Some of the nation's leading experts on children and childhood development were featured in the 21st annual Brown University/Providence Journal Public Affairs Conference, "The Dignity of Children," March 4 through 10, 2001, at the University. Take a look at what some of the presenters had to say:
• Peter Edelman on "Children in Poverty" March 7: Edelman, a former aide to Sen. Robert F. Kennedy and member of the Clinton administration, said that one in every six children in the United States lives in poverty, despite our recent years of economic prosperity. And that statistic doesn't tell the full story, given the narrow standard used to define poverty, he argued.
"Poverty is an income of $14,000 for a family of three and $18,000 for four. Try living on that if you're a single mother with two children," said Edelman.
"Why haven't we done better? ...The top one percent of the population has the same annual income as the bottom 40 percent, and that's shocking," he continued. "Our politics have been based on a policy of 'don't look up there, look down there.'"
• Christina Hoff Sommers on "Boys and Girls: Perspectives on Gender" March 8: A number of people believe masculinity is dangerous, said Sommers, the W.H. Brady Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, D.C., and author of "The War Against Boys." "Hard-line feminists are very eager to transform little boys," she said, because they believe the "body of egregiously false information" out there. "If you have propaganda, you get fanaticism. Many women on our college campuses think women are from Venus and men are from hell. That's what's behind our desperate effort to transform little boys."
• Michael Thompson on "Boys and Girls: Perspectives on Gender" March 8: "Boys are hungry for people to show them how to be a man," said Thompson, a consultant, psychologist and author of several books about raising boys.
One antidote to boys who channel their pain into aggression is "mothers who love boys, teachers who love boys, and fathers who are on the job."
Forty percent of boys in the United States are not being raised by their biological fathers, he said. "Mothers are doing the work of raising sons, but why should they do it alone? The advantage that dads have is they embody masculinity. Ultimately, you measure what kind of man you are against your father’s masculinity. …Self-controlled fathers produce self-controlled sons."