Family dinners can only accomplish so much
Esther Cep ed a says family dinners are great for bringing people together, but not a silver bullet for ensuring children’ s academic success.
As this shabby year, and with it a dispiriting decade, sags to an end, there is an interesting symmetry. In 2010, passage of the Affordable Care Act signaled the nation’s domestic policy preoccupation: health care. Ten years later, this issue is defining the political competition that will produce the first presidency of this century’s third decade.
Barack Obama’s two largest achievements during his presidency’s 70 percent of the second decade altered the public’s thinking and the government’s functioning. When he entered office, there was only a moderate consensus, but when he left, it was decisive that everyone should have health care coverage and that this should not be denied because of pre-existing health conditions.
Obama’s largest impact on governance was the expansion of Medicaid under the ACA. This has addicted 36 — so far — state legislatures and the District of Columbia on a large flow of federal funds. Those 37 jurisdictions, with 66 percent of the nation’s population (and soon perhaps Oklahoma and Missouri, both of which may have a ballot measure on expansion in 2020), are especially, and irrevocably, enmeshed in ever-deepening government supervision of health care. The American economy’s health care sector is larger than all but three nations’ entire economies, and as this decade ends, so does the sterile debate framed as a binary choice between government or private provision of health care. This is a blurred distinction without a clear difference.
Beginning in 2010, the Republican Party’s defining — its only important — domestic policy was to “repeal and replace” the ACA. Now it is clear, probably even to the declining number of Republicans who continue to substitute that chant for thought, that this will not happen. Regarding health care, the party’s intellectual pantry is now almost empty. Louisiana Sen. Bill Cassidy and a few others are working on restocking it. Perhaps they can dilute the party’s current dreadful purity as a cult of personality.
In 2019, the Democratic presidential candidates’ debates about health care have perhaps presaged a healthier party in 2020. The beginning of T.S. Eliot’s “East Coker” — “In my beginning is my end” — could be Kamala Harris’ campaign’s autopsy. Five months before she had the kamikaze courage to embrace the most futile and despised social policy of the last third of the previous century — compulsory busing of school children away from their neighborhood schools, in pursuit of racial “balance” — Harris did something even less explicable. Seven days after her campaign began, with a flippancy that proclaimed her unfamiliarity with health care’s complexities, she essentially said: Come to think about it, or actually without really thinking about it, “let’s move on” from private health insurance. Has any presidential campaign begun by alarming more people?
Elizabeth Warren’s presidential prospects may have passed their apogee on Nov. 1, when she explained, or purported to explain, how she would pay for her “Medicare for All.” Various analysts of different philosophic persuasions came to the same conclusion: She fell $10 trillion or so short of the real one-decade cost of her single-payer plan. In 2016, Hillary Clinton said a single-payer plan would “never, ever come to pass.” Warren’s only concession to reality has been to promise to not implement her plan until three years after she has fulfilled her recent promise — she cannot moderate her aggressions against those who disagree with her — to wear a Planned Parenthood scarf at her inauguration.
In 2016, Donald Trump lost the popular vote by 2,833,224, which was 521,366 more than the combined margins of victory of John Kennedy in 1960 (118,574), Richard Nixon in 1968 (510,314) and Jimmy Carter in 1976 (1,682,970). But in 2020, as in 2016, Trump’s political strategy will be to reach Election Day as only the secondmost unpopular politician in the country. If he succeeds, he might owe his tattered success to the other party’s combination of ignorance and arrogance regarding health care.
In 1993, as President Bill Clinton’s administration arrived jauntily promising a root-and-branch remaking of a health care sector less complex than today’s, Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, D-N.Y., was warning: “Ideological certainty easily degenerates into an insistence upon ignorance. The great strength of political conservatives at this time (and for a generation) is that they are open to the thought that matters are complex. Liberals have got into a reflexive pattern of denying this.”
Such denial breeds political recklessness in the deniers, dismay among voters and despair among people who know things. Next year, with the most complex domestic problem — health care — uppermost in many voters’ minds, denial might produce a president’s re-election.
George Will is syndicated by the Washington Post Writers Group. His email address is georgewill@ washpost.com.
For many, this past week was to be chockfull of family dinners, making it a perfect time to talk about why they’re great for bringing people together — but not a silver bullet for ensuring children’s academic success.
Family dinners are the stuff of legend. Throughout history, countless brilliant minds have credited their enhanced intellectual development to the act of sitting down for dinner with parents, siblings and extended family.
As these stories go, gathering for a communal meal allowed the successful person to learn about everything from household happenings and their parents’ work concerns to the political issues of the day. More importantly, it allowed them to eventually take part in lively back-and-forth of discussions, during which positions needed to either be argued against or defended.
In 2017, Microsoft cofounder Bill Gates told CNBC that when he was a young entrepreneur, he felt confident having professional conversations with older business people because he’d grown up hearing his parents articulate their thoughts and ideas at the dinner table.
“I think family traditions that get you to come together and talk about what you’re up to — going on trips together, always sitting at dinner and sharing thoughts — really made a huge difference,” Gates said.
Basically, unless a family has some sort of serious dysfunction — alcoholism, drug dependence and mental illness can make for some horribly painful family meals — you can hardly go wrong with insisting that your crew gather to share some food and talk.
But, like so many other pieces of educational advice that seem like a slam-dunk to people with means, family dinners are neither a magical cure to what ails modern public education nor an adequate counter to families’ economic struggles.
To start, though the majority (almost 71 percent) of children under 18 live in two-parent households, nearly 30 percent live either with one parent or with no parents at all. It’s hard for kids to hear the interplay between two adults engaging in mature conversations about the world when there’s only one caregiver present who’s probably just doing the best they can to get dinner on the table.
And about those two-parent homes — they aren’t the be-all, end-all of what makes for successful children, either. New research from Christina Cross, a postdoctoral fellow in the department of sociology at Harvard, found that living apart from a biological parent doesn’t carry the same life-quality penalty for black kids as for their white peers. And, similarly, being raised in a two-parent family is not equally beneficial.
Cross contradicted previous analyses by using more than 30 years of national data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics to demonstrate that family structure has a weaker relationship to the educational success of black adolescents than of white adolescents.
“I show that living in a single-mother family does not decrease the chances of on-time high school completion as significantly for black youths as for white youths,” Cross wrote in a recent New York Times op-ed. “Conversely, living in a twoparent family does not increase the chances of finishing high school as much for black students as for their white peers.”
The big factor at play in these instances was access to socioeconomic resources, such as a mother’s educational level and generational wealth or business connections. Cross noted that, “although in general, youths raised in two-parent families are less likely to live in poverty, black youths raised by both biological parents are still three times more likely to live in poverty than are their white peers. Additionally, black two-parent families have half the wealth of white two-parent families.”
So even though family dinners have been pushed as a surefire way to improve lifelong educational and earning outcomes, research going back to 2012 has bucked that notion by finding no causal relationship between family meal frequency and a child’s success.
This isn’t, of course, to say that two-parent and other families who are able to come together for a meal at least once a day aren’t an ideal worth striving for.
But even as some tsk-tsk about “today’s young people” or “unwed mothers,” it’s important to note that lowincome children’s academic performance isn’t a matter of culture or character.
If we want families to have two parents, we must make it possible for them to thrive. And if we want families to eat together, we must first ensure that the most vulnerable among us actually have food to put on the table.
Barack Obama’s two largest achievements during his presidency’s 70 percent of the second decade altered the public’s thinking and the government’s functioning. When he entered office, there was only a moderate consensus, but when he left, it was decisive that everyone should have health care coverage and that this should not be denied because of pre-existing health conditions.
Esther Cepeda is syndicated by the Washington Post Writers Group. Her email address is estherjcepeda@ washpost.com.