The American Reality

 

Chloe Symons,

Correspondent (North America)

 

WASHINGTON — The ‘American Dream’ is something that people have been envisaging and aspiring to for decades, yet two American studies that were released this month suggest that for many Americans, the dream is becoming more unreachable as time goes by.

Recent studies have shown that many Americans are now actually living on the poverty line, with the Southern Education Foundations research revealing that for the first time in 40 years, poverty is affecting a large amount of children of school ages across 13 southern and four western states. These figures are just shocking and not at all what you would expect from a study carried out on the current demographics of North America. Sheldon Danzinger, the President of the Russell Sage Foundation, a large social science research group in America, spoke in the wake of these research findings, in an attempt to explain the demographic shift that they have uncovered. He stated, “We’ve had very slow economic growth and particularly falling real wages for workers with less experience and less education for more than 30 years. So this is a long trend in the making.” However, I doubt that these comments, suggesting that the current spread of poverty has been long developing for more than 30 years, are really going to be reassuring or helpful to those Americans who are finding themselves in times of great need in the current economic climate.

The second institute that released its research findings this month was Opportunity Nation, who looked at young adults, between the ages of 16-24. Their research found that one in seven Americans within the age group seem to be becoming ‘disconnected’, meaning that they are unemployed, and out of education. The Brookings Institute, a non-profit organisation that carries out independent research in the hope of introducing innovative policy changes in America, have been looking over the research findings. Ron Haskins, from the Brookings Institute said of the findings, “We have too many kids who graduate from high school who are not well educated, they’re not good at reading, they’re not good in their numbers and they’re not prepared to learn a lot more that a company would want them to learn in order for them to work for that company.”

Other socioeconomic factors are being taken into consideration when looking to explain the findings of both of these recent studies, building over all a fairly bleak picture for modern Americans. Emphasis has been given in particular to the growing number of single parent families across the states, and how this can affect a child both economically and educationally, as well as putting a strain on the parents themselves, juggling breadwinning and the raising of their children single handed. Some analysts of these recent research studies have referred to the much older 1965 report by Daniel Patrick Moynihan named ‘The Negro Family- a Case for National Action’, as it focused on the large number of black single mothers at the time who were struggling with similar social and economic issues, and how the community needed national support to help to improve the situation. However the recent research is arguably much more serious, as it has shown the demographic issues to have spread across all races, affecting all communities.

Haskins of The Brookings Institute spoke directly about single parent families and said “The kids in single parent families are around five times as likely to be poor as in a married couple…” . With Danzinger from Russell Sage also speaking about the issue, going into more detail and stating, “High income families have much greater parental inputs, they’re better fed, they’re better housed, better clothed, they have extra curricular activities, their parents provide them with iPads and educational activities that low income families can’t afford.”

Both The Brookings Institute and Russell Sage acknowledged that the children of higher income families are ‘holding their own’, becoming successful in education and later in the field of work. But, when looking towards a solution, The Brookings Institute did not paint a particularly positive picture, with Haskins saying, “…it’s going to be very difficult for any government programme to have a substantial reduction in poverty, unless we just give them money, which American voters don’t like, and I don’t think it will happen.”

And so the future for many American children right now is not looking quite as bright as the previous generations would have hoped for them when the American Dream was first sought out.  We can only hope that these two recent research reports grab the attention of those in government, as clearly something is very wrong if poverty now exists in great numbers across North America.

Image Courtesy: Wikimedia Commons (U.S. Navy photo by Photographer’s Mate 2nd Class Dennis Cantrell)