The Culture of Fear (16 page)

But Ciba-Geigy, the company that made Ritalin and doubled its profits in the first half of the 1990s, was hardly the first to cash in on adults’ eagerness for medical solutions to child-rearing problems. Numerous psychiatric hospitals did so, for example, in the 1980s. Over the course of that decade adolescent admissions to private psychiatric hospitals quadrupled, and the number of units catering to children and adolescents increased at least twofold. Fear advertising—lots of it—produced much of the growth. One TV commercial that ran in New York City showed a teenage girl holding a gun to her head. As the screen cut to the hospital’s name and phone number, the sound of a gunshot rang out and parents were urged to call if they worried about their own children. In the Reno, Nevada, newspaper an ad that ran on the day local schools issued grades displayed a report card studded with Fs, beneath which read the foreboding question Is Your Child Failing Life? along with the name and number of a psychiatric facility.
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The ads offered parents relief from their feelings of guilt and impotence by assuring them that there was little they themselves could do apart from hauling their kid to the hospital. Indeed, some ads explicitly ruled out any parental culpability. “Studies indicate that anti-social behaviors
in adolescents usually are not ‘reactions’ to home, school or community involvements. They, more often than not, are disorders of neurological development,” read the copy for a psychiatric center in Cerritos, California.
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Parents who responded to these pitches frequently were informed by psychiatrists that their children suffered from illnesses specific to adolescence that go by names like oppositional deficit disorder, conduct disorder, and adjustment reaction. Parents who took the time to look up these ailments in the American Psychiatric Association’s
Diagnostic and Statistical Manual
discovered that they are little more than fancy pseudonyms for adolescent rebellion—or as the director of a patients’ rights organization put it, “pain-in-the-ass kid.” Based on the DSM, a child qualifies for the label “oppositional deficit disorder” and is a prime candidate for hospitalization if he or she often does any five of the following: argues with adults, defies adults’ requests, does things that annoy others, loses his or her temper, becomes easily annoyed, acts spiteful, blames others for his or her own mistakes, gets angry and resentful, or swears.
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How many of us made it out of adolescence without going through periods in which we acted like that?

Girls had an especially easy time qualifying for hospital admission; they didn’t have to be mean and nasty, just sexually active. The National Association of Private Psychiatric Hospitals published guidelines in 1984 that urged “immediate acute-care hospitalization” for girls guilty of “sexual promiscuity.”
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All told, at least 40 percent of adolescent admissions to private psychiatric hospitals during the 1980s were inappropriate, the Children’s Defense Fund estimated. The hospitals’ advertising campaigns were one reason. When researchers from the University of North Carolina questioned mothers of high school students about their reactions to a dozen fear-based newspaper ads for psychiatric facilities they came up with a paradoxical discovery. The ads had the greatest impact on parents of children who least needed mental health services.
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“Jails for middle-class kids” is how Ira Schwartz, dean of the School of Social Work at the University of Pennsylvania, described private psychiatric hospitals of that period. His studies in the mid-1980s showed
that the length of time kids stayed in these places depended primarily on how long their insurance would pay. Adolescents frequently came home more estranged from their parents and society than when they went in, Schwartz and others learned, and felt powerless for having been institutionalized against their will.
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The ads and hospitalizations eventually were curtailed by a competing economic force—the very one that boosted Ritalin sales. With the 1990s came managed care and an emphasis on short-term, out-patient mental health care. Insurance companies were no longer willing to pay out the $30 billion a year it was costing them for child and adolescent psychiatric hospitalization.
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The price for the promiscuous institutionalization of teenagers was not borne, however, only by insurance companies, their customers, or the kids who got locked up. As is so often true when middle- and upper-income Americans purchase escape hatches from their anxieties, the poor also paid. During the period of reckless expansion of private psychiatric hospitals uninsured children with severe psychiatric problems had trouble obtaining care. Between the mid-1970s and late 1980s the number of children and adolescents in
public
psychiatric facilities actually decreased.
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The idea that some children are born bad gets applied to poor and minority children with a vengeance. Many of them get written off as irredeemable.

“Crack babies,” the focus of cover stories in
Newsweek,Time,
and other major news outlets in the late 1980s and early 1990s, are a revealing case in point. The
New York Times
declared in a page-one story that these children have “brain damage that cuts into their ability to make friends, know right from wrong, understand cause and effect, control their impulses, gain insight, concentrate on tasks, and feel and return love.” What, a front-page story in the
Washington Post
asked, will become of our schools when “teachers become preoccupied with the crack-affected youngsters’ overwhelming problems”? The expense
alone was said to be staggering. “Just to get one crack baby ready for school costs more than $40,000 a year,” the
Los Angeles Times
exclaimed in an editorial. “For all 8,974 babies [identified nationally] that could add up to $1.5 billion before they are 5 years old!” (exclamation in the original).
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This is only the beginning. An essayist in
Newsweek
wondered what would become of “the very fabric of society” by the year 2000, when thousands of crack babies enter adulthood. A “CBS Evening News” report concluded with the foster mother of a crack baby speculating, “She may in fact be[come] a twenty-one-year-old with an IQ of perhaps fifty, barely able to dress herself and probably unable to live alone.”
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No group of people deserves to be demonized from birth, but the stigmatization of children of crack users was particularly undeserved. Reporters and their editors had good reason to question the term
crack baby
itself. For one thing, the typical crack-abusing mother uses a spectrum of other drugs, from alcohol and marijuana to amphetamines and heroin. Some journalists alluded to this pattern of polydrug use in their stories but promptly negated its relevance by baptizing crack the “most frequent ingredient in the mix”
(Time)
or declaring that the “crack epidemic has created a generation of youngsters who can sap even the most tenacious parent’s strength”
(Washington Post),
as if crack per se were the culprit.
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Journalists depicted crack babies as a breed apart, even though they had information to the contrary. “Trying to identify crack-affected children through behavior alone is tricky,” as one
Washington Post
reporter put it. “Many of these children look and act like other kids,”
Time
noted, hastening to add, “but their early exposure to cocaine makes them less able to overcome negative influences like a disruptive family life.”
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In the first several years after birth cocaine-exposed kids develop normally, studies show, if they are given basic nutrition, education, and nurturance. Evidence from child health experts and medical researchers indicates that the behavioral and physical symptoms of children exposed to crack stem largely from poor prenatal care, malnutrition,
low birth weight, and other deprivations common among youngsters born to poor parents. To the extent that research has documented any direct effects of prenatal cocaine exposure, they are subtle and not entirely adverse for success in life: cocaine-exposed kids appear to be somewhat more impulsive, aggressive, and easily distracted than their peers, and less easily startled.
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In time the media was forced to backpeddle. By the mid-1990s crack babies were in school, functioning much like their peers, and reporters and editors changed their spin. The less candid among them reframed the crack baby story as a war that had been won. “City Government Officials and Kind-Hearted People Actually Solved the Crack-Baby Crisis,” read the headline on a
Washington Post
story in 1994. Other journalists simply fessed up: their apocalyptic predictions had been unfounded. “Not a Lost Generation” stated a subhead in a
New York Times
piece in 1993. “Tell me, what does a crack baby look like? Nobody who talks about them ever comes in to see them,” an Associated Press story quoted the director of a children’s center asking angrily. “They’ll come in here and look at our kids and they look normal. So they say, ‘Where are the drug babies?’ I tell them, ‘They’re right here.’”
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A story in the
Cleveland Plain Dealer
went so far as to quote educators with the Cleveland public schools about the detrimental effect of the label
crack baby.
Used by health officials and teachers to catalogue kids as developmentally handicapped, the term gets “tossed around on school playgrounds by children to taunt each other,” the newspaper reported.
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Part of the credit for the demise of the crack baby panic goes to Ira Chasnoff, a Chicago pediatrician who had been the media’s expert of choice and the source of an oft-quoted estimate that 387,000 babies had been born to crack-addicted women. (The figure was more like 100,000, according to government estimates, a number some experts say is still inflated.) Chasnoff’s research, published in medical journals from 1985 through 1988, suggested that crack-exposed infants experienced a daunting list of physical and emotional problems. Within a few years, however, Chasnoff was publishing papers showing that crack-exposed kids suffer little permanent damage. He began to complain to
reporters that their coverage of crack babies was perpetuating what he termed an “us-versus-them idea” about poor children. And when a journalist asked him to comment on studies suggesting that prenatal cocaine exposure has a slight impact on IQ, he replied, “The greatest impediment to cognitive development in young children is poverty.”
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Crack babies in fact served as screens on which the American public could displace its worries about the youngest generation as a whole—fears that the young, having been cheated and neglected, would become “an unmanageable multitude” or “a lost generation,” as a
Time
cover story on crack babies aptly titled “Innocent Victims” put it. We focused on the crack baby crisis because, unlike our deeper fears, the crack baby crisis was contained. It existed only in other people’s neighborhoods, and it could be solved if only pregnant women would keep away from crack.
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Throughout the 1980s and 1990s Americans welcomed every permissible excuse to avoid facing up to our collective lack of responsibility toward our nation’s children. When Hillary Rodham Clinton’s book
It Takes a Village
came out in 1996, she toured the country to urge better health care, day care, and nutrition for America’s youth. What did media interviewers and audiences concentrate on? A dubious real-estate investment she was involved in years earlier, whether she fired members of the White House travel office, and if her feminism made her a lousy First Lady. In an interview with Clinton on ABC’s “20/20” Barbara Walters began with a statement and question: “Instead of your new book being the issue, you have become the issue. How did you get into this mess, where your whole credibility is being questioned?” Later, when Walters finally got to the book, she framed her question not in terms of children but in terms of the great Republican fear—Big Government. “You want universal health care for children. You want federally funded early education, HeadStart. You want funding for proper day care. You seem to be swimming against the tide, you know? All we hear about is less government, less money. You’re saying just the opposite,” Walters asserted.
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On “CBS This Morning” Hillary appeared for a full hour, but it wasn’t until three-quarters of the way through that the host, Harry
Smith, realized he hadn’t asked about her book. He too framed his question in terms of Big Government. “Let’s talk about those disadvantaged children for a couple of seconds, because we live in an age now where there’s these trends to take government out of a lot of different kinds of businesses,” said Smith. “Distill your philosophy for me, for a second, about what government role you think should be played in the lives of disadvantaged children.”
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A second indeed. With a commercial break looming Hillary had just enough time to raise what should have been a focal point for the entire hour’s discussion. “Government has become the whipping boy, and it takes the rest of us off the hook. More families will be affected by the downsizing of American corporations that is going on right now and the insecurity that feeds in families than any government programs. So I think that we need to say, ‘Each one of us has a responsibility,”’ she asserted.
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In the final portion of the program, after the commercials, the hosts never returned to those topics.

On the Art of Misdirection

A
nother frightening thing about America’s children: they have children of their own. Or so politicians and the media would have us believe.

The most talked about pregnant person in the world in early 1996 was a ten-year-old runaway. “With heavy makeup framing her exotic almond-shaped eyes and her long, dark hair piled high, Cindy Garcia looked at least 14,” began an Associated Press story. “It wasn’t until two weeks ago that the shocking truth came out. Cindy-8 ½ months pregnant—had innocently handed welfare workers her birth certificate to qualify for food stamps and child support. Cindy, her belly bulging, was only 10.”
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