Word: less
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...book provides a corrective to many of the current myths, liberal and conservative, about why welfare doesn't work. In particular, he pleads the case for understanding the poor as a part of mainstream American society, and not the ghettoized, isolated group that it is often perceived to be. Less than 10 percent of American poor live in the ghettos, as Ellwood reminds his readers...
...These are my hills," a Coal Valley News editorialist wrote more than 30 years ago. His words are no less pertinent today: "I do not hold title to the lands, but I reap every benefit and every injury to them. Believe it or not, you and I are the guardians of these hills. They are God's hills and we are the keepers. More than that, we shall inherit the manifold blessings of the hills. They are our hills...
Other journal entries are less encouraging. Cynthia, a former foster child who sits in front of Bianca in class, once wrote, "I would like a magic ring that do anything I said and I would want my baby doll to be a real baby." The teacher wrote back, asking her, "How would you take care of a real baby and still go to school?" She answered, "I have a mom, you know." To this, the teacher replied in her red ink, "This isn't your mom's baby. Why should she take care of it?" No reply...
Only sentimentalists have ever considered childhood to be a kingdom of untroubled innocence. Today there is more trouble for children and less time for innocence than in recent generations. The problem is not so much that children have changed. The world has changed. Writes Dr. Robert Coles, a psychiatrist and author who has studied the lives of the young for more than 30 years: "Children have always been, and still are, a mirror to us -- ourselves writ small." Ourselves have changed...
American parents have not suddenly grown malicious or indifferent. Many are at the mercy of economic changes. Today 50% of working mothers have husbands earning less than $20,000 a year. To support a family, buy a house and prepare for a child's future education, two incomes become essential. More than half of women with children younger than three years old work outside the home. But because society, and especially the workplace, has not caught up with these changes, the job of raising children has become more complicated...