus a $100 administrative fee. If the fines and fees are not paid, the debt can be sent to collections.

Terri Jackson, whose 14-year-old daughter agreed to perform 25 hours of community service after being ticketed for fighting, said she thinks the reason more tickets are written to Black children is simple: "They're paying attention to what the Black kids do."

At a hearing in November, a 15-year-old boy who had been caught with cannabis vape cartridges at the high school received 15 hours of community service; he would be fined $250 if he didn't complete it. After he went before the hearing officer, he told reporters he thought white students were disciplined less harshly at his school.

"There's differences. There are situations when they get caught and not punished like we do," said the sophomore, who identifies as Black and Latino.
***
Brian Wright, principal at Bradley-Bourbonnais Community High School, called his school's ticketing disparity disturbing and perhaps a reflection of racial bias.

"We have to assume that there is a population of our white students doing the same things that our Black students are, but why are they not getting ticketed but our Black students are?" Wright asked. "It is bothersome to me, but it is good information to take back to our assistant principals to see."

Wright said the school already is concerned about disproportionate suspensions. He also said the school has been working to address racial equity and inclusivity during the past few years by diversifying the books in the curriculum and including more students of color in Advanced Placement courses.

Administrators at other schools who were interviewed for this story said the disparities in ticketing at their schools are not the result of racial bias.

"The police are just being responsive to the actions of the students," DeKalb High School Principal James Horne said. "Where you see in the data the disproportionate numbers, the unfortunate part is there is disproportionate trauma that is affecting certain parts of the community." He added: "We're just being responsive to the challenge of our students."

Horne said his high school doesn't only respond to student misbehavior by involving police; it also uses restorative justice practices that bring students together to resolve conflicts with discussion and problem-solving. The school tries to avoid discipline that causes students to miss class time, Horne said.

Reporters sent DeKalb district officials questions about disparities at the two middle schools. They did not address those questions but wrote in a statement that they have been taking actions to better support their students and are developing a new districtwide code of conduct.

Disproportionate ticketing also occurs at schools with relatively few Black students, the analysis found. East Peoria Community High School, for example, has about 25 Black students in an average year. But Black students received 11 of the tickets police wrote during the past three school years. That's 10% of all police tickets, even though Black students represent just 2% of the school's enrollment. This school year, records show Black students received six of the 34 tickets police issued through mid-January, or about 18%. These totals don't include truancy tickets, as those were issued by a school employee.

Marjorie Greuter, the East Peoria Community High School superintendent, disputed any suggestion that students are ticketed unfairly at her school.

"We're consistent in our referral for city ordinance violations. If a kid is vaping, it doesn't matter - male, female, white, Black, low-income, high-income - they're going to get referred" to the school police officer, Greuter said.

"If it's disproportionate, it's because the offense is disproportionate or the offender is disproportionate."

Bloom Township High School District 206 has two schools: Bloom Trail in Steger and Bloom in Chicago Heights. The Chicago Heights Police Department does not ticket students at Bloom, but Steger police have agreed to ticket students at Bloom Trail when contacted by school officials.

"They call us and we ticket them," said Steger police Chief Greg Smith, who acknowledged that when he got into a fight at school as a teenager in the mid-1980s, his dean and football coach took care of it.

"I think the world has changed. What happened in the past, it wouldn't be unheard of for a dean to smack a kid upside the head - that, they just don't do anymore."

Now, he said, "it is the police officer's problem, and it's unfortunate, but everything has come down to 'We need the police.' We are handling a lot more issues than police used to."

In Chicago Heights, Deputy police Chief Mikal Elamin said officers will arrest a student if necessary - if the school or a victim signs a complaint - but the department doesn't think ticketing is appropriate. Police have not ticketed students at Bloom High School in at least the last three years, records show.

"I can't tell you that we have never ticketed, but I can say that it is not our policy to target or focus on our high school students. We wouldn't do that," Elamin said. He said issuing tickets would be "punishing the parent" because students typically aren't capable of paying.

In an emailed response to reporters' questions, Bloom Township district officials said administrators call the police when someone is injured or at risk of physical harm, when there is "severe and potentially dangerous" school disruption or when a student's behavior has "willfully interrupted the learning process" beyond what school workers can handle.

"Overall, we work to communicate that the school is not the place to handle your disagreements physically," according to the email. "We are intentional about addressing these situations fairly and equitably, regardless of students' race or gender."

After reviewing the district's own data and in response to the findings of the Tribune-ProPublica investigation, the Bloom Township superintendent scheduled a meeting with the Steger police chief to revisit their approach to police involvement in discipline.

"We want to be on the right side of things and do what is best for children," said Latunja Williams, the district's assistant superintendent for human resources.
***
Decades of research on school discipline has shown that when a judgment call is involved - such as whether to ticket someone for disorderly conduct for being disruptive or profane - students of color are disciplined more severely.

The Tribune and ProPublica were able to analyze both the race of students and the alleged violations for about 3,000 tickets that police wrote in 34 districts. While Black students made up about 11% of the enrollment in schools in these districts, they received nearly 29% of the tickets related to student behavior, including disorderly conduct, disturbing the peace, insubordination, "activity constituting a public nuisance" and "prohibited conduct on school property." White students represented about 45% of enrollment and 44% of the tickets related to student behavior. Black students also were disproportionately ticketed for fighting, assault and other offenses related to physical aggression.

Other types of violations, such as possession of drug paraphernalia, were more in proportion to Black students' enrollment. For several other racial groups, including Asian students and Native American students, there were too few tickets to draw meaningful conclusions.

Russ Skiba, a professor emeritus at Indiana University and a leading researcher on educational inequity, said U.S. schools began suspending Black students disproportionately for behavioral offenses in the 1970s, after districts were forced to fully desegregate. In the 1990s, he added, police became a more common presence in schools, exacerbating inequalities in discipline.

"There is an abundance of research that shows that Black students are not engaging in more severe behavior, that they receive punishments that are harsher for the same behavior," Skiba said. "Black and brown kids understand, and it doesn't go unnoticed, that they are being punished more often, suspended more often and, in your case, ticketed more often."

Few studies have examined ticketing of students, including how race may play a role. But an analysis published this year by the American Civil Liberties Union found police cited Black students in the Erie City School District in Pennsylvania for minor infractions at four times the rate of white students.

And in Texas, the Texas Appleseed advocacy group uncovered disparities in police ticketing in multiple school districts, leading state lawmakers to pass legislation in 2013 that prohibits officers from issuing tickets for disrupting class and other misbehavior at school. In the state's Bryan Independent School District, police had issued 53% of tickets for "disruption of class" to Black students during the 2011-2012 school year, even though that group made up about 21% of the district's enrollment. U.S. Department of Education investigators looking into the Bryan district found at least 10 incidents where Black students received harsher punishment than white students for similar conduct.

Federal data tracks how often schools involve police in a school incident, which is called a police referral, and whether an arrest was made, as well as the race of the students involved. The data does not track ticketing or other possible outcomes. In Illinois, Black students accounted for about 17% of enrollment but 42% of the students referred to police in the 2017-18 school year, according to the federal data.

The gap is similar with suspensions and expulsions. State data shows that in the 2019-20 school year about 44% of the students suspended or expelled from Illinois public schools were Black.

Citing the federal and state data, Illinois state education and justice officials in March urged schools to evaluate their punitive discipline policies, including suspensions and expulsions, and the impact of police in their schools. They said the expanding role of police officers at school raises concerns about a disparate impact on students of color, particularly Black students.

It was the first guidance the state has issued to school districts with the intent of ensuring that disciplinary practices do not violate civil rights law. Illinois State Board of Education spokesperson Jackie Matthews said punishing students for behaviors perceived as defiance or misconduct does nothing to address the reasons the students are behaving that way.

"These tactics disproportionately impact students of color and increase the odds of students dropping out and experiencing involvement with the criminal justice system," Matthews wrote in an email.

The recent state guidance did not mention tickets, which the Tribune-ProPublica investigation found to be the most common outcome when police get involved in school incidents.

Amy Meek, chief of the Civil Rights Bureau in the Illinois attorney general's office, said schools can be in violation of civil rights laws if their policies and practices have a disparate impact on certain groups of people - even if it is not intentional.

Ticketing students "falls within the umbrella of concerns" related to disparate impact and is "something that we definitely look forward to looking at in more depth," Meek said.

"School districts have an ongoing obligation to annually revisit their discipline policies," she said. "This is a prime opportunity for them to look at their data and take a look at practices that they may be employing that impose an unjustified disparate impact because of race."

Harold Jordan, nationwide education equity coordinator at the ACLU, said the U.S. Department of Education should be specifically tracking police ticketing at schools as part of its Civil Rights Data Collection, which is used to monitor whether schools provide equal opportunities to all students. The education department did not respond to a request for comment.

"I think it's significant because it's an indicator of the extent to which there's a growing amount of collaboration between schools and police that's outright harmful," Jordan said.

He said that while some incidents at school are serious, most discipline is for minor infractions. "Two kids can do essentially the same thing and be treated quite differently in how they are disciplined, and especially whether police are involved," Jordan said. "Too often, race and ethnicity are factors."
***
Bloom Township High School District 206 is on an Illinois State Board of Education list of districts that, for three consecutive years, suspended or expelled students of color disproportionately. In the 2019-20 school year, 88.5% of students suspended at Bloom Trail High School were Black, though Black students make up only about 54% of the student body.

Concerned about those numbers, district officials have focused this year on alternative ways to correct student behavior, they wrote in an email. The district is one of six in the state participating in training sessions focused on improving equity in student discipline, funded by the Illinois State Board of Education with pandemic relief funds.

Bloom Township school administrators are working with Loyola University Chicago school discipline experts to get certified in restorative justice practices. In February, all school employees were trained on positive behavior interventions. The district also has partnered with the University of Illinois at Springfield to learn about "empathetic instruction," a way of handling student misbehavior in less punitive ways.

"Our ultimate goal is to ensure a safe learning environment for all students and the school community, while proactively addressing the challenging behaviors of some of our neediest students," district officials wrote in an emailed response.

But ticketing remains a central part of Bloom Trail's disciplinary process, and by mid-April of this school year, all but six of the 54 tickets police wrote at the school went to Black students. No white students were ticketed.

Two of the tickets written to Black students went to the Posleys' sons, Josiah and Jeremiah, who were 16 and 14 at the time.

Josiah said he made a bad decision to meet another student in the bathroom after a disagreement. Once there, he said, he got jumped by several boys and defended himself. "I didn't instigate it. I didn't cause it," said Josiah, who excels in algebra and literature and wants to be an engineer. "I'm not like that."

Jeremiah said he followed Josiah into the bathroom out of concern for his brother. He didn't hit anyone, he said, but one of the boys punched him in the face. At least five boys were involved in the fight, and a security guard who tried to break it up needed four stitches after a student - not one of the brothers - pushed him into a window, according to the district.

After the fight, school officials suspended the brothers and threatened to expel Josiah, a junior, for "mob action." A meeting also was called to review the special education plan for Jeremiah, a freshman who has autism, and his parents feared the school would try to transfer him.

The family was shocked by the severity of the punishment for two boys who had not had previous discipline issues and were good students. They decided to find a lawyer and challenge the school's actions. Bloom Trail later withdrew the threat of expulsion and told both boys to come back to school.

But by then, the school had already asked Steger police to write tickets. Both boys, as well as three other students who were in the bathroom, were cited for disorderly conduct.

The Posleys said involving police added a layer of unnecessary punishment and worry for the family. The police department sent letters to their home notifying the boys that they had to appear at a hearing in November at the police station.

Jackie Ross, an attorney at Loyola University Chicago's ChildLaw Clinic who specializes in school discipline and special education, said she took on Josiah and Jeremiah's case because she felt the boys were being treated unfairly. The same goes for many others, she said.

"There is this gross secret practice going on of fining families of color who are largely unrepresented and making a lot of money from it," Ross said.

The school district said officials couldn't talk about the discipline of individual students.

As the brothers' November hearing date neared, Elizabeth Posley worried that Josiah's longer hair wouldn't be considered "presentable." Her husband agreed, even though Josiah thought it was unfair that he would have to change the way he looked to avoid being stereotyped.

"In my mind, because you look a certain way as an African American child, you're going to be judged a certain way," Elizabeth Posley said. Rodney Posley used his clippers to cut Josiah's hair.

Both boys wore suits to the hearing, Jeremiah's from his eighth-grade graduation. The family lined up several character references, including one from a church leader. Three Bloom Trail employees - a guidance counselor, a social worker and a teacher - signed a letter praising Jeremiah and his parents for their positive involvement in school.

"Jeremiah is a hard worker, compassionate and respectful of others," they wrote.

Josiah said he expected the hearing would be in a courtroom, like the one on the TV show "Judge Mathis." Instead, it took place in a Steger police conference room with rows of stackable chairs.

According to a recording of the hearing, Ross told the hearing officer that Illinois law specifically prohibits schools from fining students for disciplinary reasons. She said Jeremiah has difficulty reading social cues because of his autism and went into the bathroom not knowing he was walking into a fight. Jeremiah has protections under federal disabilities law, she argued, and the consequences he faced for his actions, including the ticket, were inappropriate.

The family said at the hearing that school officials had scaled back some of the school-based punishment and that the family expected the ticket would be thrown out, too.

"It doesn't matter if the school disciplined the children or didn't discipline them," hearing officer Brian Driscoll said in response. At the hearing, he said, "it is just different rules."

Under Steger's municipal code, the hearing officer has discretion in setting the amount of a fine or can decide to give a warning instead.

Driscoll found both boys liable and said he would fine Josiah $75 and Jeremiah $25. A third boy involved in the fight also received a $75 fine. Two others didn't show up for the hearing and were fined $150 each.

The five boys ticketed for the Bloom Trail fight, all students of color, collectively owed the village $475.

"I didn't find what he did helpful," Elizabeth Posley said of the hearing officer. "He didn't tell the kids to apologize or make up. He just fined them and kicked them out. He fined kids all night. Every kid who got in there got a fine."

The Posleys didn't pay the fines that night. They thought about appealing. But a few days later, concerned that they had a short window before the village could impose further financial consequences, Rodney Posley went to the police station to pay.

When he got there, he found out Steger accepts only cash or checks for ticket payments, and he didn't have $100 on him. He drove to a nearby Jewel-Osco supermarket and bought a Snickers bar with his debit card so he could get cash back, then drove back and handed over the money.

Josiah's suspension prevented him from playing drums at the high school's homecoming concert in the fall. Now that it's prom season, he's glad he can participate in school activities again. Wanting his younger brother to experience a typical high school rite of passage, Josiah decided to take Jeremiah to the prom with him.

On Friday, surrounded by 20 family members, the brothers slipped on sunglasses and posed in the driveway by an arch of red and black balloons to match their red and black suits. As the boys left for the dance, the whole family cheered.
Editing by Kaarin Tisue, George Papajohn and Steve Mills; additional data analysis by Ruth Talbot and Agnel Philip; additional research by Alex Mierjeski; visual presentation by Laila Milevski, Alex Bandoni and Ellen Przepasniak, Maya Eliahou, Steve Rosenberg, Todd Panagopoulos and Raquel Zaldivar; engagement reporting by Adriana Gallardo and Ariana Tobin; copy editing by Neil deMause and Jeff Carlson.

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The Price Kids Pay: Black students far more likely to be ticketed by police for school behavior

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At Bloom Trail High School in Chicago's south suburbs, the student body is diverse: About 60% of the 1,100 students are Black or multiracial. Another 27% are Latino. And 12% are white. But when you look at the group of students who get ticketed for misbehavior at school, the diversity vanishes.

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The U.S. census sees Middle Eastern and North African people as white. Many don't

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There's a reality about race in the U.S. that has confounded many people of Middle Eastern or North African descent.

The federal government officially categorizes people with origins in Lebanon, Iran, Egypt and other countries in the MENA region as white.

But that racial identity has not matched the discrimination in housing, at work and through other parts of daily life that many say they have faced.

Younger people of MENA descent have "had a plethora of different experiences that made them feel that some of their experiences were actually closer to communities of color in the U.S.," says Neda Maghbouleh, an associate professor of sociology at the University of Toronto, who has conducted research on the topic.

The paradox has been hard to show through data.

But a newly released study co-authored by Maghbouleh offers suggestive evidence that a majority of people with MENA origins do not see themselves as white. Meanwhile, a substantial percentage of white people who do not identify as MENA or Latino do not perceive MENA people as white either, the study also suggests.

The findings match the lived realities of many people of MENA descent

For the paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences - which cites NPR's reporting - Maghbouleh, along with her co-authors Ariela Schachter and René D. Flores, used online surveys to conduct experiments last summer with close to 1,100 participants.

They included one group of people who identified as white and not MENA or Latino, as well as two cohorts who either identified as Middle Eastern or reported having at least one grandparent born in the Middle East or North Africa.

Presented with a "Middle Eastern or North African" category, 88% of people of MENA descent in the study (who could select one or more categories) chose that option when identifying their race, ethnicity or origin. The results also show that adding "Middle Eastern or North African" to a list of response options dramatically lowered the share of people with MENA origins self-identifying with only the "White" category.

Another part of the study asked participants to classify made-up profiles of individuals that included names, ancestors' countries of origins and other details.

Characteristics related to the Middle East or North Africa, the findings suggest, would not be categorized as white by many people of MENA descent or by white people who do not identify as MENA or Latino.

"I think that's a very powerful finding, which I think anecdotally has been felt by most Arab Americans in their daily lives," says Kristine Ajrouch, a professor of sociology at Eastern Michigan University whose research on white identity and Arab Americans is cited in the paper.

It's hard to do research about people of MENA descent in the U.S.

Like the paper's co-authors, Ajrouch notes that research is limited by the challenges in finding large numbers of people with MENA origins to participate in studies.

"This is a really big problem that kind of haunts a lot of social science research," said Maghbouleh, who adds that people of North African descent are underrepresented among the study's participants.

Maghbouleh conducted extensive interviews with younger people of MENA descent for the 2017 book The Limits of Whiteness: Iranian Americans and the Everyday Politics of Race. The new study tries to ascertain concrete numbers for some of the insights Maghbouleh gained through that book's qualitative research.

But there is still a gap.

Researchers are hamstrung by the federal standards that require the Census Bureau to include people with MENA roots in data about white people. With no separate "Middle Eastern or North African" checkbox on the U.S. census forms, there is no direct way of producing a national count of people of MENA descent in the United States.

"It makes it very difficult to identify Middle Eastern and North African individuals or those of Arab ancestry when there's been decades of conditioning and socializing to say, 'When you fill out the form, you're supposed to check white,' " says Ajrouch, who is currently trying to study how prevalent Alzheimer's disease and other dementias are among older Arab Americans.

In effect, many people of MENA descent in the U.S. are rendered invisible in official statistics that researchers rely on for health research and other key studies.

The history of whiteness and people of MENA descent is complicated

The complicated relationship many people with MENA origins have with whiteness is entangled with a naturalization system in the U.S. that, until 1952, imposed racial restrictions on which immigrants could become citizens.

First arriving in large numbers in the late 1800s, the earliest generations of immigrants from the Middle East and North Africa saw whiteness as the path towards claiming full rights in their new country.

There were several court cases where Syrian immigrants emphasized their Christianity because it was considered a European religion and, therefore, a marker of whiteness, says Sahar Aziz, a law professor at Rutgers University Law School and author of The Racial Muslim: When Racism Quashes Religious Freedom.

"They argued they were white in court because the only immigrants that could naturalize to become U.S. citizens had to be found white by law," she says.

Anti-Black racism in the media and other parts of U.S. society, Aziz adds, has helped drive many immigrants from around the world to try to "disassociate themselves from Blackness and try to associate as close to whiteness as possible."

In more recent decades, however, there's been a growing disconnect between the way the federal government officially categorizes people of MENA descent by race and many people's lived realities - a dissonance that was underlined after the Sept. 11 attacks.

"Over the past 20 years, people who are from the Middle East and North Africa have experienced a form of stereotyping that presumes that they are inherently prone to violence, that they are prone to being sympathetic to terrorism, that they are forever foreign," says Aziz, who served as a senior policy adviser for the U.S. Department of Homeland Security's Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties during former President Barack Obama's administration.

"All of these stereotypes are what people who do not have the privileges of whiteness experience," she adds.

A MENA checkbox may show up on the 2030 census

To fully understand the experiences of people of MENA descent in the U.S., Aziz and other researchers say an additional checkbox for "Middle Eastern or North African" is needed on forms for the once-a-decade head count.

To prepare for the 2020 count, Census Bureau researchers concluded that including a "Middle Eastern or North African" category on questionnaires would be "optimal" in part because it "helps MENA respondents to more accurately report their MENA identities."

But during former President Donald Trump's administration, an effort that began during the Obama years to introduce a MENA checkbox as part of a revamped census question about race and ethnicity stalled. It required approval from the White House's Office of Management and Budget, and the lack of a public decision by OMB forced the bureau to drop the plans.

In 2018, bureau officials also announced that the agency needed to conduct research and testing to address feedback from "a large segment of the Middle Eastern and North African population" who think MENA should be considered a category for an ethnicity, not a race.

Trump's travel bans targeting people from several Muslim-majority countries in the Middle East and North Africa also raised concerns among some longtime advocates for a new census checkbox about how the public could have perceived rolling one out under the previous administration.

Last year, however, the Biden administration confirmed to NPR that it has revived the review of the proposal that would allow the bureau to overhaul how the census asks about race and ethnicity. If OMB gives the green light, a "Middle Eastern or North African" checkbox could be on track to show up on updated forms for the country's largest survey, the bureau's American Community Survey, as well as the 2030 census.

"There is so much more work that needs to be done," Aziz notes. "I don't think that that empirical work can be done until the U.S. census adds a category, whether it's under a race or whether it's under ethnicity."

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The U.S. census sees Middle Eastern and North African people as white. Many don't

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There's a reality about race in the U.S. that has confounded many people of Middle Eastern or North African descent. The federal government officially categorizes people with origins in Lebanon, Iran, Egypt and other countries in the MENA region as white.

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A week ago, a tweet about a Virginia library that went out of its way to accommodate parents went viral. The tweet included a photo of a desk or carrel that had a built-in toddler-friendly sidecar, so that parents without child care who need to use the desk's accompanying computer might have their kids occupied, distracted and comfortably contained for a few minutes, allowing them to focus.

Alissa Walker, a writer for the real estate and design site Curbed, asked about the genesis of these carrels, and learned that they came about through a collaboration between the library staff and a local interior design firm, and were created by a furniture company in Michigan.

"We kept seeing this problem with parents using the computer," says Patty Conway, the community relations coordinator for the Richmond, Va., area library. "If they have a small child, they'd have to hold them on their knee and really struggle to balance their child-care needs with their needs to use the computer."

This is a beautiful thing: The staff at the Henrico County Public Library saw that parents who used their public services were struggling, and worked to create an environment that accommodated them. Walker's article is sensitive and informative. Unfortunately, that is not how it was interpreted on social media, because of a somewhat misleading headline: "Finally, a Desk for Working Parents."

The responses, presumably from working parents, to an Instagram post about the article were scathing: "How about parental leave in line with most other developed economies?" "This isn't real, right? It's a joke. It has to be a joke." "You forgot to add the father's desk to show how they share this labor. Or is he off in a quiet room only doing one job and getting paid twice as much?"

I'm not really surprised by the vehemence of these replies. Parents of children under 5 in the United States often feel betrayed and abandoned by politicians and community leaders. And if all that someone saw was a headline perhaps implying that working parents' problems could be solved by a desk with an attached playpen, it's understandable why they'd be deeply annoyed. After all, a "desk for working parents" that really addressed our day-to-day challenges would be just a regular desk, and our kids would be elsewhere, in some form of affordable and reliable child care.

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Opinion | What Does 'a Desk for Working Parents' Mean?

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A week ago, a tweet about a Virginia library that went out of its way to accommodate parents went viral. The tweet included a photo of a desk or carrel that had a built-in toddler-friendly sidecar, so that parents without child care who need to use the desk's accompanying computer might have their kids occupied, distracted and comfortably contained for a few minutes, allowing them to focus.

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Chicago nonprofit seeks to help young moms finish college

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CHICAGO (WLS) -- New Moms, Inc. is making sure young mothers achieve their goals of finishing college.

The Chicago non-profit is partnering with City Colleges of Chicago for a three-year pilot to end the stigma around young motherhood.

Gabrielle Carverl-McNeal, senior director of Employment and Academic Coaching at New Moms, said "we believe this intentional investment will lead to more mothers of color graduating from postsecondary programs and working in family-sustaining, living wage jobs. Finally, we will invite the community to learn more and to support the program."
RELATED: Chicago job training program empowers young moms through employment

One in five college students in the United States parents, according to the Institute for Women's Policy Research.

The pilot recruited 25 Chicagoland young moms pursuing a certificate or associate degree at an accredited institution. During the program, each participant will receive monthly support, including a $500 monthly stiped, coaching and childcare support.

"Research shows that holistic support, including financial support, is one of the most effective ways to improve outcomes for low-income students," Caverl-McNeal said. "Student-parents facing scarcity and poverty achieve their goals more frequently when their environments are less stressful, when they have the support of positive relationships and when they have developed core life skills."

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Chicago nonprofit seeks to help young moms finish college

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CHICAGO (WLS) -- New Moms, Inc. is making sure young mothers achieve their goals of finishing college. The Chicago non-profit is partnering with City Colleges of Chicago for a three-year pilot to end the stigma around young motherhood.

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John Leguizamo Avoided the Sun to Stay Light-Skinned for Roles - Variety

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John Leguizamo revealed in a conversation with the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences that he made a deliberate choice in his career to stay out of the sun in order to continue booking roles as a light-skinned Latino actor. The actor said he has long "benefitted from being light-skinned" in Hollywood and addressed issues of colorism within Hollywood and within Latin culture.

"I stayed out of the sun so I could work," Leguizamo said. "I definitely would not go in the sun for years. It was a conscious thing because I could work. And all the Latinos that made it so far, a lot of them were all light-skinned. What happened to all the Afro-Latinos and the majority of indigenous Latinos? They don't get a shot, you know. So, there's a lot of things we got to deal with in Hollywood, and we got to fix, and we got to speak out and we got to speak up."

Leguizamo also reacted to last year's Annenberg Inclusion Initiative, which looked at the 1,300 top-grossing films from 2007 to 2019 and found that only 7% of films from 2019 featured a lead/co-lead Hispanic/Latino actor.

"Not only are we invisible, but when we are seen, it's a negative portrayal," Leguizamo said. "Things are improving. I think COVID made us really look at ourselves in America. Black Lives Matter was a huge awakening for America, a reboot for America to look at themselves and see what's going on. I think everybody's trying to do the right thing and hire many more people of color. What I want to see, I want to see 20% of the roles in front of the camera and the crew. I'm not asking for extra. I just want what's due to us."

Leguizamo was speaking to the Academy as part of the organization's "Seen" interview series. The actor revealed that he is going to run for Governor of the Academy in order to better enforce change in the industry.

"You have to step up and make a change and change it from within," Leguizamo said. "I feel like if you've achieved a certain amount of success, it's your duty to give back."

Leguizamo most recently starred in Disney's animated musical "Encanto." He reprises his voice role of Sid in "Ice Age: Adventures of Buck Wild," streaming January 28 on Disney Plus, and also stars opposite Anya Taylor-Joy and Nicholas Hoult in Searchlight Pictures' upcoming black comedy "The Menu."

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John Leguizamo Says He Avoided the Sun 'For Years' to Stay Light-Skinned for Hollywood Roles

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John Leguizamo revealed in a conversation with the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences that he made a deliberate choice in his career to stay out of the sun in order to continue booking rol...

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Learn how to access education data, using a variety of online tools. In this training, you will also learn the source of the data, the tables available on the subject, and how to download and create maps.

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Learn how to access education data using a variety of online tools.

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The Romanian Orphans Are Adults Now - The Atlantic

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Here's what's become of them.

Image above: Izidor Ruckel near his home outside Denver Updated at 3:22 p.m. ET on June 23, 2020.
For his first three years of life, Izidor lived at the hospital.

The dark-eyed, black-haired boy, born June 20, 1980, had been abandoned when he was a few weeks old. The reason was obvious to anyone who bothered to look: His right leg was a bit deformed. After a bout of illness (probably polio), he had been tossed into a sea of abandoned infants in the Socialist Republic of Romania.

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In films of the period documenting orphan care, you see nurses like assembly-line workers swaddling newborns out of a seemingly endless supply; with muscled arms and casual indifference, they sling each one onto a square of cloth, expertly knot it into a tidy package, and stick it at the end of a row of silent, worried-looking babies. The women don't coo or sing to them.* You see the small faces trying to fathom what's happening as their heads whip by during the wrapping maneuvers.

In his hospital, in the Southern Carpathian mountain town of Sighetu Marmaţiei, Izidor would have been fed by a bottle stuck into his mouth and propped against the bars of a crib. Well past the age when children in the outside world began tasting solid food and then feeding themselves, he and his age-mates remained on their backs, sucking from bottles with widened openings to allow the passage of a watery gruel. Without proper care or physical therapy, the baby's leg muscles wasted. At 3, he was deemed "deficient" and transferred across town to a Cămin Spital Pentru Copii Deficienţi, a Home Hospital for Irrecoverable Children.

The cement fortress emitted no sounds of children playing, though as many as 500 lived inside at one time. It stood mournfully aloof from the cobblestone streets and sparkling river of the town where Elie Wiesel had been born, in 1928, and enjoyed a happy childhood before the Nazi deportations.

The windows on Izidor's third-floor ward had been fitted with prison bars. In boyhood, he stood there often, gazing down on an empty mud yard enclosed by a barbed-wire fence. Through bare branches in winter, Izidor got a look at another hospital that sat right in front of his own and concealed it from the street. Real children, children wearing shoes and coats, children holding their parents' hands, came and went from that hospital. No one from Izidor's Cămin Spital was ever taken there, no matter how sick, not even if they were dying.

Like all the boys and girls who lived in the hospital for "irrecoverables," Izidor was served nearly inedible, watered-down food at long tables where naked children on benches banged their tin bowls. He grew up in overcrowded rooms where his fellow orphans endlessly rocked, or punched themselves in the face, or shrieked. Out-of-control children were dosed with adult tranquilizers, administered through unsterilized needles, while many who fell ill received transfusions of unscreened blood. Hepatitis B and HIV/AIDS ravaged the Romanian orphanages.

Izidor was destined to spend the rest of his childhood in this building, to exit the gates only at 18, at which time, if he were thoroughly incapacitated, he'd be transferred to a home for old men; if he turned out to be minimally functional, he'd be evicted to make his way on the streets. Odds were high that he wouldn't survive that long, that the boy with the shriveled leg would die in childhood, malnourished, shivering, unloved.

This past Christmas Day was the 30th anniversary of the public execution by firing squad of Romania's last Communist dictator, Nicolae Ceaușescu, who'd ruled for 24 years. In 1990, the outside world discovered his network of "child gulags," in which an estimated 170,000 abandoned infants, children, and teens were being raised. Believing that a larger population would beef up Romania's economy, Ceaușescu had curtailed contraception and abortion, imposed tax penalties on people who were childless, and celebrated as "heroine mothers" women who gave birth to 10 or more. Parents who couldn't possibly handle another baby might call their new arrival "Ceauşescu's child," as in "Let him raise it."
Read: Ta-Nehisi Coates on Nicolae Ceauşescu, megalomaniacal tyrant, friend of America
To house a generation of unwanted or unaffordable children, Ceauşescu ordered the construction or conversion of hundreds of structures around the country. Signs displayed the slogan: the state can take better care of your child than you can.

At age 3, abandoned children were sorted. Future workers would get clothes, shoes, food, and some schooling in Case de copii-"children's homes"-while "deficient" children wouldn't get much of anything in their Cămine Spitale. The Soviet "science of defectology" viewed disabilities in infants as intrinsic and uncurable. Even children with treatable issues-perhaps they were cross-eyed or anemic, or had a cleft lip-were classified as "unsalvageable."

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After the Romanian revolution, children in unspeakable conditions-skeletal, splashing in urine on the floor, caked with feces-were discovered and filmed by foreign news programs, including ABC's 20/20, which broadcast " Shame of a Nation " in 1990. Like the liberators of Auschwitz 45 years before, early visitors to the institutions have been haunted all their lives by what they saw. "We flew in by helicopter over the snow to Siret, landing after midnight, subzero weather, accompanied by Romanian bodyguards carrying Uzis," Jane Aronson tells me. A Manhattan-based pediatrician and adoption-medicine specialist, she was part of one of the first pediatric teams summoned to Romania by the new government. "We walk into a pitch-black, freezing-cold building and discover there are youngsters lurking about-they're tiny, but older, something weird, like trolls, filthy, stinking. They're chanting in a dronelike way, gibberish. We open a door and find a population of 'cretins'-now it's known as congenital iodine deficiency syndrome; untreated hypothyroidism stunts growth and brain development. I don't know how old they were, three feet tall, could have been in their 20s. In other rooms we see teenagers the size of 6- and 7-year-olds, with no secondary sexual characteristics. There were children with underlying genetic disorders lying in cages. You start almost to disassociate."

"I walked into an institution in Bucharest one afternoon, and there was a small child standing there sobbing," recalls Charles A. Nelson III, a professor of pediatrics and neuroscience at Harvard Medical School and Boston Children's Hospital. "He was heartbroken and had wet his pants. I asked, 'What's going on with that child?' A worker said, 'Well, his mother abandoned him this morning and he's been like that all day.' That was it. No one comforted the little boy or picked him up. That was my introduction."

The Romanian orphans were not the first devastatingly neglected children to be seen by psychologists in the 20th century. Unresponsive World War II orphans, as well as children kept isolated for long periods in hospitals, had deeply concerned mid-century child-development giants such as René Spitz and John Bowlby. In an era devoted to fighting malnutrition, injury, and infection, the idea that adequately fed and medically stable children could waste away because they missed their parents was hard to believe. Their research led to the then-bold notion, advanced especially by Bowlby, that simply lacking an "attachment figure," a parent or caregiver, could wreak a lifetime of havoc on mental and physical health.
From the April 1996 issue: Anne F. Thurston describes life in a Chinese orphanage
Neuroscientists tended to view "attachment theory" as suggestive and thought-provoking work within the "soft science" of psychology. It largely relied on case studies or correlational evidence or animal research. In the psychologist Harry Harlow's infamous "maternal deprivation" experiments, he caged baby rhesus monkeys alone, offering them only maternal facsimiles made of wire and wood, or foam and terry cloth.

In 1998, at a small scientific meeting, animal research presented back-to-back with images from Romanian orphanages changed the course of the study of attachment. First the University of Minnesota neonatal-pediatrics professor Dana Johnson shared photos and videos that he'd collected in Romania of rooms teeming with children engaged in "motor stereotypies": rocking, banging their heads, squawking. He was followed by a speaker who showed videos of her work with motherless primate infants like the ones Harlow had produced-swaying, twirling, self-mutilating. The audience was shocked by the parallels. "We were all in tears," Nelson told me.

In the decade after the fall of Ceaușescu, the new Romanian government welcomed Western child-development experts to simultaneously help and study the tens of thousands of children still warehoused in state care. Researchers hoped to answer some long-standing questions: Are there sensitive periods in neural development, after which the brain of a deprived child cannot make full use of the mental, emotional, and physical stimulation later offered? Can the effects of "maternal deprivation" or "caregiver absence" be documented with modern neuroimaging techniques? Finally, if an institutionalized child is transferred into a family setting, can he or she recoup undeveloped capacities? Implicitly, poignantly: Can a person unloved in childhood learn to love?

Tract developments fan out from the Denver airport like playing cards on a table. The Great Plains have been ground down to almost nothing here, to wind and dirt and trash on the shoulder of the highway, to Walgreens and Arby's and AutoZone. In a rental car, I drive slowly around the semicircles and cul-de-sacs of Izidor's subdivision until I see him step out of the shadow of a 4,500-square-foot McMansion with a polite half-wave. He sublets a room here, as do others, including some families-an exurban commune in a single-family residence built for Goliaths. At 39, Izidor is an elegant, wiry man with mournful eyes. His manner is alert and tentative. A general manager for a KFC, he works 60-to-65-hour weeks.
Read: American child detention centers' degrading, inhumane conditions
"Welcome to Romania," he announces, opening his bedroom door. It's an entryway into another time, another place. From every visit to his home country, Izidor has brought back folk art and souvenirs-hand-painted glazed plates and teacups, embroidered tea towels, Romanian flags, shot glasses, wood figurines, cut-glass flasks of plum brandy, and CDs of Romanian folk music, heavy on the violins. He could stock a gift shop. There are thick wine-colored rugs, blankets, and wall hangings. The ambient light is maroon, the curtains closed against the high-altitude sunshine. Ten miles southwest of the Denver airport, Izidor is living in an ersatz Romanian cottage.

"Everyone in Maramureş lives like this," he tells me, referring to the cultural region in northern Romania where he was born.

I'm thinking, Do they, though?

"You will see that many people there have these things in their homes," he clarifies.

That sounds more accurate. People like knickknacks. "Do you sound like a Romanian when you visit?" I ask.

"No," he says. "When I start to speak, they ask, 'Where are you from?' I tell them: 'From Maramureş!' " No one believes him, because of his accent, so he has to explain: "Technically, if you want to be logical about it, I am Romanian, but I've lived in America for more than 20 years."

"When you meet new people, do you talk about your history?"

"No, I try not to. I want to experience Romania as a normal human being. I don't want to be known everywhere as 'the Orphan.' "
To cheer Izidor up after his beating, Onisa promised that someday she'd take him home with her for an overnight visit.
His precise English makes even casual phrases sound formal. In his room, Izidor has captured the Romanian folk aesthetic, but something else stirs beneath the surface. I'm reminded of the book he self-published at age 22, titled Abandoned for Life. It's a grim tale, but once, when he was about 8, Izidor had a happy day.

A kind nanny had started working at the hospital. "Onisa was a young lady, a bit chubby, with long black hair and round rosy cheeks," Izidor writes in his memoir. "She loved to sing and often taught us some of her music." One day, Onisa intervened when another nanny was striking Izidor with a broomstick. Like a few others before her, Onisa had spotted his intelligence. On the ward of semi-ambulatory (some crawled or creeped), slightly verbal (some just made noises) children, Izidor was the go-to kid if an adult had questions, like what was that one's name or when had that one died. The director would occasionally peek in and ask Izidor if he and the other children were being hit; to avoid retribution, Izidor always said no.
Annie Lowrey: How America treats its own children
On that day, to cheer him up after his beating, Onisa promised that someday she'd take him home with her for an overnight visit. Skeptical that such an extraordinary event would ever happen, Izidor thanked her for the nice idea.

A few weeks later, on a snowy winter day, Onisa dressed Izidor in warm clothes and shoes she'd brought from home, took him by the hand, and led him out the front door and through the orphanage gate. Walking slowly, she took the small boy, who swayed on uneven legs with a deep, tilting limp, down the lane past the public hospital and into the town. Cold, fresh air brushed his cheeks, and snow squeaked under his shoes; the wind rattled the branches; a bird stood on a chimney. "It was my first time ever going out into the world," he tells me now. He looked in astonishment at the cars and houses and shops. He tried to absorb and memorize everything to report back to the kids on his ward.

"When I stepped into Onisa's apartment," he writes, "I could not believe how beautiful it was; the walls were covered with dark rugs and there was a picture of the Last Supper on one of them. The carpets on the floor were red." Neighborhood children knocked on Onisa's door to see if the strange boy from the orphanage wanted to come out and play, and he did. Onisa's children arrived home from school, and Izidor learned that it was the start of their Christmas holiday. He feasted alongside Onisa's family at their friends' dinner table that night, tasting Romanian specialties for the first time, including sarmale (stuffed cabbage), potato goulash with thick noodles, and sweet yellow sponge cake with cream filling. He remembers every bite. On the living-room floor after dinner, the child of that household let Izidor play with his toys. Izidor followed the boy's lead and drove little trains across the rug. Back at Onisa's, he slept in his first-ever soft, clean bed.

The next morning, Onisa asked Izidor if he wanted to go to work with her or to stay with her children. Here he made a mistake so terrible that, 31 years later, he still remembers it with grief.

"I want to go to work with you!" he called. He was deep into a fantasy that Onisa was his mother, and he didn't want to be parted from her. "I got dressed as fast as I could, and we headed out the door," he remembers. "When we were near her work, I realized that her work was at the hospital, my hospital, and I began to cry ... It had only been 24 hours but somehow I thought I was going to be part of Onisa's family now. It didn't occur to me that her work was actually at the hospital until we were at the gate again. I felt so shocked when we turned into the yard it was like I'd forgotten I came from there."

He tried to turn back but wasn't permitted. He'd found the most wonderful spot on Earth-Onisa's apartment-and, through his own stupidity, had let it slip away. He sobbed like a newcomer until the other nannies threatened to slap him.

Today Izidor lives 6,000 miles from Romania. He leads a solitary life. But in his bedroom in a subdivision on a paved-over prairie, he has re-created the setting from the happiest night in his childhood.

"That night at Onisa's," I ask, "do you think you sensed that there were family relationships and emotions happening there that you'd never seen or felt before?"

"No, I was too young to perceive that."

"But you did notice the beautiful furnishings?"

"Yes! You see this?" Izidor says, picking up a tapestry woven with burgundy roses on a dark, leafy background. "This is almost identical to Onisa's. I bought it in Romania for that reason!"

"All these things ..." I gesture.

"Yes."

"But not because they signify 'family' to you?"

"No, but they signify 'peace' to me. It was the first time I slept in a real home. For many years I thought, Why can't I have a home like that?  "

Now he does. But he knows there are missing parts-no matter how many shot glasses he collects.

In the early 1990s, Danny and Marlys Ruckel lived with their three young daughters in a San Diego condo. They thought it would be nice to add a boy to the mix, and heard about a local independent filmmaker, John Upton, who was arranging adoptions of Romanian orphans. Marlys called and told him they wanted to adopt a baby boy. "There's thousands of kids there," Upton replied. "That'll be easy."

Marlys laughs. "Not much of that was accurate!" she tells me. We're seated in the living room of a white-stucco house in the Southern California wine-country town of Temecula. Kids and dogs bang in and out of the dazzling hot day (the Ruckels have adopted five children from foster care in recent years). Marlys, now a job coach for adults with special needs, is like a Diane Keaton character, shyly retreating behind large glasses and a fall of long hair, but occasionally making brave outbursts. Danny, a programmer, is an easygoing guy. Marlys describes herself as a homebody, but then there was that time she moved to Romania for two months to try to adopt a boy she saw on a video.

Undone by "Shame of a Nation," Upton had flown to Romania four days after the broadcast, and made his way to the worst place on the show, the Home Hospital for Irrecoverable Children in Sighetu Marmaţiei. He went back a few times. On one visit, he gathered a bunch of kids in an empty room to film them for prospective adoptive parents. His video would not show children packed together naked "like little reptiles in an aquarium," as he'd described them, but as people, wearing clothes and speaking.

By then, donations had started to come in from charities around the world. Little reached the children, because the staff skimmed the best items, but on that day, in deference to the American, nannies put donated sweaters on the kids. Though the children seemed excited to be the center of attention, Upton and his Romanian assistant found it slow-going. Some didn't speak at all, and others were unable to stand up or to stand still. When the filmmakers asked for the children's names and ages, the nannies shrugged.

At the end of a wooden bench sat a boy the size of a 6-year-old-at age 10, Izidor weighed about 50 pounds. Upton was the first American he'd ever seen. Izidor knew about Americans from the TV show Dallas. A donated television had arrived one day, and he had lobbied for this one thing to stay at the hospital. The director had assented. On Sunday nights at 8 o'clock, ambulatory kids, nannies, and workers from other floors gathered to watch Dallas together. When rumors flew up the stairs that day that an American had arrived, the reaction inside the orphanage was, Almighty God, someone from the land of the giant houses!

Izidor knew the information the nannies didn't. He tells me: "John Upton would ask a kid, 'How old are you?,' and the kid would say, 'I don't know,' and the nanny would say, 'I don't know,' and I'd yell, 'He's 14!' He'd ask about another kid, 'What's his last name?,' and I'd yell, 'Dumka!' "

"Izidor knows the children here better than the staff," Upton grouses in one of the tapes. Before wrapping up the session, he lifts Izidor into his lap and asks if he'd like to go to America. Izidor says that he would.

Back in San Diego, Upton told the Ruckels about the bright boy of about 7 who hoped to come to the United States. "We'd wanted to adopt a baby," Marlys says. "Then we saw John's video and fell in love with Izidor."

In May 1991, Marlys flew to Romania to meet the child and try to bring him home. Just before traveling, she learned that Izidor was almost 11, but she was undaunted. She traveled with a new friend, Debbie Principe, who had also been matched with a child by Upton. In the director's office, Marlys waited to meet Izidor, and Debbie waited to meet a little blond live wire named Ciprian.

"When Izidor entered," Marlys says, "all I saw was him, like everything else was fuzzy. He was as beautiful as I'd imagined. Our translator asked him which of the visitors in the office he hoped would be his new mother, and he pointed to me!"

Izidor had a question for the translator: "Where will I live? Is it like Dallas?"

"Well ... no, we live in a condo, like an apartment," Marlys said. "But you'll have three sisters. You'll love them."

This did not strike Izidor as an interesting trade-off. He dryly replied to the translator: "We will see."

That night, Marlys rejoiced about what an angel Izidor was.

Debbie laughed. "He struck me more like a cool operator, a savvy politician type," she told Marlys. "He was much more on top of things than Chippy." Ciprian had spent the time in the office rummaging wildly through everything, including desk drawers and the pockets of everyone in the room.

"No, he's an innocent. He's adorable," Marlys said. "Did you see him pick me to be his mother?"

Years later, in his memoir, Izidor explained that moment:

Marlys was the tall American and Debbie was the short American ... "Roxana, which one is going to be my new mother?" I asked [the translator].
"Which one do you want to have as your mother?"
"Which one is my mother?" I begged to know.
"The tall American," she replied.
"Then that's who I want to have as my mother," I said.
When I picked Marlys, she began to cry, filled with joy that I had picked her.

The pediatric neuroscientist Charles Nelson is famously gregarious and kind, with wavy, graying blond hair and a mustache like Captain Kangaroo's. In the fall of 2000, he, along with his colleagues Nathan A. Fox, a human-development professor at the University of Maryland, and Charles H. Zeanah, a child-psychiatry professor at the Tulane University School of Medicine, launched the Bucharest Early Intervention Project. They had permission to work with 136 children, ages six months to 2.5 years, from six Bucharest leagãne, baby institutions. None was a Home Hospital for Irrecoverable Children, like Izidor's; they were somewhat better supplied and staffed.

By design, 68 of the children would continue to receive "care as usual," while the other 68 would be placed with foster families recruited and trained by BEIP. (Romania didn't have a tradition of foster care; officials believed orphanages were safer for children.) Local kids whose parents volunteered to participate made up a third group. The BEIP study would become the first-ever randomized controlled trial to measure the impact of early institutionalization on brain and behavioral development and to examine high-quality foster care as an alternative.

To start, the researchers employed Mary Ainsworth's classic "strange situation" procedure to assess the quality of the attachment relationships between the children and their caregivers or parents. In a typical setup, a baby between nine and 18 months old enters an unfamiliar playroom with her "attachment figure" and experiences some increasingly unsettling events, including the arrival of a stranger and the departure of her grown-up, as researchers code the baby's behavior from behind a one-way mirror. "Our coders, unaware of any child's background, assessed 100 percent of the community kids as having fully developed attachment relationships with their mothers," Zeanah told me. "That was true of 3 percent of the institutionalized kids."

Nearly two-thirds of the children were coded as "disorganized," meaning they displayed contradictory, jerky behaviors, perhaps freezing in place or suddenly reversing direction after starting to approach the adult. This pattern is the one most closely related to later psychopathology. Even more disturbing, Zeanah told me, 13 percent were deemed "unclassified," meaning they displayed no attachment behaviors at all. "Ainsworth and John Bowlby believed infants would attach to an adult even if the adult were abusive," he said. "They hadn't considered the possibility of infants without attachments."

Until the Bucharest project, Zeanah said, he hadn't realized that seeking comfort for distress is a learned behavior. "These children had no idea that an adult could make them feel better," he told me. "Imagine how that must feel-to be miserable and not even know that another human being could help."

In October 1991, Izidor and Ciprian flew with Romanian escorts to San Diego. The boys' new families waited at the airport to greet them, along with Upton and previously adopted Romanian children-a small crowd holding balloons and signs, cheering and waving. Izidor gazed around the terminal with satisfaction. "Where is my bedroom?" he asked. When Marlys told him they were in an airport, not his new home, Izidor was taken aback. Though she'd explained that the Ruckels did not live like the Ewings in Dallas, he hadn't believed her. Now he'd mistaken the arrivals area for his new living room.

A 17-year-old from the orphanage, Izabela, was part of the airport welcoming committee. Born with hydrocephalus and unable to walk after being left all her life in a crib, she was in a wheelchair, dressed up and looking pretty. Rescued by Upton on an earlier trip, she'd been admitted to the U.S. on a humanitarian medical basis and was being fostered by the Ruckels.

Izidor was startled to see Izabela: "Who is your mother?"

"My mother is your mother, Izidor."

"I didn't like the sound of that," he remembers. To make sure he'd heard correctly, he asked again: "Who is your mother here in America?"

"Izidor, you and I have the same mother," she said, pointing at Marlys.

So now he had to get used to four sisters.

In the car, when Danny tried to click a seat belt across Izidor's waist, he bucked and yelled, fearing he was being straitjacketed.

Marlys homeschooled the girls, but Izidor insisted on starting fourth grade in the local school, where he quickly learned English. His canny ability to read the room put him in good stead with the teachers, but at home, he seemed constantly irritated. Suddenly insulted, he'd storm off to his room and tear things apart. "He shredded books, posters, family pictures," Marlys tells me, "and then stood on the balcony to sprinkle the pieces onto the yard. If I had to leave for an hour, by the time I got home, everyone would be upset: 'He did this; he did that.' He didn't like the girls."

Marlys and Danny had hoped to expand the family fun and happiness by bringing in another child. But the newest family member almost never laughed. He didn't like to be touched. He was vigilant, hurt, proud. "By about 14, he was angry about everything," she tells me. "He decided he'd grow up and become the American president. When he found out that wouldn't be possible because of his foreign birth, he said, 'Fine, I'll go back to Romania.' That's when that started-his goal of returning to Romania. We thought it was a good thing for him to have a goal, so we said, 'Sure, get a job, save your money, and when you're 18, you can move back to Romania.' " Izidor worked every day after school at a fast-food restaurant.

"Those were rough years. I was walking on eggshells, trying not to set him off. The girls were so over it. It was me they were mad at. Not for bringing Izidor into the family but for being so ... so whipped by him. They'd say, 'Mom, all you do is try to fix him!' I was so focused on helping him adjust, I lost sight of the fact that the other children were scraping by with a fraction of my time.

"Danny and I tried taking him to therapy, but he refused to go back. He said, 'I don't need therapy. You two need therapy. Why don't you go?' So we did.

"He'd say: 'I'm fine when nobody's in the house.'

"We'd say: 'But Izidor, it's our house.' "

As early as 2003, it was evident to the BEIP scientists and their Romanian research partners that the foster-care children were making progress. Glimmering through the data was a sensitive period of 24 months during which it was crucial for a child to establish an attachment relationship with a caregiver, Zeanah says. Children taken out of orphanages before their second birthday were benefiting from being with families far more than those who stayed longer. "When you're doing a trial and your preliminary evidence is that the intervention is effective, you have to ask, 'Do we stop now and make the drug available to everyone?' " he told me. "For us, the 'effective drug' happened to be foster care, and we weren't capable of creating a national foster-care system." Instead, the researchers announced their results publicly, and the next year, the Romanian government banned the institutionalization of children under the age of 2. Since then, it has raised the minimum age to 7, and government-sponsored foster care has expanded dramatically.

Meanwhile, the study continued. When the children were reassessed in a "strange situation" playroom at age 3.5, the portion who displayed secure attachments climbed from the baseline of 3 percent to nearly 50 percent among the foster-care kids, but to only 18 percent among those who remained institutionalized-and, again, the children moved before their second birthday did best. "Timing is critical," the researchers wrote. Brain plasticity wasn't "unlimited," they warned. "Earlier is better."

The benefits for children who'd achieved secure attachments accrued as time went on. At age 4.5, they had significantly lower rates of depression and anxiety and fewer "callous unemotional traits" (limited empathy, lack of guilt, shallow affect) than their peers still in institutions. About 40 percent of teenagers in the study who'd ever been in orphanages, in fact, were eventually diagnosed with a major psychiatric condition. Their growth was stunted, and their motor skills and language development stalled. MRI studies revealed that the brain volume of the still-institutionalized children was below that of the never institutionalized, and EEGs showed profoundly less brain activity. "If you think of the brain as a light bulb," Charles Nelson has said, "it's as though there was a dimmer that had reduced them from a 100-watt bulb to 30 watts."

One purpose of a baby attaching to just a small number of adults, according to evolutionary theory, is that it's the most efficient way to get help. "If there were many attachment figures and danger emerged, the infant wouldn't know to whom to direct the signal," explains Martha Pott, a senior lecturer in child development at Tufts. Unattached children see threats everywhere, an idea borne out in the brain studies. Flooded with stress hormones like cortisol and adrenaline, the amygdala-the main part of the brain dealing with fear and emotion-seemingly worked overtime in the still-institutionalized children.

Comparing data from orphanages worldwide shows the profound impact institutionalization has on social-emotional development even in the best cases. "In England's residential nurseries in the 1960s, there was a reasonable number of caregivers, and the children were materially well provided for. Their IQs, though lower than those of children in families, were well within the average range, up in the 90s," Zeanah told me. "More recently, the caregiver-child ratio in Greek orphanages was not as good, nor were they as materially well equipped; those kids had IQs in the low-average range. Then, in Romania, you have our kids with really major-league deficits. But here's the remarkable thing: Across all those settings, the attachment impairments are similar."

When the children in the Bucharest study were 8, the researchers set up playdates, hoping to learn how early attachment impairments might inhibit a child's later ability to interact with peers. In a video I watched, two boys, strangers to each other, enter a playroom. Within seconds, things go off the rails. One boy, wearing a white turtleneck, eagerly seizes the other boy's hand and gnaws on it. That boy, in a striped pullover, yanks back his hand and checks for teeth marks. The researcher offers a toy, but the boy in white is busy trying to hold hands with the other kid, or grab him by the wrists, or hug him, as if he were trying to carry a giant teddy bear. He tries to overturn the table. The other boy makes a feeble effort to save the table, then lets it fall. He's weird, you can imagine him thinking. Can I go home now?

The boy in the white turtleneck lived in an institution; the boy in the striped pullover was a neighborhood kid.

Nelson cautions that the door doesn't "slam shut" for children left in institutions beyond 24 months of age. "But the longer you wait to get children into a family," he says, "the harder it is to get them back on an even keel."

"Every time we got into another fight," Izidor remembers, "I wanted one of them to say: 'Izidor, we wish we had never adopted you and we are going to send you back to the hospital.' But they didn't say it."

Unable to process his family's affection, he just wanted to know where he stood. It was simpler in the orphanage, where either you were being beaten or you weren't. "I responded better to being smacked around," Izidor tells me. "In America, they had 'rules' and 'consequences.' So much talk. I hated 'Let's talk about this.' As a child, I'd never heard words like 'You are special' or 'You're our kid.' Later, if your adoption parents tell you words like that, you feel, Okay, whatever, thanks. I don't even know what you're talking about. I don't know what you want from me, or what I'm supposed to do for you." When banished to his room, for rudeness or cursing or being mean to the girls, Izidor would stomp up the stairs and blast Romanian music or bang on his door from the inside with his fists or a shoe.

Marlys blamed herself. "He said he wanted to go back to his first mother, a woman who hadn't even wanted him, a woman he didn't remember. When I took him to the bank to set up his savings account, the bank official filling out the form asked Izidor, 'What's your mother's maiden name?' I opened my mouth to answer, but he immediately said 'Maria.' That's his birth mother's name. I know it was probably dumb to feel hurt by that."

One night when Izidor was 16, Marlys and Danny felt so scared by Izidor's outburst that they called the police. "I'm going to kill you!" he'd screamed at them. After an officer escorted Izidor to the police car, he insisted that his parents "abused" him.

"Oh, for Christ's sake," Danny said when informed of his son's accusation.

"Great," said Marlys. "Did he happen to mention how we abuse him?"

Back in the car, the officer asked: "How do your parents abuse you?"

"I work and they take all my money," Izidor hollered. In the house, the officer searched Izidor's room, and found his savings-account book.

"We can't take him," the officer told the Ruckels. "He's mad, but there's nothing wrong here. I'd suggest you lock your bedroom doors tonight."

Again, they had the thought: But it's our house.

The next morning Marlys and Danny offered Izidor a ride to school and then drove him straight to a psychiatric hospital instead. "We couldn't afford it, but we took a tour and it scared him," Marlys tells me. "He said, 'Don't leave me here! I'll follow your rules. Don't make me go here!' Back in the car, we said: 'Listen, Izidor, you don't have to love us, but you have to be safe and we have to be safe. You can live at home, work, and go to school until you're 18. We love you.' But, you know, the sappy stuff didn't work with him."

Living by the rules didn't last long. One night Izidor stayed out until 2 a.m., and found the house locked. He banged on the door. Marlys opened it a crack. "Your things are in the garage," she told him.

Izidor would never again live at home. He moved in with some guys he knew; their indifference suited him. "He'd get drunk in the middle of the night and call us, and his friends would get on the line to say vulgar things about our daughters," Marlys says. "Admittedly, it was finally peaceful in our house, but I worried about him."

On Izidor's 18th birthday, Marlys baked a cake and wrapped his gift, a photo album documenting their life together: his first day in America, his first dental appointment, his first job, his first shave. She took the presents to the house where she'd heard her son was staying. The person who answered the door agreed to deliver them when Izidor got back. "In the middle of the night," Marlys says, "we heard a car squealing around the cul-de-sac, then a loud thud against the front door and the car squealing away. I went down and opened the door. It was the photo album."

At 20, in 2001, Izidor felt an urgent desire to return to Romania. Short on cash, he wrote letters to TV shows, pitching the exclusive story of a Romanian orphan making his first trip back to his home country. 20/20 took him up on it, and on March 25, 2001, a film crew met him at the Los Angeles airport. So did the Ruckels.

"I thought, This is it. I'll never see him again," Marlys says. "I hugged and kissed him whether he wanted me to or not. I told him, 'You'll always be our son and we'll always love you.' "

Izidor showed the Ruckels his wallet, in which he'd stuck two family photographs. "In case I do decide to stay there, I'll have something to remember you by," he said. Though he meant it kindly, Marlys was chilled by the ease with which Izidor seemed to be exiting their lives.
From the September 1998 issue: Robert D. Kaplan on Romania, the fulcrum of Europe
In Romania, the 20/20 producers took Izidor to visit his old orphanage, where he was feted like a returning prince, and then they revealed, on camera, that they'd found his birth family outside a farming village three hours away. They drove through a snowy landscape and pulled over in a field. A one-room shack sat on a treeless expanse of mud. Wearing a white button-down, a tie, and dress pants, Izidor limped across the soggy, uneven ground. He was shaking. A narrow-faced man emerged from the hut and strode across the field toward him. Oddly, they passed each other like two strangers on a sidewalk. " Ce mai faci? "-How are you?-the man mumbled as he walked by.

" Bun," Izidor muttered. Good.

That was Izidor's father, after whom he'd been named. Two young women then hurried from the hut and greeted Izidor with kisses on each cheek; these were his sisters. Finally a short, black-haired woman not yet 50 identified herself as Maria-his mother-and reached out to hug him. Suddenly angry, Izidor swerved past her. How can I greet someone I barely know?, he remembers thinking. She crossed her hands on her chest and began to wail, " Fiul meu! Fiul meu!  " My son! My son!

The house had a dirt floor, and an oil lamp glowed dimly. There was no electricity or plumbing. The family offered Izidor the best seat in the house, a stool. "Why was I put in the hospital in the first place?" he asked.

"You were six weeks old when you got sick," Maria said. "We took you to the doctor to see what was wrong. Your grandparents checked on you a few weeks later, but then there was something wrong with your right leg. We asked the doctor to fix your leg, but no one would help us. So we took you to a hospital in Sighetu Marmaţiei, and that's where we left you."

"Why did no one visit me for 11 years? I was stuck there, and no one ever told me I had parents."

"Your father was out of work. I was taking care of the other children. We couldn't afford to come see you."

"Do you know that living in the Cămin Spital was like living in hell?"

"My heart," cried Maria. "You must understand that we're poor people; we were moving from one place to another."

Agitated, almost unable to catch his breath, Izidor got up and went outside. His Romanian family invited him to look at a few pictures of his older siblings who'd left home, and he presented them with his photo album: Here was a sunlit, grinning Izidor poolside, wearing medals from a swimming competition; here were the Ruckels at the beach in Oceanside; here they were at a picnic table in a verdant park. The Romanians turned the shiny pages wordlessly. When the TV cameras were turned off, Izidor tells me, Maria asked whether the Ruckels had hurt him or taught him to beg. He assured her neither was true.

"You look thin," Maria went on. "Maybe your American mother doesn't feed you enough. Move in with us. I will take care of you." She then pressed him for details about his jobs and wages in America and asked if he'd like to build the family a new house. After three hours, Izidor was exhausted and eager to leave. "He called me from Bucharest," Marlys says, "and said, 'I have to come home. Get me out of here. These people are awful.' "

"My birth family scared me, especially Maria," Izidor says. "I had a feeling I could get trapped there."

A few weeks later he was back in Temecula, working in a fast-food restaurant. But suddenly, he found himself longing for Romania again. It would become a pattern, restless relocation in search of somewhere that felt like home.

Friends told him there were jobs in Denver, so he decided to move to Colorado. Danny and Marlys visit him there and have gone on trips to Romania with him. It's harder for him to come home to California, Marlys says. "Thanksgiving, Christmas-they're too much for him. Even when he lived on his own nearby, he was bad at holidays. He always made an excuse, like 'I have to make the pizza dough.' When our whole family is here and someone asks, 'Is Izidor coming?,' someone will say, 'Nope, he's making the pizza dough.' "

The neuropsychologist Ron Federici was another of the first wave of child-development experts to visit the institutions for the "unsalvageables," and he has become one of the world's top specialists caring for post-institutionalized children adopted into Western homes. "In the early years, everybody had starry eyes," Federici says. "They thought loving, caring families could heal these kids. I warned them: These kids are going to push you to the breaking point. Get trained to work with special-needs children. Keep their bedrooms spare and simple. Instead of 'I love you,' just tell them, 'You are safe.' " But most new or prospective parents couldn't bear to hear it, and the adoption agencies that set up shop overnight in Romania weren't in the business of delivering such dire messages. "I got a lot of hate mail," says Federici, who is fast-talking and blunt, with a long face and a thatch of shiny black hair. " 'You're cold! They need love! They've got to be hugged.' " But the former marine, once widely accused of being too pessimistic about the kids' futures, is now considered prescient.

Federici and his wife adopted eight children from brutal institutions themselves: three from Russia and five from Romania, including a trio of brothers, ages 8, 10, and 12. The two oldest weighed 30 pounds each and were dying from untreated hemophilia and hepatitis C when he carried them out the front door of their orphanage; it took the couple two years to locate the boys' younger brother in another institution. Since then, in his clinical practice in Northern Virginia, Federici has seen 9,000 young people, close to a third of them from Romania. Tracking his patients across the decades, he has found that 25 percent require round-the-clock care, another 55 percent have "significant" challenges that can be managed with adult-support services, and about 20 percent are able to live independently.
"I have known since I was 15 that I would not have a family," Izidor says. "The way I see myself is that there would be no human being who would ever want to get close to me."
The most successful parents, he believes, were able to focus on imparting basic living skills and appropriate behaviors. "The Ruckels are a good example-they hung on, and he's doing okay. But I just had a family today. I knew this girl from Romania forever, first saw her when she was a little girl with the whole post-traumatic stress picture: fear, anxiety, uncertainty, depression. She's 22 now. The parents said, 'We're done. She's into drugs, alcohol, self-injury. She's on the streets.' I said, 'Let's get you back on a family program.' They said, 'No, we're exhausted, we can't afford more treatment-it's time to focus on our other kids.' "

Within his own family, Federici and his wife have become the permanent legal guardians for four of his Romanian children, who are now all adults. Two of them work, under supervision, for a foundation he established in Bucharest; the other two live with their parents in Virginia. (The fifth is a stirring example of the fortunate 20 percent-he's an ER physician in Wisconsin.) Both of his adult sons who haven't left home are cognitively impaired, but they have jobs and are pleasant to be around, according to Federici. "They're happy!" he exclaims. "Are they 100 percent attached to us? Hell no. Are they content with the family? Yes. Can they function in the world, around other people? Absolutely. They've figured out ways, not to overcome what happened to them-you can't really overcome-but to adapt to it and not take other people hostage."

When a baby was born into the family nine years ago-the family's only biological child-the doctor began to see new behaviors in his older kids. "The little one is a rock star to them," he says. "The big brothers at home are so protective of him. In public, in restaurants, God forbid anyone would hurt him or touch a hair on his head. It's an interesting dynamic: No one watched out for them in their childhoods, but they've appointed themselves his bodyguards. He's their little brother. He's been to Romania with them. Is this love? It's whatever. They're more attached to him than to us, which is absolutely fine."

By any measure, Izidor-living independently-is a success story among the survivors of Ceauşescu's institutions. "Do you imagine ever having a family?" I ask. We're in his room in the giant house outside Denver.

"You mean of my own? No. I have known since I was 15 that I would not have a family. Seeing all my friends in dumb relationships, with jealousy and control and depression-I thought, Really? All that for a relationship? No. The way I see myself is that there would be no human being who would ever want to get close to me. Someone might say that's false, but that's how I see myself. If someone tries to get close, I get away. I'm used to it. It's called a celibacy life."

He says he doesn't miss what he never knew, what he doesn't even perceive. Perhaps it's like color blindness. Do people with color blindness miss green? He focuses on the tasks before him and does his best to act the way humans expect other humans to act.

"You can be the smartest orphan in the hospital. But you are missing things," Izidor says. "I'm not a person who can be intimate. It's hard on a person's parents, because they show you love and you can't return it."

Though Izidor says he wants to live like a "normal" human, he still regularly consents to donning the mantle of former orphan to give talks around the U.S. and Romania about what institutionalization does to little kids. He's working with a screenwriter on a miniseries about his life, believing that if people could be made to understand what it's like to live behind fences, inside cages, they'd stop putting children there. He's keenly aware that up to 8 million children around the world are institutionalized, including those at America's southern border. Izidor's dream is to buy a house in Romania and create a group home for his own former wardmates-those who were transferred to nursing homes or put out on the streets. A group home for his fellow post-institutionalized adults is as close to the idea of family as Izidor can get.

Neural pathways thrive in the brain of a baby showered with loving attention; the pathways multiply, intersect, and loop through remote regions of the brain like a national highway system under construction. But in the brain of a neglected baby-a baby lying alone and unwanted every week, every year-fewer connections get built. The baby's wet diaper isn't changed. The baby's smiles aren't answered. The baby falls silent. The door is closing, but a sliver of light shines around the frame.

People once in a while paid attention to the baby with the twisted leg. Nannies thought he was appealing, and quick-witted. The director talked to him. One brilliant winter afternoon, Onisa took him out of the orphanage, and he walked down a street.

Sometimes, Izidor has feelings.

Two years after the Ruckels kicked him out, Izidor was getting a haircut from a stylist who knew the family. "Did you hear what happened to your family?" she asked. "Your mom and sisters got in a terrible car accident yesterday. They're in the hospital."

Izidor tore out of there, took the day off from work, bought three dozen red roses, and showed up at the hospital.

"We were in the truck coming out of Costco," Marlys recalls, "and a guy hit us really hard-it was a five-car crash. After a few hours at the hospital, we were released. I didn't call Izidor to tell him. We weren't speaking. But he found out, and I guess at the hospital he said, 'I'm here to see the Ruckel family,' and they said, 'They're not here anymore,' which he took to mean 'They're dead.' "

Izidor raced from the hospital to the house-the house he'd been boycotting, the family he hated.

Danny Ruckel wasn't going to let him in without a negotiation. "What are your intentions?" he would ask. "Do you promise to be decent to us?" Izidor would promise. Danny would allow Izidor to enter the living room and face everyone, to stand there with his arms full of flowers and his eyes wet with tears. Before leaving that day, Izidor would lay the flowers in his mother's arms and say, with a greater attempt at earnestness than they'd ever heard before, "These are for all of you. I love you." It would mark a turning point. From that day on, something would be softer in him, regarding the Ruckel family.

But first Izidor was obliged to approach the heavy wooden door, the door against which he'd hurled the photo album Marlys made for his birthday, the door he'd slammed behind him a hundred times, the door he'd battered and kicked when he was locked out. He knocked and stood on the front step, head hanging, heart pounding, unsure whether he'd be admitted. I abandoned them, I neglected them, I put them through hell, he thought. The prickly stems of burgundy-red roses wrapped in dark leaves and plastic bristled in his arms.

And then they opened the door.
* Due to an editing oversight, the print version of this article used the term papoose Lily Samuel contributed research to this article. It appears in the July/August 2020 print edition with the headline "Can an Unloved Child Learn to Love?" to describe swaddled babies; we removed the word from the online version of the article after a reader pointed out that many, including Merriam-Webster, consider it offensive.

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30 Years Ago, Romania Deprived Thousands of Babies of Human Contact

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Now more than ever, it’s important to look boldly at the reality of race and gender bias -- and understand how the two can combine to create even more harm. Kimberlé Crenshaw uses the term “intersectionality” to describe this phenomenon; as she says, if you’re standing in the path of multiple forms of exclusion, you’re likely to get hit by both. In this moving talk, she calls on us to bear witness to this reality and speak up for victims of prejudice.

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Now more than ever, it’s important to look boldly at the reality of race and gender bias -- and understand how the two can combine to create even more harm. Kimberlé Crenshaw uses the term “intersectionality” to describe this phenomenon; as she says, if you’re standing in the path of multiple forms of exclusion, you’re likely to get hit by both. In this moving talk, she calls on us to bear witness to this reality and speak up for victims of prejudice.

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Time, a breathtaking documentary by Garrett Bradley, follows a young couple's journey to keep their family together during a 20-year prison stay.

Amazon Studios

The prison abolitionist and scholar Ruth Wilson Gilmore once wrote, "Prison is not a building 'over there,' but a set of relationships that undermine rather than stabilize everyday lives everywhere." This idea is the focus of the filmmaker Garrett Bradley's Time, a gripping documentary that reframes the perception of mass incarceration and its far-reaching effects. Counter to the slew of prison films and television programming that have shaped the public imagination of life behind bars, Bradley shifts attention away from the geography of the prison as central to examining the carceral state and instead concentrates on the private sphere.

Time, which is currently streaming on Amazon Prime, highlights a Louisiana couple, Rob and Sibil Fox Richardson, who were sentenced to prison for a bank robbery they committed in 1997, when they were 29 and 25, respectively. Rob was sentenced to 60 years, while Fox accepted a plea deal of 12 years and served three and a half. The film is an amalgam drawn from a 20-year archive of home videos recorded by Fox as she awaited Rob's return and current-day footage of the Richardson family shot by Bradley. The film bridges the past and the present, exposing mass incarceration's domestic impact on the lives of those tethered to and regulated by the penal system.

Fox's footage ranges from the momentous to the mundane: their six children's playdates, family gatherings, speaking engagements, birthday celebrations, car rides, school activities, and confessionals. Alongside these black-and-white images of events and rituals, Bradley's contemporary footage-shot in a complementary gray scale-similarly captures the quotidian activities of Fox and her family as they fight for her husband's release from prison.
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The documentary's nonsequential assemblage suggests that, for Bradley, time itself is a medium through which to examine the conditions for the incarcerated and for their loved ones left behind. Bradley, who is the first Black woman to win best director for a U.S. documentary at the Sundance Film Festival, originally broached this topic in her 2017 New York Times op-doc, Alone, a short film that captures a young woman's fraught and isolating decision to marry her incarcerated boyfriend. Time continues Bradley's cinematic study of Black women's advocacy efforts and gendered labor, illuminating the emotional toll on them to sustain interpersonal relationships, familial ties, and social networks for imprisoned loved ones.

Time begins with the first video Fox recorded 20 years ago, in which she reveals that a week and a day has passed since her own release from prison. In direct address to both Rob and an imagined audience, she reveals that she is pregnant with twins and proclaims, "I know that, despite how grim my circumstances look right now, everything will be okay." The documentary fast-forwards through time, providing glimpses into the family's social histories and private memories. The breadth of Fox's archive underscores the carceral state's ability to capture, arrest, and surveil time even beyond prison walls.

In the 80-minute collage of home video and vérité footage, Bradley illustrates how the state uses time punitively to warp the lives of the incarcerated and non-incarcerated. The stasis, suspension, and recursive nature of time for the Richardson family is endless, as they loop through repetitive legal cycles that result in no progress in their quest for Rob's release. But Bradley also shows how Fox and her sons resist this temporal fix by going about their daily lives-getting ready for work, being honored at a white-coat ceremony, exercising, speaking at a university about prison abolition, participating in student debates, practicing French vocabulary. The Richardson family's interpretations of time help structure their experiences of Rob's absence. For Fox, "time is when you look at pictures from when your babies was small, and then you look at them and you see that they have moustaches and beards and that the biggest hope that you had was that before they turned into men they would have a chance to be with their father." For their son Remington, "time is influenced by our emotions. It's influenced by our actions." According to one of their twins, Justus, "Time is what you make of it. Time is unbiased. Time is lost. Time flies. This situation has just been a long time. A really long time."

These explanations, which highlight the family's oscillation between past and present, underscore the consequences of what the art historian and curator Nicole Fleetwood describes as "penal time," or the multiple temporalities that exist for the incarcerated and their families. Bradley's film sutures these timelines into a cohesive work that moves, stagnates, progresses, and regresses as it grapples with the movement of time.
Read: The documentary that bucks Oscar trends-and still got a nomination
For example, Bradley captures Fox calling the judge's office to inquire about a ruling on Rob's case. As Fox is placed on hold, Bradley's camera waits in real time as Fox stares at the phone in anticipation. Finally, the judge's assistant takes the call, quickly dismissing Fox with no update and a directive to call back after the weekend. The ambient sound is replaced with a recurring sonic motif that signals time's passage, and the scene cuts to home-video footage of a young Fox getting her small children ready to go see their father in prison. Bradley doesn't imprint the amateur footage with a date on-screen; however, the news program captured in the background places it in 2003. With a gray interstice, Bradley then cuts to the present day, with the Richardson family getting dressed to visit Rob at the Louisiana State Penitentiary. In voice-over, Fox explains how, for the past 20 years, she and her family have always begun the new year knowing that it would be the year Rob would be released, a fact she describes as both the hope and lie she tells herself. Bradley's attention to waiting, repetition, expectation, and the promise of tomorrow punctuates the film's reconfigurations of time.

While the documentary evinces Bradley's elegant artistry as a filmmaker, Time is not a singular auteur vision. It is a co-directed work that demonstrates how amateur filmmaking meant for private use can counter more visible forms of popular entertainment. Time's abolitionist narrative stands in opposition to mainstream fare about criminal-justice reform: This includes Destin Daniel Cretton's 2019 film, Just Mercy, based on the defense attorney Bryan Stevenson's memoir about his work to appeal the murder conviction of Walter McMillian; Tom Shadyac's 2018 biopic, Brian Banks, which details the story of the high-school-football linebacker who was falsely accused of rape and sent to prison; and ABC's legal drama For Life, which draws on the story of Isaac Wright Jr., a wrongly convicted man who becomes a defense attorney for fellow inmates while fighting to prove his own innocence. While these examples address structural racism in the criminal-justice system, they also uphold categories of guilt and innocence. These works, in turn, influence audiences' feelings of who should and should not be incarcerated, reproducing carceral logics even as they advocate for civil rights and reform.

In Time's liberatory field of vision, abolition is the end goal. Fox ties the carceral state to slavery, showing how racism, exploitation, and capitalism undergird the prison-industrial complex. In a rare moment for Fox, whose empowering lectures inflect the film's hopeful telos, she expresses anger at the way individuals working within the system have no respect for human life. Bradley captures Fox repeating a positive affirmation to calm herself, but her smile slips. The dramatic moment crescendos when she slams her hand on her desk, cursing and critiquing the racial politics she has to contend with. "Goddamn, he could have been home with his family just 'cause they bullshitting!" Fox exclaims. " Ain't no hurry. Oh, just some ol' niggers trying to get home from the penitentiary ... Don't you want anyone out of the system that ain't supposed to be there?" The charged moment dissipates as quickly as it arises, as Fox moves on to her next task. The emotional eruption signals to the audience how Black women endeavor to "keep it together"-relationships, families, their sanity-in the midst of what Fox calls the "cruel and unusual punishment" of carcerality.

Time 's conclusion provides both joy- and grief-filled catharsis with Rob's release from prison, an unanticipated climax that required Bradley to reassemble her crew five months after completing shooting. Throughout the documentary, Rob exists in a disembodied state, as a voice on the phone, as an image in an old home video, and as a life-size cardboard cutout Fox hangs on her bedroom wall. Upon his release, his once-frozen-in-time, one-dimensional image is now fleshed, animated, lively, and free. Bradley beautifully captures Rob's homecoming, but the documentary's final shot alludes to an indescribable sorrow. As the camera lingers on Rob's face staring at something beyond the frame, his eyes look haunted. The shot cuts to a montage of home-video footage rolling in reverse. Activities, events, and time are undone. The film's final image is that of the happy couple, Fox and Rob, sharing a kiss 20 years ago. The footage looks like both a beginning and an end. Filtered through the eyes of a newly free Rob, Bradley's cinematic rewind reminds the audience that time is both fluid and fleeting. For the once incarcerated, doing time produces plural pasts-the one lived behind bars and the one missed at home. While we can capture memories on film, Rob's viewpoint reminds us that spectatorship is no substitute for a lived experience with those we love and time lost.

We want to hear what you think about this article. Submit a letter to the editor or write to letters@theatlantic.com.

Samantha N. Sheppard is an assistant professor of performing and media arts at Cornell University.

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current-day footage of the richardson family

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defense attorney bryan stevenson’s memoir

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A Radically Different Way to Look at Incarceration

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Time, a breathtaking documentary by Garrett Bradley, follows a young couple's journey to keep their family together during a 20-year prison stay. The prison abolitionist and scholar Ruth Wilson Gilmore once wrote, "Prison is not a building 'over there,' but a set of relationships that undermine rather than stabilize everyday lives everywhere."

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David Brooks: The Nuclear Family Was a Mistake - The Atlantic

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The family structure we've held up as the cultural ideal for the past half century has been a catastrophe for many. It's time to figure out better ways to live together.

The scene is one many of us have somewhere in our family history: Dozens of people celebrating Thanksgiving or some other holiday around a makeshift stretch of family tables-siblings, cousins, aunts, uncles, great-aunts. The grandparents are telling the old family stories for the 37th time. "It was the most beautiful place you've ever seen in your life," says one, remembering his first day in America. "There were lights everywhere ... It was a celebration of light! I thought they were for me."

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The oldsters start squabbling about whose memory is better. "It was cold that day," one says about some faraway memory. "What are you talking about? It was May, late May," says another. The young children sit wide-eyed, absorbing family lore and trying to piece together the plotline of the generations.

After the meal, there are piles of plates in the sink, squads of children conspiring mischievously in the basement. Groups of young parents huddle in a hallway, making plans. The old men nap on couches, waiting for dessert. It's the extended family in all its tangled, loving, exhausting glory.

This particular family is the one depicted in Barry Levinson's 1990 film, Avalon, based on his own childhood in Baltimore. Five brothers came to America from Eastern Europe around the time of World War I and built a wallpaper business. For a while they did everything together, like in the old country. But as the movie goes along, the extended family begins to split apart. Some members move to the suburbs for more privacy and space. One leaves for a job in a different state. The big blowup comes over something that seems trivial but isn't: The eldest of the brothers arrives late to a Thanksgiving dinner to find that the family has begun the meal without him.

"You cut the turkey without me?" he cries. "Your own flesh and blood! ... You cut the turkey?" The pace of life is speeding up. Convenience, privacy, and mobility are more important than family loyalty. "The idea that they would eat before the brother arrived was a sign of disrespect," Levinson told me recently when I asked him about that scene. "That was the real crack in the family. When you violate the protocol, the whole family structure begins to collapse."

As the years go by in the movie, the extended family plays a smaller and smaller role. By the 1960s, there's no extended family at Thanksgiving. It's just a young father and mother and their son and daughter, eating turkey off trays in front of the television. In the final scene, the main character is living alone in a nursing home, wondering what happened. "In the end, you spend everything you've ever saved, sell everything you've ever owned, just to exist in a place like this."

"In my childhood," Levinson told me, "you'd gather around the grandparents and they would tell the family stories ... Now individuals sit around the TV, watching other families' stories." The main theme of Avalon, he said, is "the decentralization of the family. And that has continued even further today. Once, families at least gathered around the television. Now each person has their own screen."

This is the story of our times-the story of the family, once a dense cluster of many siblings and extended kin, fragmenting into ever smaller and more fragile forms. The initial result of that fragmentation, the nuclear family, didn't seem so bad. But then, because the nuclear family is so brittle, the fragmentation continued. In many sectors of society, nuclear families fragmented into single-parent families, single-parent families into chaotic families or no families.

If you want to summarize the changes in family structure over the past century, the truest thing to say is this: We've made life freer for individuals and more unstable for families. We've made life better for adults but worse for children. We've moved from big, interconnected, and extended families, which helped protect the most vulnerable people in society from the shocks of life, to smaller, detached nuclear families (a married couple and their children), which give the most privileged people in society room to maximize their talents and expand their options. The shift from bigger and interconnected extended families to smaller and detached nuclear families ultimately led to a familial system that liberates the rich and ravages the working-class and the poor.
Annie Lowrey: The great affordability crisis breaking America
This article is about that process, and the devastation it has wrought-and about how Americans are now groping to build new kinds of family and find better ways to live.

Part I

The Era of Extended Clans

Through the early parts of American history, most people lived in what, by today's standards, were big, sprawling households. In 1800, three-quarters of American workers were farmers. Most of the other quarter worked in small family businesses, like dry-goods stores. People needed a lot of labor to run these enterprises. It was not uncommon for married couples to have seven or eight children. In addition, there might be stray aunts, uncles, and cousins, as well as unrelated servants, apprentices, and farmhands. (On some southern farms, of course, enslaved African Americans were also an integral part of production and work life.)

Steven Ruggles, a professor of history and population studies at the University of Minnesota, calls these "corporate families"-social units organized around a family business. According to Ruggles, in 1800, 90 percent of American families were corporate families. Until 1850, roughly three-quarters of Americans older than 65 lived with their kids and grandkids. Nuclear families existed, but they were surrounded by extended or corporate families.
Read: What number of kids makes parents happiest?
Extended families have two great strengths. The first is resilience. An extended family is one or more families in a supporting web. Your spouse and children come first, but there are also cousins, in-laws, grandparents-a complex web of relationships among, say, seven, 10, or 20 people. If a mother dies, siblings, uncles, aunts, and grandparents are there to step in. If a relationship between a father and a child ruptures, others can fill the breach. Extended families have more people to share the unexpected burdens-when a kid gets sick in the middle of the day or when an adult unexpectedly loses a job.

A detached nuclear family, by contrast, is an intense set of relationships among, say, four people. If one relationship breaks, there are no shock absorbers. In a nuclear family, the end of the marriage means the end of the family as it was previously understood.

The second great strength of extended families is their socializing force. Multiple adults teach children right from wrong, how to behave toward others, how to be kind. Over the course of the 18th and 19th centuries, industrialization and cultural change began to threaten traditional ways of life. Many people in Britain and the United States doubled down on the extended family in order to create a moral haven in a heartless world. According to Ruggles, the prevalence of extended families living together roughly doubled from 1750 to 1900, and this way of life was more common than at any time before or since.

During the Victorian era, the idea of "hearth and home" became a cultural ideal. The home "is a sacred place, a vestal temple, a temple of the hearth watched over by Household Gods, before whose faces none may come but those whom they can receive with love," the great Victorian social critic John Ruskin wrote. This shift was led by the upper-middle class, which was coming to see the family less as an economic unit and more as an emotional and moral unit, a rectory for the formation of hearts and souls.

But while extended families have strengths, they can also be exhausting and stifling. They allow little privacy; you are forced to be in daily intimate contact with people you didn't choose. There's more stability but less mobility. Family bonds are thicker, but individual choice is diminished. You have less space to make your own way in life. In the Victorian era, families were patriarchal, favoring men in general and first-born sons in particular.

As factories opened in the big U.S. cities, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, young men and women left their extended families to chase the American dream. These young people married as soon as they could. A young man on a farm might wait until 26 to get married; in the lonely city, men married at 22 or 23. From 1890 to 1960, the average age of first marriage dropped by 3.6 years for men and 2.2 years for women.
From September 2019: Daniel Markovits on how life became an endless, terrible competition
The families they started were nuclear families. The decline of multigenerational cohabiting families exactly mirrors the decline in farm employment. Children were no longer raised to assume economic roles-they were raised so that at adolescence they could fly from the nest, become independent, and seek partners of their own. They were raised not for embeddedness but for autonomy. By the 1920s, the nuclear family with a male breadwinner had replaced the corporate family as the dominant family form. By 1960, 77.5 percent of all children were living with their two parents, who were married, and apart from their extended family.

The Short, Happy Life of the Nuclear Family

For a time, it all seemed to work. From 1950 to 1965, divorce rates dropped, fertility rates rose, and the American nuclear family seemed to be in wonderful shape. And most people seemed prosperous and happy. In these years, a kind of cult formed around this type of family-what McCall's, the leading women's magazine of the day, called "togetherness." Healthy people lived in two-parent families. In a 1957 survey, more than half of the respondents said that unmarried people were "sick," "immoral," or "neurotic."

During this period, a certain family ideal became engraved in our minds: a married couple with 2.5 kids. When we think of the American family, many of us still revert to this ideal. When we have debates about how to strengthen the family, we are thinking of the two-parent nuclear family, with one or two kids, probably living in some detached family home on some suburban street. We take it as the norm, even though this wasn't the way most humans lived during the tens of thousands of years before 1950, and it isn't the way most humans have lived during the 55 years since 1965.

Today, only a minority of American households are traditional two-parent nuclear families and only one-third of American individuals live in this kind of family. That 1950-65 window was not normal. It was a freakish historical moment when all of society conspired, wittingly and not, to obscure the essential fragility of the nuclear family.

For one thing, most women were relegated to the home. Many corporations, well into the mid-20th century, barred married women from employment: Companies would hire single women, but if those women got married, they would have to quit. Demeaning and disempowering treatment of women was rampant. Women spent enormous numbers of hours trapped inside the home under the headship of their husband, raising children.

For another thing, nuclear families in this era were much more connected to other nuclear families than they are today-constituting a " modified extended family," as the sociologist Eugene Litwak calls it, "a coalition of nuclear families in a state of mutual dependence." Even as late as the 1950s, before television and air-conditioning had fully caught on, people continued to live on one another's front porches and were part of one another's lives. Friends felt free to discipline one another's children.

In his book The Lost City, the journalist Alan Ehrenhalt describes life in mid-century Chicago and its suburbs:

To be a young homeowner in a suburb like Elmhurst in the 1950s was to participate in a communal enterprise that only the most determined loner could escape: barbecues, coffee klatches, volleyball games, baby-sitting co-ops and constant bartering of household goods, child rearing by the nearest parents who happened to be around, neighbors wandering through the door at any hour without knocking-all these were devices by which young adults who had been set down in a wilderness of tract homes made a community. It was a life lived in public.

Finally, conditions in the wider society were ideal for family stability. The postwar period was a high-water mark of church attendance, unionization, social trust, and mass prosperity-all things that correlate with family cohesion. A man could relatively easily find a job that would allow him to be the breadwinner for a single-income family. By 1961, the median American man age 25 to 29 was earning nearly 400 percent more than his father had earned at about the same age.

In short, the period from 1950 to 1965 demonstrated that a stable society can be built around nuclear families-so long as women are relegated to the household, nuclear families are so intertwined that they are basically extended families by another name, and every economic and sociological condition in society is working together to support the institution.

Video: How the Nuclear Family Broke Down

Disintegration

But these conditions did not last. The constellation of forces that had briefly shored up the nuclear family began to fall away, and the sheltered family of the 1950s was supplanted by the stressed family of every decade since. Some of the strains were economic. Starting in the mid-'70s, young men's wages declined, putting pressure on working-class families in particular. The major strains were cultural. Society became more individualistic and more self-oriented. People put greater value on privacy and autonomy. A rising feminist movement helped endow women with greater freedom to live and work as they chose.
Read: Gen-X women are caught in a generational tug-of-war
A study of women's magazines by the sociologists Francesca Cancian and Steven L. Gordon found that from 1900 to 1979, themes of putting family before self dominated in the 1950s: "Love means self-sacrifice and compromise." In the 1960s and '70s, putting self before family was prominent: "Love means self-expression and individuality." Men absorbed these cultural themes, too. The master trend in Baby Boomer culture generally was liberation-"Free Bird," "Born to Run," "Ramblin' Man."

Eli Finkel, a psychologist and marriage scholar at Northwestern University, has argued that since the 1960s, the dominant family culture has been the "self-expressive marriage." "Americans," he has written, "now look to marriage increasingly for self-discovery, self-esteem and personal growth." Marriage, according to the sociologists Kathryn Edin and Maria Kefalas, "is no longer primarily about childbearing and childrearing. Now marriage is primarily about adult fulfillment."
Read: An interview with Eli Finkel on how we expect too much from our romantic partners
This cultural shift was very good for some adults, but it was not so good for families generally. Fewer relatives are around in times of stress to help a couple work through them. If you married for love, staying together made less sense when the love died. This attenuation of marital ties may have begun during the late 1800s: The number of divorces increased about fifteenfold from 1870 to 1920, and then climbed more or less continuously through the first several decades of the nuclear-family era. As the intellectual historian Christopher Lasch noted in the late 1970s, the American family didn't start coming apart in the 1960s; it had been "coming apart for more than 100 years."

Americans today have less family than ever before. From 1970 to 2012, the share of households consisting of married couples with kids has been cut in half. In 1960, according to census data, just 13 percent of all households were single-person households. In 2018, that figure was 28 percent. In 1850, 75 percent of Americans older than 65 lived with relatives; by 1990, only 18 percent did.

Over the past two generations, people have spent less and less time in marriage-they are marrying later, if at all, and divorcing more. In 1950, 27 percent of marriages ended in divorce; today, about 45 percent do. In 1960, 72 percent of American adults were married. In 2017, nearly half of American adults were single. According to a 2014 report from the Urban Institute, roughly 90 percent of Baby Boomer women and 80 percent of Gen X women married by age 40, while only about 70 percent of late-Millennial women were expected to do so-the lowest rate in U.S. history. And while more than four-fifths of American adults in a 2019 Pew Research Center survey said that getting married is not essential to living a fulfilling life, it's not just the institution of marriage they're eschewing: In 2004, 33 percent of Americans ages 18 to 34 were living without a romantic partner, according to the General Social Survey; by 2018, that number was up to 51 percent.

Over the past two generations, families have also gotten a lot smaller. The general American birth rate is half of what it was in 1960. In 2012, most American family households had no children. There are more American homes with pets than with kids. In 1970, about 20 percent of households had five or more people. As of 2012, only 9.6 percent did.
We're likely living through the most rapid change in family structure in human history. The causes are economic, cultural, and institutional all at once.
Over the past two generations, the physical space separating nuclear families has widened. Before, sisters-in-law shouted greetings across the street at each other from their porches. Kids would dash from home to home and eat out of whoever's fridge was closest by. But lawns have grown more expansive and porch life has declined, creating a buffer of space that separates the house and family from anyone else. As Mandy Len Catron recently noted in The Atlantic, married people are less likely to visit parents and siblings, and less inclined to help them do chores or offer emotional support. A code of family self-sufficiency prevails: Mom, Dad, and the kids are on their own, with a barrier around their island home.

Finally, over the past two generations, families have grown more unequal. America now has two entirely different family regimes. Among the highly educated, family patterns are almost as stable as they were in the 1950s; among the less fortunate, family life is often utter chaos. There's a reason for that divide: Affluent people have the resources to effectively buy extended family, in order to shore themselves up. Think of all the child-rearing labor affluent parents now buy that used to be done by extended kin: babysitting, professional child care, tutoring, coaching, therapy, expensive after-school programs. (For that matter, think of how the affluent can hire therapists and life coaches for themselves, as replacement for kin or close friends.) These expensive tools and services not only support children's development and help prepare them to compete in the meritocracy; by reducing stress and time commitments for parents, they preserve the amity of marriage. Affluent conservatives often pat themselves on the back for having stable nuclear families. They preach that everybody else should build stable families too. But then they ignore one of the main reasons their own families are stable: They can afford to purchase the support that extended family used to provide-and that the people they preach at, further down the income scale, cannot.
Read: 'Intensive' parenting is a strategy for an age of inequality
In 1970, the family structures of the rich and poor did not differ that greatly. Now there is a chasm between them. As of 2005, 85 percent of children born to upper-middle-class families were living with both biological parents when the mom was 40. Among working-class families, only 30 percent were. According to a 2012 report from the National Center for Health Statistics, college-educated women ages 22 to 44 have a 78 percent chance of having their first marriage last at least 20 years. Women in the same age range with a high-school degree or less have only about a 40 percent chance. Among Americans ages 18 to 55, only 26 percent of the poor and 39 percent of the working class are currently married. In her book Generation Unbound, Isabel Sawhill, an economist at the Brookings Institution, cited research indicating that differences in family structure have "increased income inequality by 25 percent." If the U.S. returned to the marriage rates of 1970, child poverty would be 20 percent lower. As Andrew Cherlin, a sociologist at Johns Hopkins University, once put it, "It is the privileged Americans who are marrying, and marrying helps them stay privileged."

When you put everything together, we're likely living through the most rapid change in family structure in human history. The causes are economic, cultural, and institutional all at once. People who grow up in a nuclear family tend to have a more individualistic mind-set than people who grow up in a multigenerational extended clan. People with an individualistic mind-set tend to be less willing to sacrifice self for the sake of the family, and the result is more family disruption. People who grow up in disrupted families have more trouble getting the education they need to have prosperous careers. People who don't have prosperous careers have trouble building stable families, because of financial challenges and other stressors. The children in those families become more isolated and more traumatized.
Read: The working-to-afford-child-care conundrum
Many people growing up in this era have no secure base from which to launch themselves and no well-defined pathway to adulthood. For those who have the human capital to explore, fall down, and have their fall cushioned, that means great freedom and opportunity-and for those who lack those resources, it tends to mean great confusion, drift, and pain.

Over the past 50 years, federal and state governments have tried to mitigate the deleterious effects of these trends. They've tried to increase marriage rates, push down divorce rates, boost fertility, and all the rest. The focus has always been on strengthening the nuclear family, not the extended family. Occasionally, a discrete program will yield some positive results, but the widening of family inequality continues unabated.

The people who suffer the most from the decline in family support are the vulnerable-especially children. In 1960, roughly 5 percent of children were born to unmarried women. Now about 40 percent are. The Pew Research Center reported that 11 percent of children lived apart from their father in 1960. In 2010, 27 percent did. Now about half of American children will spend their childhood with both biological parents. Twenty percent of young adults have no contact at all with their father (though in some cases that's because the father is deceased). American children are more likely to live in a single-parent household than children from any other country.
Read: The divorce gap
We all know stable and loving single-parent families. But on average, children of single parents or unmarried cohabiting parents tend to have worse health outcomes, worse mental-health outcomes, less academic success, more behavioral problems, and higher truancy rates than do children living with their two married biological parents. According to work by Richard V. Reeves, a co-director of the Center on Children and Families at the Brookings Institution, if you are born into poverty and raised by your married parents, you have an 80 percent chance of climbing out of it. If you are born into poverty and raised by an unmarried mother, you have a 50 percent chance of remaining stuck.

It's not just the lack of relationships that hurts children; it's the churn. According to a 2003 study that Andrew Cherlin cites, 12 percent of American kids had lived in at least three "parental partnerships" before they turned 15. The transition moments, when mom's old partner moves out or her new partner moves in, are the hardest on kids, Cherlin shows.

While children are the vulnerable group most obviously affected by recent changes in family structure, they are not the only one.

Consider single men. Extended families provided men with the fortifying influences of male bonding and female companionship. Today many American males spend the first 20 years of their life without a father and the next 15 without a spouse. Kay Hymowitz of the Manhattan Institute has spent a good chunk of her career examining the wreckage caused by the decline of the American family, and cites evidence showing that, in the absence of the connection and meaning that family provides, unmarried men are less healthy-alcohol and drug abuse are common-earn less, and die sooner than married men.
The period when the nuclear family flourished was not normal. It was a freakish historical moment when all of society conspired to obscure its essential fragility.
For women, the nuclear-family structure imposes different pressures. Though women have benefited greatly from the loosening of traditional family structures-they have more freedom to choose the lives they want-many mothers who decide to raise their young children without extended family nearby find that they have chosen a lifestyle that is brutally hard and isolating. The situation is exacerbated by the fact that women still spend significantly more time on housework and child care than men do, according to recent data. Thus, the reality we see around us: stressed, tired mothers trying to balance work and parenting, and having to reschedule work when family life gets messy.

Without extended families, older Americans have also suffered. According to the AARP, 35 percent of Americans over 45 say they are chronically lonely. Many older people are now "elder orphans," with no close relatives or friends to take care of them. In 2015, The New York Times ran an article called " The Lonely Death of George Bell," about a family-less 72-year-old man who died alone and rotted in his Queens apartment for so long that by the time police found him, his body was unrecognizable.
Read: The loneliness of early parenthood
Finally, because groups that have endured greater levels of discrimination tend to have more fragile families, African Americans have suffered disproportionately in the era of the detached nuclear family. Nearly half of black families are led by an unmarried single woman, compared with less than one-sixth of white families. (The high rate of black incarceration guarantees a shortage of available men to be husbands or caretakers of children.) According to census data from 2010, 25 percent of black women over 35 have never been married, compared with 8 percent of white women. Two-thirds of African American children lived in single-parent families in 2018, compared with a quarter of white children. Black single-parent families are most concentrated in precisely those parts of the country in which slavery was most prevalent. Research by John Iceland, a professor of sociology and demography at Penn State, suggests that the differences between white and black family structure explain 30 percent of the affluence gap between the two groups.

In 2004, the journalist and urbanist Jane Jacobs published her final book, an assessment of North American society called Dark Age Ahead. At the core of her argument was the idea that families are "rigged to fail." The structures that once supported the family no longer exist, she wrote. Jacobs was too pessimistic about many things, but for millions of people, the shift from big and/or extended families to detached nuclear families has indeed been a disaster.

As the social structures that support the family have decayed, the debate about it has taken on a mythical quality. Social conservatives insist that we can bring the nuclear family back. But the conditions that made for stable nuclear families in the 1950s are never returning. Conservatives have nothing to say to the kid whose dad has split, whose mom has had three other kids with different dads; "go live in a nuclear family" is really not relevant advice. If only a minority of households are traditional nuclear families, that means the majority are something else: single parents, never-married parents, blended families, grandparent-headed families, serial partnerships, and so on. Conservative ideas have not caught up with this reality.

Progressives, meanwhile, still talk like self-expressive individualists of the 1970s: People should have the freedom to pick whatever family form works for them. And, of course, they should. But many of the new family forms do not work well for most people-and while progressive elites say that all family structures are fine, their own behavior suggests that they believe otherwise. As the sociologist W. Bradford Wilcox has pointed out, highly educated progressives may talk a tolerant game on family structure when speaking about society at large, but they have extremely strict expectations for their own families. When Wilcox asked his University of Virginia students if they thought having a child out of wedlock was wrong, 62 percent said it was not wrong. When he asked the students how their own parents would feel if they themselves had a child out of wedlock, 97 percent said their parents would "freak out." In a recent survey by the Institute for Family Studies, college-educated Californians ages 18 to 50 were less likely than those who hadn't graduated from college to say that having a baby out of wedlock is wrong. But they were more likely to say that personally they did not approve of having a baby out of wedlock.
Read: How politics in Trump's America divides families
In other words, while social conservatives have a philosophy of family life they can't operationalize, because it no longer is relevant, progressives have no philosophy of family life at all, because they don't want to seem judgmental. The sexual revolution has come and gone, and it's left us with no governing norms of family life, no guiding values, no articulated ideals. On this most central issue, our shared culture often has nothing relevant to say-and so for decades things have been falling apart.

The good news is that human beings adapt, even if politics are slow to do so. When one family form stops working, people cast about for something new-sometimes finding it in something very old.
Read: Why is it hard for liberals to talk about 'family values'?
Part II

Redefining Kinship

In the beginning was the band. For tens of thousands of years, people commonly lived in small bands of, say, 25 people, which linked up with perhaps 20 other bands to form a tribe. People in the band went out foraging for food and brought it back to share. They hunted together, fought wars together, made clothing for one another, looked after one another's kids. In every realm of life, they relied on their extended family and wider kin.

Except they didn't define kin the way we do today. We think of kin as those biologically related to us. But throughout most of human history, kinship was something you could create.

Anthropologists have been arguing for decades about what exactly kinship is. Studying traditional societies, they have found wide varieties of created kinship among different cultures. For the Ilongot people of the Philippines, people who migrated somewhere together are kin. For the New Guineans of the Nebilyer Valley, kinship is created by sharing grease -the life force found in mother's milk or sweet potatoes. The Chuukese people in Micronesia have a saying: "My sibling from the same canoe"; if two people survive a dangerous trial at sea, then they become kin. On the Alaskan North Slope, the Inupiat name their children after dead people, and those children are considered members of their namesake's family.

In other words, for vast stretches of human history people lived in extended families consisting of not just people they were related to but people they chose to cooperate with. An international research team recently did a genetic analysis of people who were buried together-and therefore presumably lived together-34,000 years ago in what is now Russia. They found that the people who were buried together were not closely related to one another. In a study of 32 present-day foraging societies, primary kin-parents, siblings, and children-usually made up less than 10 percent of a residential band. Extended families in traditional societies may or may not have been genetically close, but they were probably emotionally closer than most of us can imagine. In a beautiful essay on kinship, Marshall Sahlins, an anthropologist at the University of Chicago, says that kin in many such societies share a "mutuality of being." The late religion scholar J. Prytz-Johansen wrote that kinship is experienced as an "inner solidarity" of souls. The late South African anthropologist Monica Wilson described kinsmen as "mystically dependent" on one another. Kinsmen belong to one another, Sahlins writes, because they see themselves as "members of one another."

Back in the 17th and 18th centuries, when European Protestants came to North America, their relatively individualistic culture existed alongside Native Americans' very communal culture. In his book Tribe, Sebastian Junger describes what happened next: While European settlers kept defecting to go live with Native American families, almost no Native Americans ever defected to go live with European families. Europeans occasionally captured Native Americans and forced them to come live with them. They taught them English and educated them in Western ways. But almost every time they were able, the indigenous Americans fled. European settlers were sometimes captured by Native Americans during wars and brought to live in Native communities. They rarely tried to run away. This bothered the Europeans. They had the superior civilization, so why were people voting with their feet to go live in another way?

When you read such accounts, you can't help but wonder whether our civilization has somehow made a gigantic mistake.

We can't go back, of course. Western individualists are no longer the kind of people who live in prehistoric bands. We may even no longer be the kind of people who were featured in the early scenes of Avalon. We value privacy and individual freedom too much.

Our culture is oddly stuck. We want stability and rootedness, but also mobility, dynamic capitalism, and the liberty to adopt the lifestyle we choose. We want close families, but not the legal, cultural, and sociological constraints that made them possible. We've seen the wreckage left behind by the collapse of the detached nuclear family. We've seen the rise of opioid addiction, of suicide, of depression, of inequality-all products, in part, of a family structure that is too fragile, and a society that is too detached, disconnected, and distrustful. And yet we can't quite return to a more collective world. The words the historians Steven Mintz and Susan Kellogg wrote in 1988 are even truer today: "Many Americans are groping for a new paradigm of American family life, but in the meantime a profound sense of confusion and ambivalence reigns."

From Nuclear Families to Forged Families

Yet recent signs suggest at least the possibility that a new family paradigm is emerging. Many of the statistics I've cited are dire. But they describe the past-what got us to where we are now. In reaction to family chaos, accumulating evidence suggests, the prioritization of family is beginning to make a comeback. Americans are experimenting with new forms of kinship and extended family in search of stability.

Usually behavior changes before we realize that a new cultural paradigm has emerged. Imagine hundreds of millions of tiny arrows. In times of social transformation, they shift direction-a few at first, and then a lot. Nobody notices for a while, but then eventually people begin to recognize that a new pattern, and a new set of values, has emerged.

That may be happening now-in part out of necessity but in part by choice. Since the 1970s, and especially since the 2008 recession, economic pressures have pushed Americans toward greater reliance on family. Starting around 2012, the share of children living with married parents began to inch up. And college students have more contact with their parents than they did a generation ago. We tend to deride this as helicopter parenting or a failure to launch, and it has its excesses. But the educational process is longer and more expensive these days, so it makes sense that young adults rely on their parents for longer than they used to.

In 1980, only 12 percent of Americans lived in multigenerational households. But the financial crisis of 2008 prompted a sharp rise in multigenerational homes. Today 20 percent of Americans- 64 million people, an all-time high -live in multigenerational homes.

The revival of the extended family has largely been driven by young adults moving back home. In 2014, 35 percent of American men ages 18 to 34 lived with their parents. In time this shift might show itself to be mostly healthy, impelled not just by economic necessity but by beneficent social impulses; polling data suggest that many young people are already looking ahead to helping their parents in old age.

Another chunk of the revival is attributable to seniors moving in with their children. The percentage of seniors who live alone peaked around 1990. Now more than a fifth of Americans 65 and over live in multigenerational homes. This doesn't count the large share of seniors who are moving to be close to their grandkids but not into the same household.

Immigrants and people of color-many of whom face greater economic and social stress-are more likely to live in extended-family households. More than 20 percent of Asians, black people, and Latinos live in multigenerational households, compared with 16 percent of white people. As America becomes more diverse, extended families are becoming more common.

African Americans have always relied on extended family more than white Americans do. "Despite the forces working to separate us-slavery, Jim Crow, forced migration, the prison system, gentrification-we have maintained an incredible commitment to each other," Mia Birdsong, the author of the forthcoming book How We Show Up, told me recently. "The reality is, black families are expansive, fluid, and brilliantly rely on the support, knowledge, and capacity of 'the village' to take care of each other. Here's an illustration: The white researcher/social worker/whatever sees a child moving between their mother's house, their grandparents' house, and their uncle's house and sees that as 'instability.' But what's actually happening is the family (extended and chosen) is leveraging all of its resources to raise that child."

The black extended family survived even under slavery, and all the forced family separations that involved. Family was essential in the Jim Crow South and in the inner cities of the North, as a way to cope with the stresses of mass migration and limited opportunities, and with structural racism. But government policy sometimes made it more difficult for this family form to thrive. I began my career as a police reporter in Chicago, writing about public-housing projects like Cabrini-Green. Guided by social-science research, politicians tore down neighborhoods of rickety low-rise buildings-uprooting the complex webs of social connection those buildings supported, despite high rates of violence and crime-and put up big apartment buildings. The result was a horror: violent crime, gangs taking over the elevators, the erosion of family and neighborly life. Fortunately, those buildings have since been torn down themselves, replaced by mixed-income communities that are more amenable to the profusion of family forms.
Read: Why black families struggle to build wealth I often ask African friends who have immigrated to America what most struck them when they arrived. Their answer is always a variation on a theme-the loneliness.
The return of multigenerational living arrangements is already changing the built landscape. A 2016 survey by a real-estate consulting firm found that 44 percent of home buyers were looking for a home that would accommodate their elderly parents, and 42 percent wanted one that would accommodate their returning adult children. Home builders have responded by putting up houses that are what the construction firm Lennar calls "two homes under one roof." These houses are carefully built so that family members can spend time together while also preserving their privacy. Many of these homes have a shared mudroom, laundry room, and common area. But the "in-law suite," the place for aging parents, has its own entrance, kitchenette, and dining area. The "Millennial suite," the place for boomeranging adult children, has its own driveway and entrance too. These developments, of course, cater to those who can afford houses in the first place-but they speak to a common realization: Family members of different generations need to do more to support one another.

The most interesting extended families are those that stretch across kinship lines. The past several years have seen the rise of new living arrangements that bring nonbiological kin into family or familylike relationships. On the website CoAbode, single mothers can find other single mothers interested in sharing a home. All across the country, you can find co-housing projects, in which groups of adults live as members of an extended family, with separate sleeping quarters and shared communal areas. Common, a real-estate-development company that launched in 2015, operates more than 25 co-housing communities, in six cities, where young singles can live this way. Common also recently teamed up with another developer, Tishman Speyer, to launch Kin, a co-housing community for young parents. Each young family has its own living quarters, but the facilities also have shared play spaces, child-care services, and family-oriented events and outings.

These experiments, and others like them, suggest that while people still want flexibility and some privacy, they are casting about for more communal ways of living, guided by a still-developing set of values. At a co-housing community in Oakland, California, called Temescal Commons, the 23 members, ranging in age from 1 to 83, live in a complex with nine housing units. This is not some rich Bay Area hipster commune. The apartments are small, and the residents are middle- and working-class. They have a shared courtyard and a shared industrial-size kitchen where residents prepare a communal dinner on Thursday and Sunday nights. Upkeep is a shared responsibility. The adults babysit one another's children, and members borrow sugar and milk from one another. The older parents counsel the younger ones. When members of this extended family have suffered bouts of unemployment or major health crises, the whole clan has rallied together.

Courtney E. Martin, a writer who focuses on how people are redefining the American dream, is a Temescal Commons resident. "I really love that our kids grow up with different versions of adulthood all around, especially different versions of masculinity," she told me. "We consider all of our kids all of our kids." Martin has a 3-year-old daughter, Stella, who has a special bond with a young man in his 20s that never would have taken root outside this extended-family structure. "Stella makes him laugh, and David feels awesome that this 3-year-old adores him," Martin said. This is the kind of magic, she concluded, that wealth can't buy. You can only have it through time and commitment, by joining an extended family. This kind of community would fall apart if residents moved in and out. But at least in this case, they don't.
Read: The hot new Millennial housing trend is a repeat of the Middle Ages
As Martin was talking, I was struck by one crucial difference between the old extended families like those in Avalon and the new ones of today: the role of women. The extended family in Avalon thrived because all the women in the family were locked in the kitchen, feeding 25 people at a time. In 2008, a team of American and Japanese researchers found that women in multigenerational households in Japan were at greater risk of heart disease than women living with spouses only, likely because of stress. But today's extended-family living arrangements have much more diverse gender roles.

And yet in at least one respect, the new families Americans are forming would look familiar to our hunter-gatherer ancestors from eons ago. That's because they are chosen families-they transcend traditional kinship lines.
Read: The extended family of my two open adoptions

The modern chosen-family movement came to prominence in San Francisco in the 1980s among gay men and lesbians, many of whom had become estranged from their biological families and had only one another for support in coping with the trauma of the AIDS crisis. In her book, Families We Choose: Lesbians, Gays, Kinship, the anthropologist Kath Weston writes, "The families I saw gay men and lesbians creating in the Bay Area tended to have extremely fluid boundaries, not unlike kinship organization among sectors of the African-American, American Indian, and white working class."

She continues:

Like their heterosexual counterparts, most gay men and lesbians insisted that family members are people who are "there for you," people you can count on emotionally and materially. "They take care of me," said one man, "I take care of them."

These groups are what Daniel Burns, a political scientist at the University of Dallas, calls "forged families." Tragedy and suffering have pushed people together in a way that goes deeper than just a convenient living arrangement. They become, as the anthropologists say, "fictive kin."

Over the past several decades, the decline of the nuclear family has created an epidemic of trauma-millions have been set adrift because what should have been the most loving and secure relationship in their life broke. Slowly, but with increasing frequency, these drifting individuals are coming together to create forged families. These forged families have a feeling of determined commitment. The members of your chosen family are the people who will show up for you no matter what. On Pinterest you can find placards to hang on the kitchen wall where forged families gather: "Family isn't always blood. It's the people in your life who want you in theirs; the ones who accept you for who you are. The ones who would do anything to see you smile & who love you no matter what."

Two years ago, I started something called Weave: The Social Fabric Project. Weave exists to support and draw attention to people and organizations around the country who are building community. Over time, my colleagues and I have realized that one thing most of the Weavers have in common is this: They provide the kind of care to nonkin that many of us provide only to kin-the kind of support that used to be provided by the extended family.

Lisa Fitzpatrick, who was a health-care executive in New Orleans, is a Weaver. One day she was sitting in the passenger seat of a car when she noticed two young boys, 10 or 11, lifting something heavy. It was a gun. They used it to shoot her in the face. It was a gang-initiation ritual. When she recovered, she realized that she was just collateral damage. The real victims were the young boys who had to shoot somebody to get into a family, their gang.

She quit her job and began working with gang members. She opened her home to young kids who might otherwise join gangs. One Saturday afternoon, 35 kids were hanging around her house. She asked them why they were spending a lovely day at the home of a middle-aged woman. They replied, "You were the first person who ever opened the door."

In Salt Lake City, an organization called the Other Side Academy provides serious felons with an extended family. Many of the men and women who are admitted into the program have been allowed to leave prison, where they were generally serving long sentences, but must live in a group home and work at shared businesses, a moving company and a thrift store. The goal is to transform the character of each family member. During the day they work as movers or cashiers. Then they dine together and gather several evenings a week for something called "Games": They call one another out for any small moral failure-being sloppy with a move; not treating another family member with respect; being passive-aggressive, selfish, or avoidant.

Games is not polite. The residents scream at one another in order to break through the layers of armor that have built up in prison. Imagine two gigantic men covered in tattoos screaming "Fuck you! Fuck you! Fuck you!" At the session I attended, I thought they would come to blows. But after the anger, there's a kind of closeness that didn't exist before. Men and women who have never had a loving family suddenly have "relatives" who hold them accountable and demand a standard of moral excellence. Extreme integrity becomes a way of belonging to the clan. The Other Side Academy provides unwanted people with an opportunity to give care, and creates out of that care a ferocious forged family.

I could tell you hundreds of stories like this, about organizations that bring traumatized vets into extended-family settings, or nursing homes that house preschools so that senior citizens and young children can go through life together. In Baltimore, a nonprofit called Thread surrounds underperforming students with volunteers, some of whom are called "grandparents." In Chicago, Becoming a Man helps disadvantaged youth form family-type bonds with one another. In Washington, D.C., I recently met a group of middle-aged female scientists-one a celebrated cellular biologist at the National Institutes of Health, another an astrophysicist-who live together in a Catholic lay community, pooling their resources and sharing their lives. The variety of forged families in America today is endless.
For many people, the era of the nuclear family has been a catastrophe. All forms of inequality are cruel, but family inequality may be the cruelest. It damages the heart.
You may be part of a forged family yourself. I am. In 2015, I was invited to the house of a couple named Kathy and David, who had created an extended-family-like group in D.C. called All Our Kids, or AOK-DC. Some years earlier, Kathy and David had had a kid in D.C. Public Schools who had a friend named James, who often had nothing to eat and no place to stay, so they suggested that he stay with them. That kid had a friend in similar circumstances, and those friends had friends. By the time I joined them, roughly 25 kids were having dinner every Thursday night, and several of them were sleeping in the basement.

I joined the community and never left-they became my chosen family. We have dinner together on Thursday nights, celebrate holidays together, and vacation together. The kids call Kathy and David Mom and Dad. In the early days, the adults in our clan served as parental figures for the young people-replacing their broken cellphones, supporting them when depression struck, raising money for their college tuition. When a young woman in our group needed a new kidney, David gave her one of his.

We had our primary biological families, which came first, but we also had this family. Now the young people in this forged family are in their 20s and need us less. David and Kathy have left Washington, but they stay in constant contact. The dinners still happen. We still see one another and look after one another. The years of eating together and going through life together have created a bond. If a crisis hit anyone, we'd all show up. The experience has convinced me that everybody should have membership in a forged family with people completely unlike themselves.

Ever since I started working on this article, a chart has been haunting me. It plots the percentage of people living alone in a country against that nation's GDP. There's a strong correlation. Nations where a fifth of the people live alone, like Denmark and Finland, are a lot richer than nations where almost no one lives alone, like the ones in Latin America or Africa. Rich nations have smaller households than poor nations. The average German lives in a household with 2.7 people. The average Gambian lives in a household with 13.8 people.

That chart suggests two things, especially in the American context. First, the market wants us to live alone or with just a few people. That way we are mobile, unattached, and uncommitted, able to devote an enormous number of hours to our jobs. Second, when people who are raised in developed countries get money, they buy privacy.

For the privileged, this sort of works. The arrangement enables the affluent to dedicate more hours to work and email, unencumbered by family commitments. They can afford to hire people who will do the work that extended family used to do. But a lingering sadness lurks, an awareness that life is emotionally vacant when family and close friends aren't physically present, when neighbors aren't geographically or metaphorically close enough for you to lean on them, or for them to lean on you. Today's crisis of connection flows from the impoverishment of family life.

I often ask African friends who have immigrated to America what most struck them when they arrived. Their answer is always a variation on a theme-the loneliness. It's the empty suburban street in the middle of the day, maybe with a lone mother pushing a baby carriage on the sidewalk but nobody else around.

For those who are not privileged, the era of the isolated nuclear family has been a catastrophe. It's led to broken families or no families; to merry-go-round families that leave children traumatized and isolated; to senior citizens dying alone in a room. All forms of inequality are cruel, but family inequality may be the cruelest. It damages the heart. Eventually family inequality even undermines the economy the nuclear family was meant to serve: Children who grow up in chaos have trouble becoming skilled, stable, and socially mobile employees later on.

When hyper-individualism kicked into gear in the 1960s, people experimented with new ways of living that embraced individualistic values. Today we are crawling out from the wreckage of that hyper-individualism-which left many families detached and unsupported-and people are experimenting with more connected ways of living, with new shapes and varieties of extended families. Government support can help nurture this experimentation, particularly for the working-class and the poor, with things like child tax credits, coaching programs to improve parenting skills in struggling families, subsidized early education, and expanded parental leave. While the most important shifts will be cultural, and driven by individual choices, family life is under so much social stress and economic pressure in the poorer reaches of American society that no recovery is likely without some government action.

The two-parent family, meanwhile, is not about to go extinct. For many people, especially those with financial and social resources, it is a great way to live and raise children. But a new and more communal ethos is emerging, one that is consistent with 21st-century reality and 21st-century values.

When we discuss the problems confronting the country, we don't talk about family enough. It feels too judgmental. Too uncomfortable. Maybe even too religious. But the blunt fact is that the nuclear family has been crumbling in slow motion for decades, and many of our other problems-with education, mental health, addiction, the quality of the labor force-stem from that crumbling. We've left behind the nuclear-family paradigm of 1955. For most people it's not coming back. Americans are hungering to live in extended and forged families, in ways that are new and ancient at the same time. This is a significant opportunity, a chance to thicken and broaden family relationships, a chance to allow more adults and children to live and grow under the loving gaze of a dozen pairs of eyes, and be caught, when they fall, by a dozen pairs of arms. For decades we have been eating at smaller and smaller tables, with fewer and fewer kin.

It's time to find ways to bring back the big tables.
This article appears in the March 2020 print edition with the headline "The Nuclear Family Was a Mistake." When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

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live.part ithe era of extended clansthrough

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The family structure we've held up as the cultural ideal for the past half century has been a catastrophe for many. It's time to figure out better ways to live together.

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Lual Mayen South Sudan Refugee creates video game to help refugees - CNN

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lual mayen south sudan refugee creates video game to help refugees  - cnn

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How this man is using video games to help refugees

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Lual Mayen is a refugee from South Sudan who is now the CEO of Junub Games which is releasing the video game "Salaam" that will help raise awareness and aid for refugees.

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A spate of brutal rapes and murders of young girls in a single district of India over the past month has provoked outrage and exposed the ongoing use of sexual violence as a tool of oppression and revenge against lower caste communities.

Over the past month, the Lakhimpur Kheri district of the Indian state of Uttar Pradesh has witnessed four incidents of girls being raped and brutally murdered. At least two of the girls were Dalits, the lowest caste in the Hindu system of social hierarchy, who were previously referred to as "untouchables" and cast out from society.

Last week, a 14-year-old girl Dalit girl was found hanging from a tree in a village, having been raped and murdered. Just a few days before, a three-year-old girl was raped and strangled to death.

On 14 and 24 August, two girls, a 13-year-old and a 17-year-old, were both raped and killed in Lakhimpur Kheri.

"These cases of extreme sexual violence are more examples of the dominant caste wielding power over Dalit women who are perceived as weak and vulnerable and available," said Manjula Pradeep, director of campaigns at the Dalit Human Rights Defenders Network.

She added: "Dalit women are seen as impure and deprived when they access basic amenities but their bodies are also used as objects to take revenge on the Dalit communities and keep them oppressed. With more Dalits demanding their rights, these kinds of incidents we have seen in Lakhimpur Kheri are increasing."

Local activists said the assaults carried out against the Dalit girls went ignored by police until the issue was raised by activists and members of the opposition political party, who said the incident of the 13-year-old had "shaken humanity". Activists have also struggled to enter the village to intervene in the cases as upper caste members of the village had reportedly blocked access.

The state of Uttar Pradesh already has the highest number of reported cases of violence against Dalits but during coronavirus lockdown there was a reported spike of attacks on Dalits by upper caste Thakurs. However, no arrests have been made.

"The recent spate of rape and murder cases in the Lakhimpur Kheri district indicates an endemic problem of sexual violence and the state government needs to do much more to address this crisis," said Divya Srinivasan, a south Asia consultant for women's rights organisation Equality Now.

"In many instances, sexual violence committed against Dalit women and girls is perpetrated by men from dominant 'upper castes', who use sexual violence as a tool to assert power and reinforce existing caste, social and gender hierarchies," said Srinivasan.

Srinivasan emphasised that these entrenched hierarchies of power gave attackers of Dalit women a worrying sense of impunity. Assaults on lower caste women were rarely investigated or prosecuted, and in the case of Dalit victims, rarely prompt much media coverage or public outrage.

India remains the most unsafe country for women in the world, with a woman raped every 20 minutes. Lower caste women in particular bear the brunt, with little to no access to justice. It first came to light in a 1999 report by Human Rights Watch that documented how Dalit women in Bihar were raped and then had their breasts cut off and were shot in the vulva.

Official statistics show that at least four Dalit women are raped in India every day, though the real number is thought to be much higher as the communities often do not report the rapes due to pressure from higher castes or because police refuse to file the cases.

Recent incidents include a 19-year-old Dalit girl in Gujarat who was sodomised and her body hung from a banyan tree in January, and a 16-year-old Dalit girl in Gujarat who had been repeatedly raped and gang-raped and then thrown from a water tank in April.

An upcoming joint report by Equality Now and Swabhiman Society found that Dalit women are subjected to more severe or aggravated forms of sexual violence, such as gang-rapes or rape with murder.

The issue of sexual violence has become more prominent in recent years, particularly following the 2012 Delhi bus gang-rape case, and again last year after the brutal gang-rape of a vet in Hyderabad. Despite harsher punishments introduced for sexual violence, reports of rape and assault continue to rise.

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Dalits bear brunt of India's 'endemic' sexual violence crisis

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A spate of brutal rapes and murders of young girls in a single district of India over the past month has provoked outrage and exposed the ongoing use of sexual violence as a tool of oppression and revenge against lower caste communities.

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Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie: The danger of a single story | TED Talk

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Our lives, our cultures, are composed of many overlapping stories. Novelist Chimamanda Adichie tells the story of how she found her authentic cultural voice -- and warns that if we hear only a single story about another person or country, we risk a critical misunderstanding.

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Daughters of Negligence: Domestic Workers and the Apathy of the Urban Middle Class Amid the Pandemic

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Our lives in the cities and towns of India are possible to a largely degree because of domestic workers/ house helps who help us finish or take care of domestic chores such as cleaning, cooking, looking after the children and the elderly etc. Our lives come to a standstill if our domestic help suddenly calls up to ask for a leave or tells us that she/he will soon quit the job, such is the centrality of the role that domestic workers play in our lives, especially in the fast-paced urban centres.

The coronavirus pandemic had however compelled us to live without our domestic helps for prolonged periods of time and this only highlighted the extreme significance of their presence in our lives as caretakers and bearers of a significant burden of our own domestic responsibilities.

It is certainly not easy to have a full-fledged job and run the household errands for a working professional in the absence of the support of domestic helpers, or for an elderly couple to look after their house on their own in a high-rise apartment, or for a new mother to ensure that her child has been bathed and fed on time while she is busy making a presentation in office without the support of a domestic worker. The lockdown has in many ways compelled us to operate without domestic workers and to realise that domestic workers are irreplaceable and critical to our sustenance.

More than 24% of the state's domestic workers have permanently lost their employment and over 62% have lost their employment partially

It is important to understand that while rely on their employers for their livelihoods and feel humiliated, let down or exploited when their employers treat them inappropriately or don't hand them a deserved salary, employers too are at a complete loss when domestic workers are absent from the domain of their responsibilities which includes a plethora of domestic tasks such as washing, cleaning, cooking and care-taking responsibilities. The coming of the domestic workers coronavirus pandemic brought about major hardships in the lives of domestic workers as a significant percentage among them lost their livelihoods and found themselves in sheer financial distress as they are now finding it impossible to pay the school fees of their children, pay housing rents or bills and most significantly, in the absence of a health cover, they have no way to make sure that they or their families live through the pandemic without worrying for external expenses or healthcare emergencies.

Let us look at the situation in Maharashtra , here the government has been repeatedly reminding the public against disallowing domestic workers into homes or removing them from the job and has been asking people to allow domestic workers to resume their responsibilities but fear of the virus and resultant suspicion have meant that more than 24% of the state's domestic workers have permanently lost their employment and over 62% have lost their employment partially.

It is important to note that there is a significant section among domestic workers who are the sole breadwinners for their families or come from extremely exploitative homes, where their financial independence plays a very important role in freeing them from the shackles of violence.

In fact a recent study conducted by the National Domestic Workers' Welfare Trust and Maharashtra Gharelu Kamgar Sanghatana which comprises of many unions of domestic workers has found that domestic workers across Pune, Mumbai, Kolhapur, Thane and Sangli have been adversely affected by the lockdown and the resultant loss of employment.

Around 33% of the total domestic workers were senior citizens

The took into account over 5,000 families from the above mentioned localities and found that while there was widespread financial distress and economic vulnerability that was being faced by the domestic workers but particularly vulnerable were those who were senior citizens. The study found that 33% of the total domestic workers were senior citizens and in many cases, they lived alone and were solely responsible for fetching their own bread and butter.

I spoke to a domestic worker in her early seventies named Shamili Govinde and she told me that while her husband, a load-puller at a factory had died two years ago, her two sons had abandoned her. The lockdown meant that she had lost her sole source of income which was to work as a domestic worker in a neighbourhood housing society. When the gates of the housing society closed for her, she had to borrow money from neighbours but in the absence of work, she feels she can't sustain any longer if things continue as they are today.

The report reminds us that over 46% of the domestic workers in Maharashtra are facing issues related to housing and over 43% have lost their food security.

66% of the domestic workers are unable to have their children continue their education and are unable to pay the fees on time and 100% of them have access to no health cover.

This implies that they have been completely cut-off from medical care, because in the absence of transportation networks they are unable to go to public hospitals and private healthcare is too costly to be afforded by them. With many domestic workers being the only breadwinners of their families, the loss of the source of employment has been nothing less but life threatening.

Look at the dilemmas that Kamla, 23 years, is facing. Her husband worked as a security guard for a housing society and was recently forced to quit the job when he developed sustained cough and cold and residents objected to his coming on the society's premises, now Kamla is the sole breadwinner for her family and has to feed her husband and her three children. She borrowed money from her employers to pay the rent and buy some essential groceries but recalls the dreaded time she and her family had to go through when even her own employment as a domestic workers was snatched away by the recent lockdown.

She has been asked to resumed work by 3 of her four employers and is looking for more work, but she cannot stop reiterating the hardships that the pandemic has cast upon the family. While her husband has started searching for work at local eateries and godowns, her eldest son has begun working at a tea-shack in her own locality, where he washes dirty utensils for a meagre wage.

The unions of domestic workers and several bodies that work for their rights and dignities have demanded from the government that domestic workers be compensated and be paid a minimum allowance of Rs 10,00 by the government until the situation becomes normal again and the restrictions imposed due to the pandemic are completely removed.

It wouldn't be wrong to say that domestic workers across the country are among the most affected sections of the population and in most cases have had to do without work for more than four to five months.

We also have to take note of the fact that domestic workers are experiencing an unprecedented plight as societies and residential complexes are imposing their own restrictions and have shown an attitude of stern disapproval on the entry of domestic workers into gated communities or into urban upper and middle class households. As a result thousands of domestic workers continue to be jobless, unemployed and thus are facing extremely difficult times in the absence of structural and institutional support. Their worries and concerns have never occupied the centre stage of media attention and neither have they ever been discussed by policymakers, despite their critical role in sustaining urban homes and making life comfortable for most of us.

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Daughters of Negligence: Domestic Workers and the Apathy of the Urban Middle Class Amid the Pandemic - The New Leam

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Our lives in the cities and towns of India are possible to a largely degree because of domestic workers/ house helps who help us finish or take care of domestic chores such as cleaning, cooking, looking after the children and the elderly etc.

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Zones of regulation mood chart uses Black faces to depict 'out of control' kids - Chicago Tribune

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The laminated chart was intended to help young Gurnee schoolchildren identify emotional "zones" while learning remotely. Were they happy, calm and ready to learn? Frustrated, worried, losing control? Or maybe they were angry, yelling and hitting - out of control.

But when parent Alonzo Massey saw the chart in his son's back-to-school materials, he was taken aback. Of the four cartoon images of children used to illustrate the feelings chart, two were white, including the "ready to learn" child and another shown as sad or tired. But the "losing control" and "out of control" children were Black.

"A kid is a kid and they're going to look at this and say, 'That looks like me,'" said Massey, father of a first grader at Spaulding School. "How are you going to make sure my kid doesn't see himself as the angry kid?" Massey contacted the school Aug. 24, the same day parents picked up their kids' remote learning materials.

Gurnee District 56 Superintendent Colleen Pacatte said a Spaulding staff member had gotten the chart from a website called teacherspayteachers.com, where educators buy and sell original teaching materials. Eight teachers at Spaulding, which serves students in prekindergarten through second grades, used the chart, she said.

A spokeswoman for the website said the chart had been removed and its teacher author was asked to review the site's policy on "inappropriate content."

In a letter sent to Massey and other parents, Pacatte said the district would investigate how the chart made it into some children's school bags. She expressed disappointment and reassured them that school employees would do better.

"It wasn't used by everybody," Pacatte said. "It was selected by a single grade level and a couple of other miscellaneous teachers. As soon as we found out it was going out, we stopped."

Educators call these groups of feelings "zones of regulation," and using them has become common in schools focused on teaching social-emotional skills, especially for students with disabilities.

Hundreds of other mood charts are available on the website used at Spaulding and elsewhere on the internet. Most use emoji, road signs or just colors, rather than depictions of children. One popular sign uses a series of emoting llamas.

The chart sent home at Spaulding set off a discussion on Facebook among upset parents. Angenetta Frison, whose prekindergarten daughter attends Spaulding and was one of the recipients, found a plethora of other options when she looked. Why use this one, she wondered, when it was so obviously problematic?

"I felt like somebody had to have seen it - whoever was putting these together - and had to have no problem with it," Frison said.

A feelings chart was a good idea, Pacatte said - educators are concerned about kids' social and emotional development as they learn from home during the pandemic.

Just not this one.

"I know the staff that are involved feel horrible," she said.

The eight teachers are being provided training on implicit bias from an outside consultant, Pacatte said. Gurnee 56 also is in its third year of a districtwide study of racial inequality, which will continue.

"I'm heartbroken that it happened because we have been doing so much work on this. It's evidence that we have to continue. And we will do that," Pacatte said.

She's also invited the teachers to join an ongoing study of the book "Unconscious Bias in Schools: A Developmental Approach to Exploring Race and Racism."

"What's blatantly obvious to some people hasn't been obvious to others," she said.

Recommended on Chicago Tribune

Most Read on Chicago Tribune

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Feelings chart depicting 'out of control' child as Black upsets parents at Gurnee school

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The laminated chart was intended to help young Gurnee schoolchildren identify emotional "zones" while learning remotely. Were they happy, calm and ready to learn? Frustrated, worried, losing control? Or maybe they were angry, yelling and hitting - out of control. But when parent Alonzo Massey saw the chart in his son's back-to-school materials, he was taken aback.

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https://globalnews.ca/news/7408226/mothers-hours-child-care-pandemic-study/

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A new report by Yale economists finds no evidence that the enhanced jobless benefits Congress authorized in March in response to the COVID-19 pandemic reduced employment.

The report (PDF) addresses concerns that the more generous unemployment benefits, which provide $600 per week above state unemployment insurance payments, would disincentivize work.

The researchers assessed this claim using weekly data from Homebase, a company that provides scheduling and timesheet software to small businesses throughout the United States. The findings suggest that, in the aggregate, the expanded benefits neither encouraged layoffs during the pandemic's onset nor deterred people from returning to work once businesses began reopening.

The enhanced unemployment benefits were initiated under the CARES Act, a $2.2 trillion economic stimulus package enacted on March 27 that attempted to ease the pandemic's severe economic consequences. The expanded benefits, which are set to expire July 31, provide a $600 weekly payment in addition to any state unemployment insurance. The supplemental payment was designed to cover 100% of the average U.S. wage when combined with existing unemployment benefits. The generosity of an individual's unemployment benefits depends on several factors, including their earnings history and their state's schedule of benefits.

The report found that workers receiving larger increases in unemployment benefits experienced very similar gains in employment by early May relative to workers with less-generous benefit increases. People with more generously expanded benefits also resumed working at a similar or slightly quicker rate than others did, according to the report.

"The data do not show a relationship between benefit generosity and employment paths after the CARES Act, which could be due to the collapse of labor demand during the COVID-19 crisis," said Joseph Altonji, the Thomas DeWitt Cuyler Professor of Economics in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, and a co-author of the report.

Critics argued that the expanded benefits, which exceeded many people's normal weekly wages, would incentivize businesses to lay off workers to cut costs and disincentivize recipients from returning to work. If the enhanced benefits had these effects, the researchers said, the data should show a significant drop in employment in the week after the CARES Act took effect; it should also show subsequent decreases in relative employment as workers with more generous unemployment benefits put off returning to work. The data did not yield results that support these predictions.

The researchers found no evidence that recipients of more generous benefits were less likely to return to work. They also found that workers who received larger increases in their unemployment benefits relative to their wages did not experience greater declines in employment after the CARES Act was enacted.

The Homebase data primarily covers small businesses that require time clocks for day-to-day operations. The majority are restaurants, bars, or retail operations. The workers represented in the dataset are hourly employees who earn relatively low wages. While the data does not represent the entire U.S. labor market, it captures a segment of it that has been disproportionately affected by the pandemic, the researchers noted.

The analysis controlled for the severity of the COVID-19 pandemic and for the various restrictions that states imposed on businesses during the public health crisis. The researchers tested their results against employment outcomes in the federal government's Current Population Survey, a more representative sample of the labor market than the Homebase data, and obtained similar findings. But they stress that their results pertain to the current pandemic period of slack labor demand and do not speak directly to the effects of unemployment benefits on employment during normal times.

The report's other authors are Zara Contractor, Lucas Finamor, and Dana Scott (primary author), Ph.D. candidates in the Department of Economics; Ryan Haygood, a rising senior in Yale College and research assistant at the Tobin Center; Ilse Lindenlaub, assistant professor of economics; Costas Meghir, the Douglas A Warner III Professor of Economics; Cormac O'Dea, assistant professor of economics; Liana Wang '20 B.A., an undergraduate research assistant; and Ebonya Washington, the Samuel C. Park Jr. Professor of Economics.

The analysis, supported by Yale's Tobin Center for Economic Policy, comes as Congress debates whether to extend the expanded unemployment benefits. The full report is available on the Tobin Center's website.

Related

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Yale study finds expanded jobless benefits did not reduce employment

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A new report by Yale economists finds no evidence that the enhanced jobless benefits Congress authorized in March in response to the COVID-19 pandemic reduced employment. The report (PDF) addresses concerns that the more generous unemployment benefits, which provide $600 per week above state unemployment insurance payments, would disincentivize work.

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“The pandemic made some parts of the traditional college experience, such as parties and close-quarters socialization, dangerous," Ian Bogost writes. “But campus life thrives on dangerous behavior in...

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Mike Groll / AP

In December 2012, a Senate subcommittee was convened to examine the school-to-prison pipeline, a national trend in which overly punitive school discipline policies push students out of school and into the criminal-justice system. Among the witnesses at the first-ever congressional hearing on this issue was Edward Ward, at the time an honor-roll student in his sophomore year at DePaul University and a recent graduate of Orr Academy on the West Side of Chicago. He offered an eye-opening first-hand account of his high-school experience. "From the moment we stepped through the doors in the morning, we were faced with metal detectors, X-ray machines, and uniformed security," said Ward, describing a high-poverty, majority-black campus "where many young people ... feel unwelcome and under siege."

Far from an aberration, what Ward depicts-public schools serving primarily black and other nonwhite students that rely on more restrictive security-is quite common, according to a new research paper from Jason P. Nance, an associate professor of law at the University of Florida Levin College of Law. Nance set out to find if there was a proliferation of school security following highly publicized school shootings like the tragedy at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut. He discovered that many schools had intensified their security and surveillance of students, but the practice was not equally applied. Rather, schools with a preponderance of students of color within the school building were more inclined to adopt strict surveillance practices-metal detectors, locked gates, security cameras, random sweeps, and school police.

In the first empirical analysis of its kind, Nance gained authorization to access a restricted database from the U.S. Department of Education-the School Survey on Crime and Safety conducted in 2009-10 and 2013-14-to examine school security methods pre- and post- the Newtown school massacre. He found a clear and consistent pattern, even after controlling for a host of variables that might explain the presence of stricter student surveillance, such as school crime, neighborhood crime, school disorder (disciplinary or behavioral problems on campus), and other student demographics and school characteristics.

"After controlling for all those things, I still found that the concentration of students of color was a predictor of whether or not schools decided to rely on more intense [security] measures," said Nance, referring to black, Hispanic, Asian, and Native American children. "I questioned why that was [and] it seemed like race was playing a factor in these decisions."

His research carefully documents the degree to which race influenced surveillance decisions. Nance used logistic regression models-a statistical method for analyzing a dataset-to predict the odds of a school using a particular combination of security options. The study suggests that as the portion of students of color in the school increased, so did the odds that the school would rely on more intense surveillance methods. In schools where students of color accounted for more than half of the student body, the probability of the school using a mix of metal detectors, school police and security guards, locked gates, and random sweeps was two to 18 times greater than at schools where the nonwhite population was less than 20 percent. "Schools with higher concentrations of [students of color]," he concluded, "are more inclined to rely on heavy-handed measures to maintain order than other schools facing similar crime and discipline issues."

But not all school districts see stricter security policies as a downside-even in districts serving an overwhelmingly nonwhite student body. In Boston, the chief of police for the city's schools told MassLive.com last year that metal detectors are a deterrent to thwart weapons in schools, and he considers the addition of the security method a success story. In Boston's three largest high schools, every student is required to walk through a metal detector every school day. "The idea now is that schools are more of a safe zone and that helps parents," said Eric Weston, a 30-year veteran of school policing, who believes it makes students feel safer. "They know they can't bring in a weapon, but they also know the kid behind them can't either."

The extent to which the increased security was related to race and ethnicity, rather than grounded in legitimate safety concerns, is further proven in a companion analysis in which Nance investigated the major, student-caused instances of school violence for the last 25 years using information culled from a CNN archive of U.S. school violence incidents and federal data on demographics of the relevant schools. The overwhelming majority-some 62 percent-of the occurrences of major school violence happened in schools that serve primarily white students. These findings are "illustrative of a much greater problem that we have of racial inequalities within our [public] school system," Nance said, noting research on racial disparities in special-education placements, gifted-and-talented programs, and teacher expectations of academic success. He also acknowledged that "African Americans tend to experience [educational inequalities] to the highest degree."

Additionally, the report emphasizes the educational and sociological harms of constant student surveillance, linking the over-reliance on strict security with students' diminished feelings of trust and safety. One of the scholars who has studied and written extensively on this aspect is Pedro Noguera, a distinguished professor at UCLA's graduate school of education. "When we think about what leads to safety in schools, we have to focus on how safety relates to the quality of relationships, relates to kids receiving the education they need, and not rely on excessive security," Noguera said. "Because when we do, the impact on learning, the impact on the way kids feel about being there, and the likelihood [students] will be subject to very punitive forms of discipline goes way up."

In New York City, Noguera cites public schools with metal detectors "where they literally can't get the kids into the building on time because [the screening] takes so long," and cautioned that the long-term impact can be seen in student motivation and engagement. "You want schools to be safe, but at the same time you want them to be places where kids feel as though they can learn and be supported," Noguera said, adding that bringing police onto campus and placing youth under continuous surveillance "begins to turn schools into institutions that are more like prisons."

The increasing reliance on strict security practices has led activists and students in some large city school districts-where these methods are most commonly found-to push back against school environments where, as Noguera writes, "the fixation on control tends to override all other educational objectives and concerns." A districtwide policy in Los Angeles to conduct random screenings with metal detector wands in all secondary schools (grades 6-12) has been in place for over two decades, yet concerns about the rule resurfaced in June, with local groups calling for the district to change its security procedures. Similarly in New York, the nation's largest school district faces growing calls to remove metal detectors from schools.

Kesi Foster, the New York City coordinator for Urban Youth Collaborative, a student-led educational-justice coalition, is part of the movement to reform these practices. "We have yet to see any evidence that this kind of [intensive surveillance and] policing ... creates an academic environment where [students] are more likely to thrive, improves school culture and climate, or creates a safer learning environment. Yet cities, states, and the federal government continue to invest in these kind of strategies and the only results we see is the criminalization of black youth in their schools."

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Students of Color Are Disproportionately Affected by School Surveillance

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In December 2012, a Senate subcommittee was convened to examine the school-to-prison pipeline, a national trend in which overly punitive school discipline policies push students out of school and into the criminal-justice system.

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Caste discrimination in some of Silicon Valley's richest tech companies : Planet Money : NPR

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subscribe to Planet Money podcast

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Sam Cornelius is from India, and works in the U.S. tech sector. Sometimes when he meets another Indian at his company, they ask him questions that seem innocent enough on the surface, like, "Where is your family from?" Or, "Are you vegetarian?" Sometimes they might even suggest going for a swim. But, Sam says, these questions can feel like a dangerous trap. Coming from a fellow Indian, they're often clever attempts to find out something very specific: his caste.

The state of California filed a lawsuit this summer alleging a type of discrimination not frequently cited in U.S. workplaces: caste discrimination. The case involves an all-Indian team of employees at Cisco Systems' headquarters in San Jose, but similar complaints are popping up at other companies in the tech sector.

We follow how an ancient social hierarchy usually associated with South Asia has been cropping up at the ping pong tables and complementary juice bars of Silicon Valley.
This episode is adapted from For more about money and how it rules the world, subscribe to our Newsletter the excellent Rough Translation podcast. For more about allegations of caste discrimination in the Valley, make sure to check out the full episode, How To Be Anti-Casteist, and the links in their show notes.

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Caste Arrives In Silicon Valley : Planet Money

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subscribe to Planet Money podcast subscribe to Planet Money podcast Sam Cornelius is from India, and works in the U.S. tech sector. Sometimes when he meets another Indian at his company, they ask him questions that seem innocent enough on the surface, like, "Where is your family from?" Or, "Are you vegetarian?"

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For songs relating to our reading of "teenage wasteland"

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MGMT - Time to Pretend (Official HD Video)

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Immigrants in a US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) detention center in Georgia are being subjected to horrific conditions and treatment, including "jarring medical neglect" and a high rate of hysterectomies among women, according to a whistleblower complaint filed by several legal advocacy groups on behalf of a nurse who works there.

The nurse, Dawn Wooten, has been practicing for more than 10 years, three of which she was employed at Irwin county detention center in Georgia, which is run by private corporation LaSalle Corrections. The complaint, filed on her behalf on 14 September, accused the center of negligence, including poor safety precautions surrounding Covid-19 and generally hazardous and unsanitary conditions.

Immigrants who spoke out against these conditions were regularly pushed into solitary confinement, the complaint said. Wooten says she was demoted and reprimanded when she spoke out about these practices, according to an interview with the Intercept.

The Intercept also reported that Wooten's account was "bolstered by interviews with another current member of Irwin's medical staff - who asked not to be named for fear of retaliation - and four people currently or recently detained there".

Related: Revealed: Trump nominee had role in removing prosecutor opposed to family separations

According to the new complaint, Wooten reported an alarmingly high rate of hysterectomies - a surgery in which part or all of the uterus is removed - being performed on Spanish-speaking immigrants, many of whom did not appear to understand why they had undergone the procedure.

She said an off-site doctor supposedly performed the surgeries on women who complained of heavy menstrual cycles, but that many women seemed to not understand what had happened. In many cases nurses obtained consent from patients by "simply googling Spanish", the complaint alleges.

"Everybody he sees has a hysterectomy - just about everybody," Wooten said. "That's his specialty, he's the uterus collector. Everybody's uterus cannot be that bad."

The complaint also alleges health and safety violations related to the procedures. One woman said she was not properly anesthetized during a procedure and overheard the doctor say he had mistakenly removed the wrong ovary, rendering her unable to have children. Another went in to have a cyst drained and ultimately got a hysterectomy instead, the complaint said.

"When I met all these women who had had surgeries, I thought this was like an experimental concentration camp. It was like they're experimenting with our bodies," one detainee said, according to the complaint.

Project South, one of the human rights groups that filed the complaint, had previously filed a report in 2017 regarding Irwin's poor treatment of detainees, including unsanitary conditions, inedible food and refusing medical care to detainees. "This place is not equipped for humans," one detained immigrant at Irwin told Project South at the time.

Conditions have "only worsened" in the face of Covid-19 threats, the complaint says. The facility has refused to test detained immigrants for Covid-19 in a timely manner, concealed numbers of positive tests and mixed those who have been exposed to Covid-19 with those who have not, according to the complaint.

"There is no social distancing possible in a detention center," said Azadeh Shahshahani, a human rights attorney at Project South. "We are calling for people to be freed immediately, and we have been calling for this facility to be shut down for a long time."

Shahshahani said the groups also plan to file these documents to Congress as well as to the United Nations. The United Nations defines "imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group" as an act of genocide, a crime under international law.

"These are gross human rights violations, and the US government should be held accountable," she said. She added that Irwin detention center is not unique: Project South filed similar complaints against the Stewart detention center, another location in Georgia where detainees have alleged abuse.

LaSalle Corrections did not respond to request for comment. When reached by phone, an employee at the Irwin county detention center declined to comment or answer how many immigrants are currently housed there, but according to the company's website the location houses up to 1,201 people. Ice did not immediately respond to request for comment.

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Ice detainees faced medical neglect and hysterectomies, whistleblower alleges

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Immigrants in a US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) detention center in Georgia are being subjected to horrific conditions and treatment, including "jarring medical neglect" and a high rate of hysterectomies among women, according to a whistleblower complaint filed by several legal advocacy groups on behalf of a nurse who works there.

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Read: Amanda Mull on why Americans have baked all the flour away
In adulthood, I've moved into apartment after apartment determined to find the domestic success that eluded my mother. I resolved to buy fewer, higher-quality things, and only when I could afford them. And I would conquer the shameful habit of refusing to let go. A decade and a half into my quest, my record has been middling. My own stack of old magazines is mostly n+1s and Bon Appetit s, suggesting that although I have grown a bit tidier than my forebears in certain ways, I've mostly just become more pretentious.

My penchant toward clutter has always felt like a character flaw, but one of the milder ones. Now, inside my home like millions of other Americans lucky enough to have a laptop job, I've spent months shuffling around and tripping over all the stuff I tried for years to ignore or throw out. But instead of the self-recrimination that usually arises when I'm forced to confront my attachment to my things, I've felt only relief. A pandemic hit, and suddenly all my inherited neuroses about precariousness didn't seem so distant and silly.

Clutter isn't an American concept-Victorians, for example, lived in spaces overflowing with objets d'art and many other kinds of objets-but modern Americans cultivate clutter's presence in ways that set them apart. While previous generations had plenty of stuff, they "would accumulate those things over a lifetime and value that process," says Susan Strasser, the author of Never Done: A History of American Housework. "Your grandmother would die, and you would welcome her furniture rather than thinking you'd rather have something that looked new from IKEA."

The shift from accumulation to consumption took place between the 1880s and the 1920s, a period Strasser says caused "a seismic shift in people's relationship to the material world." Before that, most possessions were either made at home or bought from peddlers, local craftspeople, or general stores. As American manufacturing and transportation took off around the turn of the 20th century, the economy of stuff began to centralize, setting us on a crash course with the big-box behemoths that largely dictate the country's consumption patterns today.

But for American retail as we know it to thrive, people cannot simply stop shopping when they have what they need. Long before you could press a key and have a new set of throw pillows hand-delivered to your home in 48 hours, another turn-of-the-century innovation kept us buying: the secondhand store. "Salvage charities," as Strasser calls them, assuaged people's guilt about unloading perfectly good things. If relinquishing your unneeded possessions to the poor was a moral act, then why not redecorate and create a few more?

After World War II, this acquisitive trend combined with a housing boom, and people spent year after year filling up spacious suburban homes with freezers and clothes dryers and dishwashers. In the 1970s, kids who'd been raised by parents who still bore the scars of the Depression entered adulthood encouraged to enjoy the spoils of modernity. Strasser remembers fretting with her college housemates over whether to throw out once-used aluminum foil, which her own parents always saved and pressed out: "Were my friends and I going to keep doing what we'd been raised to do and make one roll of aluminum foil last four years?" During that decade, she says, American clutter made its debut as the source of cultural anxiety we know today.

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Read: Amanda Mull on why Americans have baked all the flour away In adulthood, I've moved into apartment after apartment determined to find the domestic success that eluded my mother. I resolved to buy fewer, higher-quality things, and only when I could afford them. And I would conquer the shameful habit of refusing to let go.

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Affluent White student-athletes are profiting from the labor of their poor Black peers, study says - CNN

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affluent white student-athletes are profiting from the labor of their poor black peers

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Affluent White student-athletes are profiting from the labor of their poor Black peers, study says

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A new study of the economics of college sports found that affluent White students are profiting off the labor of poor Black students.

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The domestic workers fleeing modern slavery in the UK

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It is just after 7am on a rainy morning in July and 57-year-old Sheila Tilan is pacing up and down a private road that leads to one of London's most exclusive streets.

She is wearing white trousers and a black shirt, just as she said she would.

Joggers pass by and a security guard sits in a nearby cabin, guarding a gate that leads to multi-million-pound mansions.

Sheila pretends to talk on her mobile phone so as not to draw attention to herself.

About an hour later, a tiny woman carrying a schoolgirl's backpack and wearing baggy pink trousers emerges from one of the houses.

She walks towards Sheila and the two embrace briskly. They have been in telephone contact for some weeks, but this is the first time they have met.

"Sorry, I had to make breakfast," Florence* says in a whisper.

That morning, like every morning for the past four years, Florence, who is from the Philippines and looks younger than her 28 years, had made breakfast and tidied the living room of her employer's house.

But this morning would be different because the night before she had packed her belongings into the backpack and resolved to wear the three pairs of trousers and four t-shirts she could not cram into it.

Sheila is visibly relieved that her first "rescue" since the country went into lockdown in late March has been successful. But the past few months have been so busy that she has forgotten she no longer has a key to the apartment the Filipino Domestic Workers' Association (FDWA), of which she is co-founder, uses as an informal "safe house".

Recently, the apartment has become a haven for migrant workers who have become homeless as a result of losing their jobs during the coronavirus crisis.

With cafes and restaurants only serving takeaway food, Sheila and Florence find a bus stop to sit at as they wait for someone to bring them the key.

Florence admits with an embarrassed smile that it is the first time she has walked down these streets.

"A year and six months, I don't go out," she explains in broken English, her mood suddenly sullen.

Florence had first begun working for her employers, a diplomatic family, in Kuwait, and says that since they moved to London, she had only left the house to accompany members of the family on shopping trips.

Relations had turned sour during lockdown, she says, with the family installing a camera to monitor her, and withholding her pay (which was below the United Kingdom's minimum wage) and passport.

The UK police are currently looking into the allegations and confirmed to Al Jazeera there have been no arrests.

Importing abuse

In 2019, the UK government issued just under 23,000 Overseas Domestic Worker (ODW) visas, aimed at workers temporarily accompanying their employers from abroad. They are valid for six months. About half of these were issued to workers from the Philippines. Around 200 to 300 workers enter the country with a diplomatic household every year.

A 2017 freedom of information request shows that more than 70 percent of ODW visa applications to the UK are from Gulf countries whose kafala migrant sponsorship system, also used in Lebanon and Jordan, has been described by the International Labour Organization (ILO) as "inherently problematic".

"The kafala system places this undue power with the employer that is magnified in relation to domestic workers," Ryszard Cholewinski, a senior Migration Specialist in the ILO's Regional Office for Arab States, explains, adding that live-in domestic workers in hard-to-monitor private homes are at particularly high risk of forced labour.

"[The ILO's forced labour] indicators include things like withholding of passports and restricted movement of workers, which is exacerbated in the case of domestic workers as many of them are unable to leave the house," Cholewinski adds.

A lack of social security often means that even middle-income families in Gulf countries are forced to hire outside help to care for children and the elderly. "Employers feel that they have made an investment and that the worker should stay with them for a number of years," Cholewinski says.

The ILO estimates that 80 percent of the at least 67 million adult domestic workers worldwide are women, and that one in five is an international migrant.

In the UK, changes to the immigration rules in 2012 introduced a tied visa system that critics argued merely recreated the kafala, as a worker could not quit their job without becoming undocumented and at risk of deportation. The government countered that victims of abuse could be channelled through the National Referral Mechanism (NRM), the UK's framework for modern slavery victims, with referrals made by designated first responders including NGOs and the police.

An independent review of the ODW visa, commissioned by the government and published in 2015, recognised that the UK was inviting an average of 17,000 "potentially vulnerable individuals" into the country every year and recommended that workers be given a universal right to change employer and apply for visa extensions. As a result, domestic workers are now able to change employer while their six-month visa is still valid. But critics say the time limit makes the changes merely nominal.

Before becoming prime minister, Theresa May (who was then Home Secretary) had aimed for her political legacy to be leading the global fight against modern slavery. The 2015 Modern Slavery Act was hailed as "landmark legislation"aimed at making it easier to prosecute criminals - with the most serious offenders facing a life sentence - and to protect victims. But the latter ran counter to the Conservative government's hardline immigration policies - designed to create a "hostile environment" for undocumented migrants.

The government argued that the rules governing the ODW visa would work to prevent those who were not abused using it as a way into the country, while still offering protection to genuine victims. In practice, victims may spend years with an insecure immigration status that gives them limited or no right to work or access welfare, essentially keeping them in a cycle of exploitation that the coronavirus pandemic - with its accompanying disruption and rise in unemployment - has only made worse.

Precarious immigration status

The "safe house" is an airy three-bedroom apartment in an upscale neighbourhood of west London. Its owners live abroad so Sheila persuaded them to put it to good use.

Exhausted after a two-hour police interview, Florence collapses on a sofa in what used to be a child's bedroom.

"The policewoman said it's very hard to establish a case [of] modern slavery when she signed a paper stating that she received this amount," says Sheila, referring to Florence's contract and visa paperwork, which say she received double the £400 ($525) a month Florence says she was actually paid.

"If you are telling me that it's so hard to establish a case, and if I am the victim, then I will feel like you're not helping me, because you're not aware of what's going on, what experience I had," she continues, frustrated.

Sheila was a single mother of three sons when she travelled to the UK as a domestic worker in 2003. Her mother looked after her sons back in the Philippines while Sheila hopped from job to job in London. Immigration rules were more relaxed at the time, enabling her to become a permanent resident. She has since become a point of reference for the community, a role that, coupled with Florence's young age, makes her feel protective towards her.

There has been a year-on-year rise in the number of referrals to the NRM. In 2019, 10,627 potential victims were referred - a 52 percent increase from 2018, and nearly double the 2017 figure. But observers believe the number of referrals reflects just the tip of the iceberg. When it comes to domestic workers, academics and frontline workers say that many prefer not to be referred for fear of what the process will involve.

"There is absolutely no guarantee that someone who has been ill-treated and possibly trafficked will manage to be recognised as a victim of trafficking," Virginia Mantouvalou, a professor of human rights and labour law at University College London (UCL), explains.

Data suggests the uncertainty is magnified for potential victims without a UK or European Union passport: only three percent of those from outside the EU who were referred in 2019 had received a final decision confirming them as victims (known as "conclusive grounds") by the beginning of 2020, while the figure for UK and EU nationals was 14 percent and seven percent respectively. Overall, eight in 10 referrals had only received an initial "reasonable grounds" decision - identifying them as potential victims.

According to the charity Kalayaan, which has been assisting domestic workers in the UK for more than 30 years, domestic workers who enter the NRM face an average wait of 24 months before being recognised.

Right to work

By the time Ana*, who is in her 40s, applied to the NRM during lockdown and received a positive reasonable grounds decision from the UK authorities, she had lost her right to work.

Potential victims whose six-month visa expires before they are recognised as such are unable to work legally in the country while their case is decided and are expected to survive on £39.60 ($52) a week provided by the government as part of its victim support programme. In some cases, they are provided with accommodation, but according to Kalayaan this can be difficult to set up and many survivors opt instead for community support.

The agency that brought Ana from the Philippines to Abu Dhabi in 2011 first took advantage of her free labour for two weeks before handing her over to her designated employer. But she says she was verbally and physically abused by the family she worked for and was soon returned to the agency, which sold her to another family for $3,000.

She recounts working "almost 24 hours" a day as she took care of a baby while also being responsible for household chores.

"I was doing everything. Cleaning, cooking, everything," she explains over the phone as she is self-isolating due to her frail health, which she says deteriorated after she left the Philippines.

"They didn't give me proper food and I didn't have time to have a proper rest ... I [was] very depressed and stressed."

Whenever she left the house with the family, she was asked not to speak to anyone.

Her family back home had no guarantees she would be able to send them money as her employers once held back her salary for six months.

Then the family moved to London three years ago and one day she was asked to buy sugar at the local supermarket. She never returned.

She found low-paid, part-time undocumented work as a carer for the elderly, but when the coronavirus pandemic struck, she began to worry.

"I stopped my work because of the pandemic, because of my asthma," she explains. "I had symptoms of COVID and I [was] scared to go to the hospital."

Despite government reassurances that everybody is entitled to care regardless of immigration status, undocumented workers are often afraid of accessing healthcare for fear of being reported.

Ana has now approached the Voice of Domestic Workers, another community support group, and applied to the NRM. She has avoided destitution thanks to a friend who was able to accommodate her.

Starting over, doing the same

Josephine*, 38, thought she could breathe a sigh of relief when she was recognised as a victim of modern slavery earlier this year, until she found out that the two-year domestic worker visa she received was a shaky foundation on which to rebuild her life. The conditions of her visa are that she is only allowed to work in a private household and has no access to welfare.

Compared to her previous employer, a woman she says would "beat me on my head and body, make me ashamed in front of a lot of people," the elderly couple she works for in Londontreat her like part of the family. But due to travel restrictions, they were stuck outside the country after going on holiday, and Josephine was left in London with no work and no income.

"I didn't have money to pay rent. [For] two months I didn't send money to my kids," the single mother of three teenage children in the Philippines explains. "I didn't have any option but to seek help from my fellow Filipinas."

Josephine's work was suspended again recently due to the ill health of the man she cares for. But she feels she has little leverage to enforce her rights, negotiate pay or seek alternative employment.

"[When] I tell [employers] that I have a working permit for only household work, and that's all, they can only pay me the minimum wage."

Josephine, who has applied for asylum, wants to study to become a qualified carer. "Maybe when I get a final decision from the Home Office I can work as a caregiver, based on what I know," she says.

"Even though she has the skills and experience that are in such short supply in the social care industry, this is an economic sector that she cannot tap into," Avril Sharp, a policy and casework officer at the charity Kalayaan, explains.

Sharp says that a number of domestic workers in the charity's network reported losing their jobs and becoming destitute at the height of the crisis.

"The risks are heightened for those undocumented in the UK who have lost their jobs," Sharp adds.

Strengthening the rights of domestic workers

Florence is likely to be referred to the NRM, but conviction rates for modern slavery offences remain low.

"There is a huge discrepancy between referrals under the NRM and prosecutions under the Modern Slavery Act," says Professor Mantouvalou. "This may be due to the difficulty of the situation, the fact this is a particularly hidden crime, because the police don't have the right training yet. There are great weaknesses in the system."

Immunity that applies to diplomatic households further complicates the picture.

"At the same time, the problem is not just that you can't prosecute all these employers. The big problem is the vulnerability these workers have because of their visa. It's more effective to improve the visa, to strengthen the right of domestic workers, than to just start prosecuting all these mean employers," Mantouvalou adds.

At the safe house, Florence is entertaining her new flatmates by singing Celine Dion's My Heart Will Go On. They are Amelia, a carer of Jamaican origin who had been evicted by her landlord weeks earlier; and Lili, who lost her job as a live-out cleaner when she was told her services would not be needed during lockdown. Both are part of an army of invisible undocumented workers who were left with no support and facing destitution when work dried up during the pandemic.

Sheila, who cooked everyone fish for lunch with Florence as her helper, looks over the scene with amusement and a hint of pride, knowing she is the one who made this temporarily carefree atmosphere possible. They will think about Florence's two children, who need her help during lockdown in the Philippines, tomorrow.

"I wish the government would create more jobs at home, so that people will stop leaving the country," Sheila reflects. "People were forced to leave the country because there is no opportunity, no job, even if you finish your schooling, if you are a professional. You need to leave the country to find a place where you can work and you will be paid and can support your family."
*Names have been changed to protect identities. This reporting was supported by the International Women's Media Foundation's Howard G Buffett Fund for Women Journalists.

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The domestic workers fleeing modern slavery in the UK

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It is just after 7am on a rainy morning in July and 57-year-old Sheila Tilan is pacing up and down a private road that leads to one of London's most exclusive streets. She is wearing white trousers and a black shirt, just as she said she would.

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Two recent works challenge the long-standing pact of American motherhood: We give mothers nothing and expect everything in return.

The moments I felt most viscerally in Maggie Gyllenhaal's The Lost Daughter, an intermittently dreamy and menacing exploration of maternal ambivalence, weren't when Leda (played by Olivia Colman) confesses, weeping, that as a young mother she abandoned her children, or when a worm wriggles out of the mouth of the doll that Leda has stolen, as if to literalize the movie's themes of love and caretaking corrupted. Rather, two other scenes felt jarring to me: one when Leda is sitting in blissful solitude on a beach, and another when she's at a cinema watching The Last Time I Saw Paris. In both, Leda's contented absorption is rudely interrupted by loud, thoughtless groups who commandeer her space and disrupt her peace.

This is, it has to be said, a fairly brutal re-creation of the experience of having children. In motherhood, there is no space anymore; there are no idle stretches of time within which to ruminate or look at the sky or simply let your mind do nothing at all. There is no more catering only to yourself. Time, while precious, can be bought; space, that mental state of unfettered carelessness, cannot. "When I leave her," Rachel Cusk wrote of her baby in her 2001 book, A Life's Work: On Becoming a Mother, "the world bears the taint of my leaving, so that abandonment must now be subtracted from the sum of whatever I choose to do. A visit to the cinema is no longer that: It is less, a tarnished thing, an alloyed pleasure."
Read: The movie that understands the secret shame of motherhood
Space is selfish, and the bargain you make when you decide to be a "good" mother is that there is no self anymore-all happiness and gratification now comes from the happiness and gratification of your children. "You have to recognize the difference between what you want and what she wants," a social worker tells Frida, the central character in Jessamine Chan's lightly dystopian new novel, The School for Good Mothers. Her implication is that what Frida wants no longer applies. "A mother is always patient," instructors tell Frida when she's institutionalized after making the catastrophic decision to briefly leave her toddler alone. "A mother is the buffer between her child and the cruel world. Absorb it," they tell her. "Take it. Take it." Left unacknowledged is the truth that human beings can only stretch so far before they break.

The question is what that breaking looks like. I had hit what felt like 20 breaking points at this time last year, when I had two six-month-olds who were supposed to be starting at a day care that was closed because of a COVID outbreak and a brain that was too exhausted and anxious to be able to find words to write. I hit one this week when I finally managed to finish a paragraph but then got a phone call asking me to pick up a child who was coughing and crying inconsolably. I have broken over and over in these past 18 months and nothing has come of it, because, truthfully, breaking isn't an option. I do-almost all mothers do-care more about my children's happiness and safety than my own. But I'm grateful for a spate of new works, The Lost Daughter and The School for Good Mothers among them, that are confronting the idea that being a "good" mother means totally suppressing all your own needs and desires and instincts. They challenge the long-standing pact of American motherhood: We give mothers nothing and expect everything in return.

Let me return to this idea of space, because it's the opposite of children, of days ritualistically carved into mealtimes and nap times and playtimes and bath times and No and Please mama mama mama pleeeease. Space is what compels Leda to leave her daughters, what induces Frida, after sleeping only six and a half hours across four nights, to stow her toddler in an ExerSaucer and leave the house without her. Frida feels "mounting frustration and angst, the selfish desire for a moment of peace." Most days, she thinks, "she can talk herself down from that cliff." But one day, she can't. She gets in the car to pick up some papers she needs for work, but can't make herself go home. The pleasure of being gone is too potent, "the pleasure of forgetting her body, her life." When she returns about two and a half hours later, a neighbor has called the police and her daughter is in state custody.

Chan is clear-eyed in describing Frida's crime. While she's gone, her daughter, Harriet, cries so much that her voice is hoarse by the time Frida sees her at the police station. The ExerSaucer is soiled, visible proof of Harriet's distress. The point of the scene is not to doubt that Frida has done a terrible thing, but to consider why she did it, and to experience her punishment alongside her. Chan's novel is dystopic but grounded in emotional realism: After a judge determines that Frida abandoned her daughter, she's obliged to spend a year in an institution charged with rehabilitating bad mothers, a new initiative seemingly funded by tech money and likely implemented by a referendum in a local election. Housed in a former liberal-arts college (a dark joke), the center puts its inmates through ordeals meant to replicate the tests of motherhood, each more awful than the last. If the bad mothers succeed in "learning to be good," they have a chance of getting their children back.

The School for Good Mothers is crafted like a sinkhole, all the more nightmarish for how plausibly it pulls Frida in and entraps her. The book's futuristic twists-at the school, robots simulate toddlers-jazz up its defiantly simple premise: This is a novel that portrays what it's like to make a terrible mistake that costs you your child. We are party to Frida's doubt and exhaustion and panic. The weight of her guilt is suffocating. The institution is less brutal, in some ways, than her own internal monologue-all the voices in her head telling Frida how she's failing. On Thanksgiving she imagines in detail, over several pages, all the awful things her family members are saying about her and why she's absent. The state can scrutinize Frida as ruthlessly as it likes, but it'll never manage to best all the ways she critiques herself.

Chan states in the book's notes that she was inspired, in part, by two stories in The New Yorker: one about a mother who, like Frida, left her child at home unsupervised, and another about efforts in Providence, Rhode Island, to train low-income parents to talk more with their children, in part by recording those mothers throughout the day. Some of the power of Chan's narrative comes from being shocked that the kind of mother who's typically protected by the state-an educated, upper-middle-class woman who screws up-is suddenly as vulnerable to it as a mother without those kinds of privileges. "Torture is not a word to use lightly," an instructor tells Frida after a particularly monstrous round of assessments. "We're putting you in high-pressure scenarios so we can see what kind of mother you are." It's an accidentally frank acknowledgment that the "kind" of mother one person is might depend less on her than on circumstance.

The Lost Daughter has a different, starker viewpoint. "I'm an unnatural mother," Leda tells Nina (Dakota Johnson), a younger woman whose depression and reluctance to engage with her child reminds Leda of herself. Gyllenhaal, who both directed the movie and wrote the screenplay, which is based on an Elena Ferrante novel, makes no attempt to ground Leda's behavior in mitigating circumstances. Rather, Gyllenhaal makes her joyful disconnection, her freedom on a vacation in midlife, the film's core argument. In one of the movie's opening scenes, Leda drives to her apartment on the fictional Greek island of Kyopeli, light and loose in the sunlight, letting her arm dance in the currents out the window. The next day, she wakes and walks down to the water, letting herself float in the sea, unburdened. It seems almost unfair, two years into a pandemic that has squeezed and enraged parents like never before, to present this alternative reality: sun, sea, solitude, Paul Mescal cheerfully proffering a Cornetto.

Ultimately, though, Leda can't escape her children. The arrival of Nina's family, a boisterous clan from Queens, floods Leda with memories of holidays with her daughters, screaming fights, all the days she wanted room to work but couldn't have it. In the movie, Leda's lover quotes the philosopher Simone Weil, who wrote that "attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity." Looking back, Leda has little of either for her children. (We rarely remember the times we did everything right.) "What did it feel like without them?" Nina asks when Leda confesses her sins. "It felt amazing," Leda replies. "It felt like I'd been trying not to explode and then I exploded." In flashback, her husband feels not only abandoned by her actions but also unmanned: "Do you need me to cut my balls off?" he asks her. The moment reminded me of the narrator of Claire Vaye Watkins's novel I Love You but I've Chosen Darkness, who declares that she leaves her child because she wants "to behave like a man, a slightly bad one," her choice of adverb its own explanatory footnote. Leaving your children is only a mortal sin, apparently, when women do it.

To condemn Leda is easy; like Frida, she condemns herself. ("I went back because I missed them," she explains, adding, "I'm a very selfish person.") One of the reasons I appreciated thinking about The School for Good Mothers alongside The Lost Daughter was that one portrays, in agonizing detail, the load of motherhood, and the other its absence. In an interview with my colleague Shirley Li, Gyllenhaal pointed to Leda's "unnatural mother" line as presenting its own inverted question: "What's a natural mother?" I'd argue that, however you define the answer, it is not the same thing as being a "good" one.

Related Podcast

Listen to Sophie Gilbert discuss The Lost Daughter on an episode of The Atlantic's culture podcast The Review:

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long-standing pact of american motherhood

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Two recent works challenge the long-standing pact of American motherhood: We give mothers nothing and expect everything in return.

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This is the midweek edition of Culture Study - the newsletter from Anne Helen Petersen, which you can read about here. If you like it and want more like it in your inbox, consider subscribing.
For the newsletter this week, I'm talking with sociologist Jessica Calarco about her recent research on mothers grappling with parenting, partners, anxiety, work, and feelings of failure during the pandemic. She's whipsmart, as you'll see below, and I love what she has to say about the work of sociology as a form of " ungaslighting." Follow her on Twitter here - and if you have thoughts, praise, or questions, please feel free to leave them in the comments. [Academics don't get a lot of explicit praise, in particular, just saying]

And if you have ideas for other organizers, academics, and thinkers I should interview at length, send me an email!
Can you tell me a bit about yourself and your work?
I'm an associate professor of sociology at Indiana University, and my research focuses on inequalities in family life and education. I'm also the mom of a 6-year-old and a 3-year-old whose antics and insights and general hilariousness are getting me through the darker days of the pandemic.

This research grew out of a project examining how mothers navigate parenting controversies in making decisions for themselves and their children (e.g., decisions about breastfeeding, co-sleeping, vaccines, screen time, and employment after childbirth). The project started in 2018 with surveys of pregnant women in Southern Indiana, and we've been following up with those same mothers with surveys and in-depth interviews every six months.

In the interviews we conducted early in the pandemic, mothers told us about waking up at 5 am to work before their kids got up, trying to keep toddlers occupied during conference calls, losing their jobs and their childcare in the same week, fighting with their partners about whether or not to wear masks, and doubling or tripling their kids' normal screen time, just so they could get a break. My coauthors and I (Amy Knopf, Assistant Professor, Indiana University School of Nursing; Emily Meanwell, Clinical Professor of Sociology, Indiana University; Elizabeth Anderson, PhD student in Sociology, Indiana University) made the decision to develop a follow-up project called The Pandemic Parenting Study.

The first paper we've developed ("Let's Not Pretend It's Fun") focuses on pandemic-related childcare disruptions: Among the mothers who have greatly increased the time they are spending with their children, 80% report that they are experiencing more stress during the pandemic, 72% report that they are experiencing more anxiety during the pandemic, and 56% report that they are experiencing more frustrations with their kids.

Because of intensive work pressures and intensive parenting pressures, and because of a lack of adequate support from the government, their employers, or their partners, mothers who are working from home without childcare feel like failures - as both workers and mothers. They also blame themselves for those failures. Many are turning to turn to food and alcohol as ways to cope - even hiding out eating Oreos in the bathroom to give themselves a break. Some mothers are also dropping out of the workforce to reduce the stress they face.

The second paper ("My Husband Thinks I'm Crazy") shows how the pandemic is exacerbating longstanding sources of conflict in couples with young children (related to men's perceived lack of support with parenting and household responsibilities) and also creating new sources of conflict (related to men's perceived dismissal of mothers' concerns about COVID-19).

39% of the mothers in our sample report increased frustrations with their partners during the pandemic - and this frustration is especially common among mothers who have been working from home without childcare (because, in many of these cases, their partners are not providing adequate support with parenting) and mothers whose partners are not extremely supportive of the steps they are taking during the pandemic (because, in many of these cases, partners are dismissing mothers' concerns about COVID-19, leaving mothers to do the work of managing their families' health, and sometimes taking actions that put their families at increased risk, e.g., by refusing to wear masks).

In many cases, mothers are blaming themselves for the conflicts they're experiencing with their partners - and feel responsible for reducing those conflicts, including by leaving the workforce, beginning use of antidepressants, or ignoring their own concerns about COVID-19.

My coauthors and I are especially concerned about the mothers who, because they are unemployed or make less money than their husbands/partners, have been left in a position with limited power to demand that their husbands/partners do more at home. In the paper, we talk about a woman named Audrey. Pre-pandemic, Audrey and her husband were trying to have another baby. But when the pandemic hit, Audrey lost her job and her husband had to work long hours, which led to frequent arguments. Because of those arguments, Audrey no longer wanted another baby. Despite Audrey's wishes, her husband (to use her words) sexually assaulted her by not pulling out during sex, and Audrey got pregnant. The pregnancy and the assault have taken a serious toll on Audrey's mental health, leading her into therapy and onto antidepressants.

Meanwhile, the pandemic has left Audrey without a full-time job, without her own health insurance, and with a toddler and a baby on the way. Essentially, the pandemic has left her in a tremendously difficult situation with very few options for herself and her children.

It's easy for people on the outside to tell Audrey that she should leave her husband, or that she should demand he treat her better and do more at home. But because of the lack of social support for mothers in the U.S., and because of Audrey's own limited support network, leaving is a risky prospect - it would leave her without income or health insurance or a place to live, while pregnant, in the middle of a pandemic. Because of her limited power within her own home, demanding that her husband do more could also put Audrey at risk for further abuse. To support mothers like Audrey - and all mothers - we argue that policymakers should ensure that families can access financial resources that aren't predicated on employment. More specifically: making TANF [Temporary Assistance for Needy Families] less restrictive, funding universal healthcare and childcare, and extending unemployment relief.
For people who aren't academics or sociologists, can you explain these studies, why you shaped them the way you did, and the limitations (and bonuses) of focusing on a particular area in Indiana?
Many studies use surveys to determine how common some experience is in the population as a whole: How many women have dropped out of the workforce because of the pandemic; How many kids are falling behind because their schools are closed; How many dads are doing their fair share at home. That kind of research requires large samples that reflect the same demographics as the U.S.

Other studies - "qualitative" studies like this one - use in-depth interviews (and sometimes small-scale surveys) to understand how people perceive their experiences, what those experiences mean to them, and what motivates people to respond to their experiences in particular ways. With our study, we can't say with certainty what proportion of mothers in the U.S. are experiencing increased stress or increased frustrations with their children or their partners. We can't say what proportion of U.S. mothers are dropping out of the workforce to deal with these challenges. But we can say - better than any large-sample surveys - how mothers are experiencing pandemic-related disruptions in their normal routines and what motivates mothers to respond to those disruptions in particular ways.

Between our pre-pandemic research and the research we've conducted during the pandemic, we've spent more than 500 hours interviewing these mothers and conducted nearly 800 surveys with them. This has allowed us to see their pandemic experiences in the context of their pre-pandemic lives, and in the context of the lives of other mothers in the same community.

There are certainly limitations involved in focusing on mothers in one Southern Indiana community. The community we studied, for example, is primarily white. We do have Black, Latina, and Asian women in our study, but we can't say with certainty whether their experiences are representative of the experiences of Black, Latina, or Asian women in the U.S. as a whole. At the same time, getting to know these women allows us to make sense of their experiences and their decisions in the context of their own lives - and in the context of the lives of other women facing similar challenges in their lives.
What sticks out to you about your findings? What's the thing you can't stop thinking about or can't stop telling people about?
Mothers are blaming themselves for their "failures" in this pandemic - for "failing" to be the kind of perfect worker who doesn't let her kids distract her from work, for "failing" to be the kind of perfect mother who sacrifices work to meet her kids' needs, for "failing" to be the kind of perfect wife who never gets angry and always defers to her spouse.

As a sociologist, it's easy for me to see how that blame is deeply misplaced - how women should be blaming our government for failing to stop the spread of the virus, for failing to pay people to stay home, for failing to provide an adequate social support system with affordable childcare, affordable healthcare, and sufficient financial protections for people who can't make ends meet...how women should be blaming their employers for putting profits before people, for setting unrealistic expectations, and for failing to provide the support that workers need...how women should, in many cases, be blaming their own spouses or partners for prioritizing their own careers, for not doing enough at home, and for denying the science about COVID-19.

In the U.S., most of us aren't taught to use our sociological imaginations. We're not taught to think about social problems as structural problems. We're not taught to see the forces that operate beyond our control - forces like capitalism, patriarchy, and white supremacy. And we're not taught to see how those forces create many of the challenges we face in our lives and constrain our ability to make choices that could help us overcome those challenges.

Instead, we - especially women and people from other systematically marginalized groups - are taught to self-help-book our way out of structural problems. To believe that all our problems would go away if only we were to strictly follow some seventeen-step plan.

Another part of this I can't stop thinking about is how our lack of a social safety net is putting women's health and relationships at risk. So much of the public conversation has focused on the women who are dropping out of the workforce. Those stories are important, but to me they signal the centrality of capitalism in all of our public concerns.

Meanwhile, we're paying far less attention to the challenges faced by mothers who are struggling to stay in the workforce while caring for their children at home. These women may face penalties in the workforce - being passed over for promotions or salary increases or being chastised by their bosses for failing to get work done. But these women are also taking serious hits to their relationships, their health, and their wellbeing.

I'd say we're also not paying enough attention to the mothers (and the families more generally) who are struggling to make ends meet. Early in the pandemic, because of the CARES Act payments and expanded unemployment benefits, many of the low-income mothers we talked to were doing okay. Not great. But most had enough to pay their bills and keep a stable situation for their kids. Now, with that extra money gone, and with the pandemic dragging on, those families are facing dire challenges with no end in sight.
Can we talk a bit about "intensive" parenting expectations? I don't know how to talk about intensive parenting in a way that doesn't feel blamey - I want to simultaneously acknowledge the fact that these are standards that we reinforce ourselves, but also that it can be very, very difficult to opt out of them.
As we find in our research, intensive work and intensive parenting can lead mothers to experience more stress, more anxiety, and more frustration in navigating disruptions to their normal routines.

But mothers should not be blamed for attempting to remain engaged in intensive work or intensive parenting. Both are social norms in the U.S.: Workers, especially elite professional workers, are expected to devote their whole lives to their jobs. Meanwhile, mothers, all mothers, are expected to devote their whole lives to their children and do whatever it takes to meet their children's needs (usually while being devoted, supportive partners, as well).

And these norms, like all norms, exist to keep people from challenging the status quo. People who break norms judge themselves. A minor breech might make them feel awkward, the way you might feel if you stood backward on an escalator packed with people. A more serious breech might make them feel like failures. As people, we're taught to judge ourselves - to feel embarrassment and shame for breaking norms - to push us back into compliance with norms and to prevent us from breaking norms in the first place.

Intensive work and intensive parenting norms are especially powerful because they serve the interests of powerful actors in our society, including corporations and (white) men. It's easy to see how intensive work norms benefit corporations-the harder workers work, the more money corporations stand to make. Especially if workers, because they're so "committed" to their jobs, don't demand higher salaries to compensate. But these intensive parenting norms are directed primarily at women. And they make it more difficult for women to manage having kids while also having demanding careers.

That serves men's interests in two ways: Intensive parenting norms push some women to become stay-at-home mothers, which often leaves them financially dependent on their (male) partners and gives those (male) partners more power in the home. Meanwhile, intensive parenting norms also push women to put their children ahead of their careers. In the workforce, that makes it harder for women to compete with men for top positions, because they're seen as less committed to their jobs (violating the intensive worker norms). At home, that means men also remain (at least in most families with different-sex partners) the primary breadwinners, which gives men more power and authority in that personal sphere.

If people in power want to stay in power, they have an interest in enforcing social norms. (Meanwhile, people with less power also tend to be complicit in enforcing norms, especially if they have followed those norms themselves. They do so because it allows them to feel validated in their own choice to follow the norms. And because it validates the idea that they deserve the benefits they've received for following the norms). This also means that for mothers, as for all people who want to participate in society, not following norms comes with very real risks.

For mothers, the feelings of judgment and failure that can come from breaking norms are especially threatening right now. Many mothers are already feeling isolated because of the pandemic, and breaking norms runs the risk of making them even more disconnected than they already are. Many mothers are still holding themselves to those standards, even when it undermines their wellbeing.

Mothers who are struggling to meet intensive worker and intensive parenting norms report feeling like failures, and they sometimes face consequences from others, including criticism from their bosses or snide comments from their mother-in-laws. The title of our first paper, "Let's Not Pretend It's Fun," comes from a mom who was working full-time while also trying to provide full-time care for her toddler in the home. That mom was frustrated with her mother-in-law, who was pressuring her to "cherish these special times" being home with her 17-month-old daughter. [As a side note, I've gotten very similar comments and pressures from my own mother during the pandemic, and even though I study this stuff, it's hard not to judge myself against the standard she sets].

We also found that these norms served the interests of the powerful, even during a pandemic. Faced with intensive worker norms, many professional mothers found ways to get their work done, even if it meant sacrificing sleep or sacrificing their relationships or sacrificing their own wellbeing. Meanwhile, many mothers also became the default parent, even when they and their husbands/male partners were both working from home.

Erica and her husband, for example, were both working from home during the pandemic while caring for their first grader, preschooler, and toddler. Explaining why she was doing the bulk of the pandemic parenting, Erica told us: "My husband's job is very demanding, and they talk a lot about flexibility, but at the end of the day if [his boss] sets a meeting, he sets a meeting. You can't not go, even during a pandemic, if you want to keep your job.... [So] it's primarily me."

Erica went on to tell us that, because of that role, she's "been the one that's been more frustrated and a little less patient with the kids," and she's also planning to leave the workforce, at least temporarily, so that she can just focus on her kids and not have to juggle parenting with paid work. In another family, Natalie and her husband were both PhD students - they literally had the same job and were both working from home while caring for their toddler. They also tried to split the number of childcare hours evenly. Yet Natalie still felt pressured to give her husband the more desirable morning work shift, taking the afternoon work shift for herself, even though she was often too tired after a full morning of parenting to get any work done in the afternoons.

There were some moms who were able to push back against or reject intensive parenting norms - but those moms tended to be less socially connected before the pandemic. With fewer social connections, they didn't feel as beholden to other people's expectations for what "good parenting" should look like. They didn't stress as much if their kids were watching Moana on loop, because they didn't have other mom friends to compare themselves to. And they didn't stress as much if their kids weren't doing much academically during the pandemic, because they weren't comparing themselves to other families they knew at their kids' schools (in some cases because they were already homeschooling pre-pandemic).

At the same time, having fewer social connections often meant these mothers had to do more on their own with less support (e.g., less support from extended family members or friends who might serve as a sounding board or step in to offer resources or assistance when needed, etc.).
I don't think the pandemic has necessarily created new problem so much as exacerbated, amplified, and highlighted old/chronic ones. How much of what you're seeing is connected to chronic patriarchy, chronic undervaluing of women's unpaid work in the home, chronic inattention to cultivating affordable childcare options?
Other countries have social safety nets. The U.S. has women. Women in the U.S. have long done a disproportionate share of the unpaid service work in institutions and at home. They're the ones who run the bake sales so the school can have an art teacher or enough books to go around. They're the ones who run church outreach programs to attract new families and serve community members in need. They're the ones who check in on sick coworkers, remember birthdays, and help their colleagues feel like part of a team. Women do all of that unpaid service for the institutions in their lives, and then they go home and do even more.

Women serve as the social safety net because norms (norms that serve capitalistic, patriarchal, and white interests) in the U.S. tell them that's their role. And because breaking those norms leaves them open to judgments (or worse) from others and judgments from themselves.

The pandemic came along and ripped a giant hole through what little safety net we did have to support women and especially mothers in the U.S. It's closed the childcare centers and schools mothers rely on for childcare; it's made it more difficult for mothers to rely on other people and organizations they might usually turn to for support. And because of the pandemic's disproportionate impact on women's careers, it has also made it more difficult for unpartnered mothers to support their families and for mothers in difficult or dangerous relationships to consider leaving and going out on their own.

Our society has long failed to support mothers in meeting the demands of paid work and parenting. And this pandemic has made painfully clear the need for adequate support. That includes universal access to affordable childcare. It also includes policies that reduce intensive work and parenting pressures and ensure that all families have access to the resources they need.
I first heard about your work within the framework of "un-gaslighting" - aka, sociology helps us un-gaslight ourselves when it comes to thinking that everything is our own failing, our own problems, instead of linked to massive structural issues, ideologies, etc. What sort of takeaway would you hope to give people who are parenting during this pandemic?
The U.S. is a deeply individualistic society. And that culture of individualism is reinforced by the lessons we're taught at home, in schools, and in the media. So many of those lessons, in turn, are dominated by a pop psychology narrative that promotes individual solutions to deeply structural problems. Pull yourself by your bootstraps. Wash your face. Lean in.

Sociology turns that narrative on its head. Sociologist C. Wright Mills, for example, described using a "sociological imagination" as seeing how individual human lives are shaped both by "history and biography." This means recognizing that people's experiences, decisions, and outcomes are shaped by the larger social contexts in which they live and also their status within those social contexts, as determined by forces like racism, sexism, and economic marginalization. Certainly, people have agency. But that agency is enhanced or constrained by their social status and by the larger contexts in which they live.

As a sociologist, then, I can see that offering "tips and tricks" for mothers about how to parent during the pandemic would be ineffective at best and harmful at worst. Sure, some mothers might benefit from that kind of advice. But they're probably going to be the mothers who already have plenty of resources and plenty of people on whom they can rely for support.

The people I'd much rather target for recommendations are the people with the power to ensure that mothers get the resources and support they need. Because moms don't need advice right now. They need politicians and business owners and community leaders and their own partners to step up and give them the support they deserve.

In the long term, we need to ensure that families' access to resources and support isn't tied to or predicated on employment. This means making TANF less restrictive, funding universal healthcare and universal preschool, ensuring universal access to affordable childcare, family leave, and sick leave, and also extending the expanded unemployment benefits put in place through the CARES Act.

In the short term, we need policymakers - and individuals - to take steps to stop the spread of the virus and make it safe to reopen schools, childcare centers, and businesses. These sorts of solutions will be difficult to achieve given politically entrenched disagreement about COVID-19, which means we also need clear, scientifically-informed communications from political and public health leaders about the steps necessary to reduce the spread of the virus. As mothers like Cassidy suggested in our interviews, seeing leaders like President Trump take the pandemic seriously can persuade skeptical men that the pandemic is actually "a big deal." ●

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"Other countries have social safety nets. The U.S. has women."

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Andrew Caballero-Reynolds / Getty This is the midweek edition of Culture Study - the newsletter from Anne Helen Petersen, which you can read about here. If you like it and want more like it in your inbox, consider subscribing.