The First Amendment; Freeda Rebelski

The. Eastern Public Radio Network in cooperation with the Institute for democratic communication at Boston University now presents the First Amendment and a free people a weekly examination of civil liberties in the media. In the 1970s the host of the program is the institute's director Dr. Bernard Reuben. With me on this edition is Frida rebel Skee professor of psychology at Boston University. Holder of many awards for excellent teaching which is not something everybody can say we need more people like Friedrich Belsky both national and local awards author of such books says growing children which was out in 1077 life the continuous process the year before that and before that child development

and behavior freed are currently among her many other activities is the president of the Massachusetts children's lobby which among its many duties has been monitoring the Department of Public Welfare and acting as spokesman. Spokes group for a great clump of a population that has no lobbyist. Yes the children like the old people and they don't have normal views. Freida just one of the most important things that the Massachusetts children's lobby does and wants to do in the near future. Well let me first tell you what the Massachusetts children's lobby is. All right first of all we are a lobby that is unlike a lot of the organizations in our state and in other states which may take a stand. But then they may not carry it forth. We tend to carry our stand force we either write legislation fight legislation try to get people elected try to get people out of office. We do that the other part thing that we do that so

central and very important in speaking out for the child is to educate people to think about children differently than the way they have. And we see that function as a really major function that lots of times people talk about legislation or as you just talked about overseeing an arm of government as one way that people can watch out for kids. But there's lots of other ways we can think about children and by teaching people to think about children differently. They will begin to act differently towards kids. Let me give you a little example. There are times when judges make decisions about children thinking that children can think about things the way adults can and the data from research clearly show that children don't see the world the way we do and there's really very different view of the world they have. And it isn't wrong it's just clearly different they judge things differently they look at things differently. And when you judge kids by adult standards they often look like they're bad. Let me give you a little example of my own kids smeared some toothpaste on a coffee table and I came

down and I saw it and because it was the morning and I was sensible I said Sam Why'd you do that. And he said you gave me this toothpaste and to clean my teeth so good I thought I'd clean the table for you. Right now that's a good example I could have punished him. But it's also very logical isn't it. That's right. It's a good example of kids being totally different from an adult. I could have punished him for doing something positive from a from his standpoint. How old is he. Well he was a little boy when he said that then. Since then he's grown up and in fact he got me an article once from a women's magazine that showed that you could clean a table perfectly well with toothpaste. The point I'm really making is the children's view of the world is different from ours and children and parents are different from our views of them. I guess I'd like to say a little bit about that because that leads into a really already has her. I think very many Americans view the family as being mother father and children and assume that that's how it's always been and that's how it mostly is. Well most of the world's families are not like that. A mother a father and children all living isolated in an apartment or a

house. Most of the world's families are either extended families with somebody else some other relative living with them or have different kinds of structure like two families living together or five families under one roof. Basically it's a much bigger unit with cousins around. That's right and older people and younger people right. And throughout history. Never has there been a time when there's been a family like ours all alone in the past when we had this kind of family we now have which is cold and in jargon the nuclear family. There was always in the next tent or in the next apartment or in the next hut another relative so that there wasn't the one family mother father children alone with stranger mother father children but they were always somewhat somebody else close to go to. Now this is an important point because I think we tend to think. That the family should stand alone. It never has stood alone. There has never been a history time in our history when the woman the

mother has been home with her children alone never ever except for so many so-called nuclear families today in the United States and it's really only since the Second World War maybe since the late 30s that this has been exaggerated in the way that it now is. Is this one of the worst misinterpretations for example of women's liberation that they should stand alone with their children. Yes well except that a lot of women have taken on sisterhood which has a communal kind of quality. It is interesting because I'm really going off the topic a little bit but if you think of sisterhood in an Indian family when a mother has to make a meal there is a sister there to take care of the children. And another woman said to talk to the husbands coming home from work you know our kind of family we see the biggest kind of difficulties and conflicts around that dinner time when the mother even if she's working she's often coming home making a meal taking care of the children waiting for the husband or greeting him doing everything.

And the children often that's the time of the biggest X number of accidents for example. Those are things we know. The reason I'm mentioning this is as we know something about the structure of the family and recognize reality for what it is. We can then say maybe the way to help American families is to strengthen the family strengthen parents by providing services that allow adults to be more adult. What are some of the services that you would let me give you was a simple anecdote that may give you example of of the simplest kind of services. A students in my introductory psychology class have to do a study of behavior and one of the studies they do is what people do with their children and they for example stand in a supermarket and hear mothers screaming at their children and saying stop your child is screaming to children as they scream at them or I'll give you something to cry about as they hit them. That's a good example of the fact that that woman is under a great deal of tension. A child in a supermarket also. Subject to a great barrage of noise of

color and what a child does in a supermarket as most of us have seen them say runaround. They grab at things. They talk a lot about Gotta get said oneness which has been also well conditioned into them by the media. Some of the media some of the use of the media and it's a difficult situation. The child doesn't belong in the supermarket and a mother must have time to shop for mother and father must have time to shop. It would be very simple for instance if you're going to have a supermarket and if you're going to have a society like we have to maybe have a play place there where children can be. But it might also be better if there were time a mother could shop knowing that her children were well taken care of at home. I'm not thinking of this very good illustration of shopping and then going to to another part of the abused children show where adults by age only fall apart completely and then tear apart the children in the most physical way. Is this something beyond reconstruction are we playing with social dynamite in the way

that to start with your illustration about the family in the way that we are letting things disintegrate without replacement of cherished and ancient institutions. For example the family is disintegrating as you point out of becoming nuclear. Would you go be on nuclear power I think last year but you don't have to go in that direction that is if you reckon. First of all the most important thing for any kind of change is to recognize what reality is. And as you know Nixon for example vetoed the daycare bill because he had this image in his head that a mother and a father and children to me this happy home isolated away from the rest of the world. It just isn't that way. One out of six American children under the age of 18 are living in NO in a one family house. One child excuse me one parent house right now. Over half of the married women in America with kids 6 to 17 years old work. I mean the reality is just not the way that Nixon presented it. Once you see reality then you

can begin to think of what to do. Let me take your example of of child abuse or of the need for force to parenting and say that if we had a society where people lived in neighborhoods where they knew each other or felt related to each other then they would reach out a hand to each other and help each other. It's very hard to tell somebody else you must help someone else. You don't get the best kind of help that way. If I needed help with my child I would go to somebody I knew and trusted rather than want to have somebody come down to me and say You better get some help with your child. Now can you provide that. I had a foreign student once in my class from Ethiopia who said that she didn't need babysitters in her town. And I said why not. And she said well we have a lot of relatives. And I said yes if we have relatives around we tend not to hire babysitters here too. How many people live in your town. And she said 90000 people. And I said how many are your relatives. And she said why all of them. And I thought I would feel really different about my

neighborhood and about my town if they were all my relatives. And then I knew I could count on them and they could count on me. Now that leads me to a really central point that I feel and that is that adults are not acting adult now for good reason. They're scared. They are alone they are relatively poor. Even those so-called middle class people in the United States their own little elated isolated don't have people to turn to don't have meaningful things often that they're doing. There's nothing wrong with these people. They're doing the best they can given the circumstances they're in and most of them are not very pleasant circumstances. But we live in a in a gimme guarded society where people live in cities and towns that are not these social communities that you talk about where there is no Greek idea of fraternity everybody being everybody else's cousin. What can the individual do and what can we do for the child if we accept reality that it's it's pretty bad for many children.

But if this reality doesn't have to be how do you think it's reality. Well I would change reality in the most. I would first of all try to do preventive work and I would do that by trying to strengthen parents and that means jobs for people who want to work and good jobs and a sense of well-being at work. You and I know how important work is to us. It seems to me quite clear that unemployment is widespread now and that millions of workers are thrown out of work every year without a chance to fight it. It seems to me that for instance if corporations decided that their workers were not just expendable but were people who they had an obligation to that then the corporation instead of just firing people would then say gee we have to let some people go we can't make money this way. Maybe we could rearrange jobs. Would people be willing to give up say 10 percent of their pay if it they knew that they would never be fired. You know I don't know how to do it I do know of one major corporation that tried doing this and discovered they didn't need to throw people out of work. It strikes me as you throw people out of work that you also are saying someone else should take care of

them and we don't have a society where someone else takes care of people. We each person that we dumped out we have to pick up either through our taxes or some other way. And it would be better to do the preventive stuff of keeping people at a useful job. Let me ask you for the rebels a simple question. Many children are in trouble. You are suggesting that we make the people in our society more more viable. It seems to me that you are suggesting a tremendous educational program which leaves many children say a generation behind. Shame. OK then let me say this two things One first of all I think most people want to be more thoughtful than they are that is if I believe anything about the field of developmental psychology it's that adults are capable of reasonable thought but they need to have behind them or beneath them the food the clothing the shelter.

If we could assume that there'd be some chance for people to have adequate resources then I don't think it's a big educational effort to teach people to stop and think and say what is the child asking for what is the child need. That should be going on. That means a major restructuring of how we spend our money. There's plenty of jobs and there's plenty of money to be used for children. If we decided not to spend the kind of money we spent for going to the moon for us to depend upon what you want to do if you had that child care is important you need child welfare centers or care centers and right on you need hundreds of thousands of people to do that. Yes and let me give you even an example in Massachusetts the man who runs the state lottery makes more money than the person who runs juvenile services. That's an example of a state side in how they want to spend their money. Well in terms of perverted priorities it makes sense though that he makes more money than the other man.

Well to some people perhaps not so many if the priorities are all out of work. Yeah and I think that we have our priorities out of whack. But you asked a really good question that is. That's preventive stuff. And I hope you'll come back to that question because the issue of how to prevent unwanted babies and how to have them have adequate lives important. But for the children we now have what can we adequately do. Now there we have to start rethinking the service delivery in this state for example state of Massachusetts. We spend a great deal of money for administration of state services much more so I think than is needed. And less is given to actual service. Reminds me a little bit of some of our wars where we spend a great deal of money to help people where if we handed them that same amount of money they probably could have done a lot better. We spend a lot of money for all kinds of levels of services and for people judging other people's work and going over their work and we do very well. We spend little relatively in our budget for the actual helping the people.

We could use our monies better. We could also use some underused people in the United States we have the elderly who would like to feel more useful. We have the college student who is told that they're worthless. We have the unemployed who are certainly told that they're worthless. If we were to organize a works project administration like we did with with the WPA in the in the 1930s something where people could begin to see that their own usefulness is important for society. We do that for a very few people. If we were to do that it would help the children and it would also help I believe the adults in the society to feel more productive. You know this is not a traditional ideological statement that you may know this is you know let me be a humane state OK but let me give you an example in practice. We don't have enough social workers in the state. Right now we don't have enough money for social workers to handle all the abuse cases that we have already recorded separate from finding it checking through on the ones and finding out the ones that haven't been

identified adequately. There are very many women in the state who have social work degrees who've been well trained in social work but have been well trained in our culture to be home with families who would love to for no pay. I'm sure a take on one or two caseload situation helps the state enormously not need pay you need some supervision. And of course needs and watchful care that the kids are getting adequate social welfare. But there is plenty of free resources that we could be using that we're not. No the media just to dwell for a moment on the media are a vast educational tool if you show us all they do is most of the time sensationalize the macaw where the system breaks down. And once that terrible story is told about the abused child of the murderer or whatnot they flit on to something else what would we do about that Massachusetts children's lobby the other day went through the literature on child abuse and discovered in the state of Massachusetts for example that we get this

child abuse hysteria and the election years for the nursing home products right. And you know I mean does that mean that the child abuse situation occurs in the election years and of course you and I know the answer is No. It's useful press. It's too bad because although there are too many cases of child abuse in the United States it is not the most serious problem we have. I think we have at least as major problems in under-nutrition or malnutrition in a great many Americans and certainly in American children. And we have the issue of I think rather poor childbirth practices in the United States which is something the mass children's lobby and other groups to have considered as taking action on and you'd really get something that goes wrong. The bureaucracy always finds a way to say it wasn't there at the time or nobody's response. Yeah I think in the state of Massachusetts right now we are rethinking child abuse and the protective services in general should children be put in foster care and if so what kind.

And one of the things that the Massachusetts children's lobby has taken as it stand is that whatever we decide to do we should have open hearings open to the press and open to the public. We feel that's very important and that only by having adequate chance for people to come forth and say things and give testimony and be heard that any adequate laws can be written. There was some talk about presenting a plan and then having people comment on it. But the Massachusetts children's lobby feels very strongly that in any kind of legislation like this there should be open hearings wide open hearings held throughout the state so that people can come easily and present their points of view and their knowledge. You know I forgot to ask you want a central question because I just don't know the answer to it at the moment. How many people are in the Massachusetts kind of support do you hear. Oh I'm glad you're raised that. First of all I should have said earlier that we are besides being a lobby we're a membership organization. We have about 500 members across the state.

And in a bad 10 other states we write our members when we think it's useful for them to write their legislators about bills. We ask our members to participate even for federal legislation when it's appropriate. We keep our members advised about what's doing in the state not only that. Through mailings. But we also run meetings for example in the fall of 1998 we'll be running a meeting on 766 law which is a state law in Massachusetts that says that there should be equal education for all and that it's up to their members in the school system and in our society to provide adequate educations real children which refers to the so called exceptional children that you have a euphemism that family are all exceptional to. Well what happens is there's now there are some revisions in 766 now being written and there's a new national law that's similar to 766 and we feel that it would be a

good time at the start of the national law for us to rethink 766 to see how well it's been working to see what children have been left out for instance parochial school children have been left out of it and to see whether we as a state can provide leadership for the nation in saying this is the way the law should be better written to better serve more children or even though it's written this way These are the pitfalls and this is where some cities fall through in the use of there has been a godsend to many many families who have the exceptional child in one way or another and could never afford even a Stabat medical or social attention. That's right and the core evaluation which is a plan for each child is an important issue because what it says is each child should have his own his or her own plan and that if you can to provide education for all children. Including those who previously been excluded. You have to really look at each child's individual needs. It's a very important issue and it's one that we provided public education for all children for a long time in the United States. The notion that the education might be different for different children is a very

revolutionary notion and a very important one. Are you able to get the message out about the importance of children's causes through the mass media and sometimes doing something for you. Sometimes talk programs like this of course always are interested in organizations like ours. Sometimes we find if we're holding a press conference about something we consider important as now it's true that the media consider it important or as important as we do. Mostly we find that we tend to operate along with other groups and I think we are as a lobby our most successful when nobody hears particularly about us. When we've done our lobbying successfully and we've done our education well and no one needs to say our name but know that if they need some resources they can come to us on the other hand if you follow the action for Tru-TV approach. The more people know that you are there the more they may refer things to you and support you at crucial moments when the vote can go either way I agree with that yes and people do use us

for that we have legislators call us all the time about our stand and where some data on certain issues. What what are some of the more crucial things that you see on the table know that you are worried about for children. Well I'm certainly worried about the large number of babies born who are not wanted teenage pregnancies in the United States are rising. There's a lovely example of the fact that we do not need to have these babies that we need a massive education campaign about what does it mean to be a parent and the responsibility of adults to babies that babies are susceptible fragile etc creatures and that they need welfare from adults and a 14 15 16 year old is just not adult no matter how grown up they feel they are they do not think like adults do. What about the repeated stories of how the child was caught. Hit and the police know about it.

He gets repaired as it were and sent back to the same diabolical people do or inadequate people I don't think do that do we need to face up squarely to reforming the way we look about parental rights when children are being so how someone has to speak up for the child like that but I don't want speaking up. All right but I don't want to think I don't like about what you just said is those are the parents you have to ask why the parents the way they are and what would you do with the child you want to just take the child away from parents. Well suppose a child comes in he's got a broken I understand what you have been jury and his face is full of welts do you just give him back to the people who are facing psychological problems everyday themselves now but you can assume that the parents can change and the child can change. I'm not suggesting that's the only technique but I think that notion that we have that we just remove the child from the parents present a some sort of a litmus test where you say in this case I don't want to take the risk of sending that child back now. Well. I think it's certainly possible and many

instances I've seen where you might say those parents are not adequate right then and there what could you do then temporarily and then you have to look either to build some structures or use the structures we now have such as foster care and or state custody of a child and give some time and see what one can do but I think in our society we tend to jump in when we do jump in and I don't think we jump in often enough but when we do jump in we tend to think the thing to do is to split families and to blame people. And I think the issue is to ask why are people behaving the way they are. And if we can help with that maybe the behavior would change. So the question is then as you put it either we support the family at that moment of crisis or we split the family but there is a choice between the two you can support. Yes and you could split and even support as long as that's in your plan and you're thinking about it everybody knows that.

I think though when you're talking about very young children they have a problem in understanding what's going on around them and that it's essential that somebody speaks for the child from the perspective of what the child knows and doesn't know. I have been involved in participating in court cases where what I've testified for is sometimes something that may have looked on the outside as if it wasn't saving the child properly. But at least didn't confuse the child with shifting from foster home to foster home for the first year of its life. Now again we may have to change some of the systems in our society to build a person for instance who would stay with the child. But even in the Best Children's Hospital in Boston they keep switching nurses on a kid rather than allow the nurses to get too attached to the child or the child to the. Yes which makes no sense from a psychological perspective. That is an if you know a child can be hospitalized a long time it pays to have some sleep all night to cuddle up to something there's just no question about answering the minutes remaining and familiarity doesn't always breed contempt it also makes people feel very comfortable with warmth and comfort

and feeling and mutual concern and admiration these are the things that you cannot buy. You know you must and those are human characteristics human characteristics that nobody knows about them professionally better than you do and I think from your own humaneness I've been delighted on this edition to have Friederich Belsky president of the Massachusetts children's lobby professor of psychology at Boston University and notable author. Thanks again for this edition Bernard Reuben. Thank you. The eastern Public Radio Network and cooperation with the Institute for democratic communication at Boston University has presented the First Amendment as a free people a weekly examination of civil liberties in the media. In the 1970s the program was produced in the studios of WGBH Boston. This is the eastern Public Radio Network.