Of course American parents are not okay
Of course American parents are not okay
Every school shooting feels like an act of terrorism against families. Which is what it is.
I’m briefly coming out of vacation mode to re-up this piece for anyone that needs it.
I’m also highlighting this wonderful and hopeful interview with the amazing by and (despair is a tool of the gun industry to wear us down, hope is what will defeat them—and the activism is working!), in which we get a nice mention.
A version of this piece originally ran in March 2023
Every time there is a school shooting I feel personally gut-punched as a parent. As a mother. As someone who has a child in America, I do not have the freedom to send my child to school, or the movies, or the store, without worrying that she will encounter someone with an assault rifle.
Every school shooting feels like an act of terrorism against families, including my family. Which is what it is.
In a now viral video, following the school shooting in his state a Republican Tennessee Congressman was asked by a reporter what should be done to fix school shootings, and he says with almost a shrug: “We aren’t going to fix it.” (This isn’t taken out of context—you can see it for yourself here.)
Then, when asked what should be done to make school children like his daughter safe, he replies: “We homeschool them.”
In the U.S., you have the right to safety for your children if you keep them at home 24/7 (preferably in the full-time care of a woman).
Otherwise, you’re on your own. Just you—or rather your children and their teachers—against assault rifles.
Of course parents are not okay. No one has ever been okay when their children live in constant danger, because of war for example—or in our case, state-sanctioned domestic terrorism that kills our children every day.
It’s not okay. We are not okay. We are heartbroken. We are anxious. We are traumatized.
But I started writing about this before the latest school shooting sent us all into terrorized grief again.
Earlier this week, the Times ran an opinion column titled “What if Kids are Sad and Stressed Because Their Parents Are?”
In it, David French proposes that we need to tend to our own adult mental health if we want our teens’ mental health to improve. He points to addictions, social media, “politics” and ye olde “helicopter parenting” as problems that adults need to fix in order to fix their kids. “It’s time for us to realize that our hurt can become our kids’ hurt, and if we want to heal our children, that process may well start by seeking the help we need to heal ourselves.”
This struck me because I think all the time about how taking care of kids starts with taking care of their grownups. But we don’t take care of grownups well in this country, so the children of the grownups suffer, too.
I’m reminded of an article that came out last year in which a college professor described the teen health crisis amongst their students as “a sense of existential dread that they can’t separate from their daily ability to live.” Which also explains precisely how many parents that I know feel right now.
French admonishes parents to “heal ourselves”—I’m assuming with therapy, better habits, self-care? But this is a problem much bigger than cognitive behavioral therapy and yoga, which Gen Xers and Millennials are very good at doing.
This admonishment sounds like the old American mindset that is the source of so much of our suffering: individuals are forced to seek solutions to systemic problems on their own, and we feel like we have failed when really it’s the systems and policies that are so much bigger than we are that are failing. Or, as one mom friend said to me recently when we were struggling and failing to find integrated schools for our Black-biriacial children: “It’s the game, not the players.”
If you’re feeling like it’s an especially awful time to be raising a child in America, that’s for good reason. America does not take good care of its grownups, especially the grownups that take care of kids.
Consider:
The U.S. is virtually the only rich country that provides no federal help with childcare, sending many parents of young children into financial crisis. (In the U.S. having a child is the single best predictor that a woman will end up in bankruptcy.)
The U.S. remains the ONLY high-income country that still has no federal paid leave after birth. And a quarter of mothers in the U.S. return to work within two weeks of birth.
Related: The United States has the highest infant and maternal mortality rates out of any other high-income country—and the death rates are twice as high for Black mothers and babies.
Housing prices in the U.S. have shot up 40% since the pandemic. Then inflation shot up. Then interest rates shot up. This is especially bad news if you need space for kids.
The U.S. is the second-largest emitter of carbon emissions (after China), as we and our children face a terrifying climate crisis.
And then there’s the guns.
The U.S. has the highest number of gun deaths of any high-income country. The gun homicide rate here is 26 times higher than other wealthy countries, according to Everytown research, and more than half of us have been impacted by gun violence or know someone who has.
Guns are the #1 killer of children in the U.S.
No other country has this problem. (No other wealthy country has any of these problems— except for climate change which is caused mostly by a few countries and impacts everyone).
American parents are living through an awful and unprecedented era in our country’s history. We haven’t been through a war on American soil, but we don’t have to. Every day 120 Americans die, and every day we wonder if our school, our kids, will be next. (It’s our kids every time, they’re all our American kids.)
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Meg Conley has called what we are living through “The U.S. School Shooter Era.” She recently imagined what that chapter will look like in school books 100 years from now, written in language simple enough for a fifth-grader to grasp:
“During a multi-decade campaign of far-right radicalization, Republican politicians adopted positions of gun extremism to maintain and expand their power.
After allowing the assault rifle ban to lapse in 2004, they began nurturing a first-person shooter culture previously unknown in America. Many even sent Christmas cards featuring their elementary age children holding rifles made for combat.
Republican rhetoric created a right to kill. In Republican speeches and legislation, the right to kill became the primary right associated with the right to freedom.”
Conley’s depiction is brilliant and it’s worth reading the whole thing, because it’s so plainly spoken. And unlike apocalyptic sci-fi, which is what it sometimes feels like as we live through it, she casts our moment as an awful reality that will always be remembered as such: A historic tragedy. A historic national tragedy.
But it’s also oddly comforting because it shows that in the span of time, it wasn’t that long ago that schools were safe. Most of us remember it (I do). It was just over 20 years ago. It was a time not very long ago; maybe we could find our way there again while it’s still fresh in our memory.
For now we have anxious and scared American grownups who are worried about their kids. And we have anxious and scared American kids, who are worried about their grownups.
Sometimes I think about a story about my sister from years ago, back before school shootings were very commonplace (not so long ago really, just 12 years ago). Her little boy was terrified to go to kindergarten and leave her care for the first time. Every day all summer long, he told her that he wasn’t going to go to school. When the day arrived she drew a heart on his hand, and a heart on her own hand. When she walked him to the bus, she promised him that it would be okay, and if he got scared, to just look at the heart on his hand and think of her.
The trust it took for him to get on the bus. The trust it took for her to send him.
At the end of this summer, I will put my only daughter on the bus to go to kindergarten. Would I make a heart on her hand? Could I make any reasonable promise to either of us that I think it will be okay, when I’m sending her with my own heart in my throat?
I don’t think that she will be the one to need the heart on her hand, I think it will be me. But there’s no one to write hearts on our hands. There’s no one promising that it will all be okay, that we will be safe and together again at the end of the day.
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Further reading
MATRIARCHY REPORT is written by Lane Anderson and Allison Lichter.
Lane Anderson is a writer, journalist, and Clinical Associate Professor at New York University; she has won several awards for her writing on inequality and family social issues. She has an MFA from Columbia University. She was raised in Utah and is based in New York City with her partner and daughter.
Allison Lichter is a journalism professor at The New School and worked for many years at New York Public Radio and at the Wall Street Journal as a producer and editor. She was born and raised in Queens, and lives in Brooklyn with her partner and daughter.
It is maddening, no traumatizing--gaslighting--to continue to insinuate that the problems that face individuals in these times have anything at all to do with things that are in our control. Of course children, teens, and adults are not ok! Of course anxiety is skyrocketing. We are assaulted from all sides with dehumanization that is enabled and endorsed by our government (some more guilty than others) and economic system. Gun violence, climate change, vast wealth inequality (which means all of us are seeing our wealth squeezed upwards), lack of health care, the stripping away of reproductive care... I could go on, but we all KNOW IT IN OUR BONES. And I think what we need is rage. I think we have bottled it up just to function, and so it eats at us from the inside. But we need an outlet, a place to let our bones unleash the energy they've been carrying.
Thank you for this, I did just send my youngest kid to kindergarten- I did the heart on the hand for preschool last year but now that he’s back at school with his brother he says he’s not afraid. I love our elementary school and staff, but I have felt a lot of despair and I can’t focus on work today.
We started back to school a few weeks ago and my kids both seem like they were getting into routine of K and 2nd grade. I was feeling hopeful again only to be blindsided by another fucking shooting. It does feel like an act of terrorism against my family and against every family. I’ve been volunteering with my local Democratic Party office and we have to win this election. I was in 5th grade when Columbine happened and I can remember elementary school without active shooter drills.