wfn.org | Children in poverty need help to succeed, speakers say

[NewsDesk <NewsDesk@UMCOM.UMC.ORG>]

April 12, 1999 News media contact: Joretta Purdue*(202)546-8722*Washington
10-21-31-71B{195}

BALTIMORE (UMNS) - The consequences of ignoring children in poverty are too
grave to ignore, according to speakers at a national symposium, including a
former governor, a retired surgeon general and two United Methodist bishops.

"I would submit to you that God has enough evidence on the United Methodist
Church to charge it with child neglect and abuse," said Bishop Kenneth L.
Carder of the denomination's Nashville Area.

Some 35,000 children throughout the world under the age of 5 die of
malnutrition every day, he said, and 10 million die annually of
poverty-related causes. 

"We have the means to feed everyone in the world," but many are not fed, the
bishop said.

Carder spoke at the National Symposium on Children and Poverty: Raising Our
Children in the Next Millennium. Other speakers at the April 5-7 program
included former New York governor Mario Cuomo; retired surgeon general M.
Joycelyn Elders; Children's Defense Fund founder Marion Wright Edelman; and
Bishop Felton Edwin May.

The program commemorated 125 years of service by the Board of Child Care of
the United Methodist Church's Baltimore-Washington Annual Conference, which
also serves the Peninsula-Delaware Conference. The board provides more than
a dozen programs, including adoptions, foster care, counseling, outpatient
mental health. It has a staff of more than 200.

Five million children are being forced into refugee camps in the Balkans,
Africa and other parts of the world, Carder said. More children than
soldiers die as a result of modern wars, he said.

"We in the church will be held especially responsible because we know what
justice is," he declared. He reminded his audience that "Bible justice"
refers to what happens to the least, and sometimes God's justice does not
appear fair, as in a parable when workers hired late in the day received the
same amount as those who had worked all day. 

One of the goals of the United Methodist Council of Bishops' Initiative on
Children and Poverty is to measure everything in the church by what happens
to the children, Carder said. This understanding affects everything,
including facilities and clergy salaries, he said. He stressed that the
church must move beyond simple charity to changing its systems.

Bishop May of the Baltimore-Washington Conference addressed issues related
especially to urban youth, and he agreed with Carder about the
denomination's failings. 

"We are more proficient at doing programs than we are at caring for people,"
he declared. He described his emphasis on "holy boldness" not as a program
but as an attitude, which is based on the commandment to love God above all
others and to love one's neighbor as oneself.

May spoke of his conference's efforts at involving laity in guilds organized
to assemble the occupational skills of United Methodists for serving the
larger community. The conference's first guild, consisting of attorneys, is
working with communities and individuals who lack the resources to enlist
such expertise. May also spoke of the "shalom zones," where a community's
resources are organized with help from the church to make life better
particularly for children.

"The bottom of it all is hope," he said. "We are not proselytizing but just
being clear about why we are doing what we do." Christians are responsible
for reflecting God and working for economic justice, not just hand-outs, he
said.

During the symposium, two petitions were prepared by a committee of
participants. One, addressed to Congress, asks that additional funds from
the budget surplus be designated for programs that work with or help
children. The petition also calls for setting a goal of eradicating hunger
in the United States by 2010. Copies were provided so registrants could
include them in correspondence or visits with their senators and
representatives.

The other petition commends the Bishops' Initiative on Children and Poverty,
cites growing momentum and urges that that the initiative be continued in
the coming quadrennium. That petition will go to the Council of Bishops.

"Poverty is the most pervasive health problem we've got in this country,"
said Elders, a United Methodist and retired pediatrician. She decried the
situation that permits children to experience hunger and lack of health care
in the wealthiest nation on earth.

"When hope dies, moral decay can't be far behind," she asserted. Looking at
the various federal and state programs, she said, "We've got a lot of quilt
pieces out there, but nobody puts them together to make a blanket (for a
child)."

The "Radical Right" has been allowed to define the religious position on
children, health care and welfare because most of the religious community
has kept silent, Elders said. She urged her listeners to use their power for
"the most valuable resource we will ever have -- all the children of this
country."

"Nobody teaches us the two most important things in the world: how to be a
good parent and how to be a good citizen," she said. With 50 million
children in school each day, how can more and more children be helped? she
asked.

Children reach half their adult height at age 3, and they know half of what
they'll learn by 5, but the country neglects early childhood education,
Elders remarked. "We in America have been developing smart bombs . . . when
we should have been developing smart kids." The country is not preparing its
young people to take their place in the 21st century, she charged.

Deborah Prothrow-Stith, a physician and educator, said the country is
suffering from an epidemic of youth violence. Prothrow-Stith holds many
titles at the Harvard School of Public Health, including those of associate
dean, professor and director of the Division of Public Health Practice. She
was raised a United Methodist and is married to a clergyman, the Rev.
Charles Stith, who is U.S. ambassador to Tanzania.

Although the U.S. homicide rate has declined in recent years in some places,
she voiced concern about an increase of killings in small towns and cities,
and suspects a third wave of violence at the hands of girls. She also sees a
trend toward violence in younger and younger children.

She attributes this to many factors, including growing income equality,
access to guns, alcohol and other drug use, and domestic violence. People
who witness or experience violence are at greater risk to commit it, she
observed.

"Rambo hearts and Terminator heads" is one way Prothrow-Stith describes U.S.
society, which she indicts as "getting meaner and meaner as a culture."
Although this has something to do with television and movies, she said,
meanness is more pervasive. "It's who we are." The meanness has even invaded
the service professions that are supposed to aid children, she added.

"I don't think we're mean. I think we're overwhelmed. I think we don't want
to take the risks, but it comes across as meanness to our children," she
said.

Harry Shorestein, Florida state attorney in Jacksonville, said, "It's
critical to bring law enforcement into the discussion of children and
poverty." He favors getting smart over getting tough.

"The answer to crime is not prevention or punishment; it's both," he
emphasized. The most important crime in the United States is not murder, but
truancy, he said. "It's the first and most important indicator of future
criminal activity." 

He established a school in the Jacksonville jail and said it is critical to
preventing recidivism - along with alcohol and drug training. "Everything we
do is with the idea of returning (the juvenile offender) to a different
environment than the one he came from."

Shorestein and Prothrow-Stith were part of a panel on children and violence,
along with James Garbarino, director of the Family Life Development Center
at Cornell University.

Young people see acts of violence as one of the few ways to assert
themselves, Garbarino said, noting that kids kill themselves about as
frequently as they kill others. Children in socially toxic environments also
see adults as unable to protect them. Garbarino reported a boy he
interviewed in Michigan as saying, "If I join a gang, I am 50 percent safe;
if I don't, I am 0 percent safe."

The further these boys go down the paths of violence, the more resources are
needed to reform them, Garbarino warned.

David S. Liederman, executive director of the Child Welfare League of
America, said studies show that children from families earning less than
$10,000 are 22 times more likely to be abused.

"It's the easiest thing in the world to kick people off welfare - if you can
sleep nights," he remarked. It is much harder to find them jobs that will
sustain them and their families, he added.

Cuomo, who was governor of New York for 12 years, described helping children
as an achievable objective. "This country is just not trying as hard as it
should," he said.

The strong U.S. economy is masking problems that will increase if conditions
turn sour, Cuomo warned. The amount of personal debt is rising, the middle
class is losing economic ground and the poor are unable to rise out of
poverty, he said. The country needs a heroic message, "so sensible that
everybody says yes" and so sweet that everybody feels inspired, he said. 

"It's time for America to be fair to its children," challenged Edelman, who
was recognized for a career devoted to civil rights and children. "The
social and health security of non-voting children is at the bottom of
politicians' agendas."

Defense spending accounts for $6 billion a week, while school readiness and
other programs to help children are being cut, she observed. "Children who
can't read and write or operate a computer are sentenced to economic and
social death. Children do not need to be stigmatized for not learning what
we have not taught them."

Most poor children in the United States are white, not black, she noted, and
most are in working families. Parents who work full time should be paid
enough to support a family, she said.

"Child welfare must take precedence over corporate welfare," she said.
"Children need the best we can offer."
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