Some kids simply have to grow up faster than others

The other day, I was sitting in my doctor’s waiting room. Opposite me sat a young father and his daughter. She couldn’t have been more than about 1. They were both black. Were they poor? They were definitely not well-off. The father, tired and scruffy, was trying to feed his daughter from a takeaway container. The food looked cold. She was more interested in making sure the floor got a good feed. Her milk bottle occupied her for a bit. But that too soon found itself on the floor. So far, so normal.

And then things got ugly. The girl’s father started to curse at her, loudly. She was threatened with everything from food restrictions to beating. Obviously none of these adult threats worked. I’m not sure how much she would have understood. She was only 1 after all. He called his partner to complain about the daughter’s behavior. On speakerphone. She didn’t like the tone he was taking and the way he was “disrespecting her”. His voice grew louder. A police officer who happened to be nearby gave him a look that said, calm down, but didn’t approach. He complained on the phone that everyone was looking at him. We were.

If you asked anyone in that waiting room what they thought of this likely poor, definitely black father’s parenting style, I suspect they would have all said, bad. Scolding a child using adult words, verbally abusing their partner in front of their child, antagonizing a police officer. They would probably have also said, he should know better.

We take the same view of poor black kids. Just look at our juvenile justice system. The sentences we hand out — higher likelihood of being locked away, longer periods of detention, adult incarceration after successive felonies — say, you should have known better. The prosecutions that we don’t bring against police officers for shooting black kids in poor neighborhoods — Tamir Rice being the latest example — say we know better.

But how would “they know better”? The evidence on poverty and parenting is compelling. Poor parents — Black, White, Hispanic, Asian — have less money to devote to their children. They can’t buy as many books, take them on educational trips, expose them to opportunities that ensure their intellectual development. Poor parents are also more stressed. So their children grow up in an environment full of tension, harsh words, excessive discipline and lack of parental time. These children are more likely to display behavioral difficulties. Things like the inability to sit still at school or contain their aggression. Without extremely resilient parents, it is very difficult for these children to know better.

And yet, the case of Ethan Couch, the so-called ‘affluenza’ teenager, which has recently re-surfaced, centered on him not knowing any better. Having grown up in an environment of white wealth and privilege, where none of his actions had consequences, he could simply not be held fully responsible for drunkenly killing 4 people while illegally driving his father’s car. His wealthy parents failed to set boundaries which made him less culpable. They were at fault. But he was not.

We are remarkably consistent in our view of bad parenting — whether it is from privilege or poverty. Parents should provide a warm, nurturing environment, in which their children can flourish, but they should also provide discipline and boundaries. Children should know right from wrong.

Yet we are horribly inconsistent in our view about the impact of bad parenting on children. Any child being raised poorly faces disadvantage, whether from excessive wealth or lack of it. But we insist on treating some like adolescents and others like fully-grown adults. And the demarcation appears to be race.* We call on neurological research that shows that the part of a teenager’s brain that is responsible for good, well-thought out decision-making (sitting in the pre-frontal cortex) is not fully formed and hence they cannot be fully responsible for their actions. But yet we do not apply this research consistently in our world view.

Whether the police officers in the Tamir Rice case knew that his gun was a replica or not, did they really believe that a 12 year old fully understood the consequences of his actions of playing with a gun in public? And what about the view that they thought he was older? If that’s the case, then he would have had to look over 25 because that is when the pre-frontal cortex is fully formed. This doesn’t seem very likely.

All of this serves to remind us that some kids simply have to grow up faster than others. Either because their home environment forces them to (like the little 1 year old in my doctor’s surgery). Or because society fails to protect them. If we truly believe that adolescents are still malleable, that their brains are not yet hard-wired and we can help guide them on to a good life path, then we need to start treating them all equally. Otherwise we will make no progress in addressing the injustices that arise from
inequality.**

*I cannot do this argument sufficient justice here. Two must-read books where the authors provide a compelling account based on their own experiences are Ta-Nehisi Coates in “Between the World and Me” and Bryan Stephenson in “Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption“.

**See, for example, “15 Memos on Race and Opportunity” by Richard Reeves and colleagues at the Brookings Institution, that outline very clearly how race gaps, especially for black Americans, have shown little sign of improvement in recent years.

Originally published at tellingtimes.me on January 6, 2016.