Free The Two-Income Trap by Elizabeth Warren; Amelia Warren Tyagi Page A

fallout of her husband’s job loss. She carefully hid the past-due notices, told him the telephone was shut off due to a “mechanical difficulty,” and said the car was towed away because the transmission was broken. But then came the phone call that forced her to admit that she and her husband could no longer shield him. “Our son has braces. When the dentist was informed of the bankruptcy, they called and said they wouldn’t see him anymore.” After a series of humiliating phone calls, she finally found an orthodontist who was willing to remove her son’s braces—for cash in advance. Then she had to explain to her eleven-year-old what had gone wrong in their lives, why a stranger would take off his braces while his teeth were still crooked, and how his life was about to change.
    When a radical change occurs in a child’s life—divorce, a move to a new city, or even the birth of a new sibling—parents typically alert the
other adults in the child’s life, asking them to give additional support and to watch for signs of trouble. But middle-class parents don’t tell the teachers, the pediatrician, the school counselor, or the babysitter that their youngster may be experiencing distress because Mom and Dad are on the brink of bankruptcy. This leaves children isolated, confused, and conscious that something shameful is going on.
    The code of silence makes it difficult for these children to seek out friends who have lived through the same experience. Children become more isolated, cut off from their peers. Over time, this can evolve into keeping secrets and telling lies. Professor Katherine Newman, in her book Falling from Grace , quotes the advice an unemployed father gave to his son: “In his school, everybody’s father is the head of this and that. So I said, ‘You just tell them your Dad was VP of a company and he just refused to go on an overseas assignment. . . .’ I told him if anybody asks, tell them I started my own firm.” 20 When a parent advocates telling lies, what is a child to think? Politicians may contend that financial collapse has lost its stigma, but children living through it may not see it that way.
    A handful of academic studies provides hints about the future these children face. The catalog of damages inflicted on children when their parents divorce—falling test scores, low self-esteem, discipline problems, depression—also applies for middle-class children whose parents are in financial trouble. 21 Financial collapse has an additional wrinkle less common among children of divorce: It often sends a child into adult roles long before his time. Newman observes: “For downwardly mobile families, it is the parents who need their kids’ emotional support. . . . Their children want to be more independent, but a sense of responsibility and obligation pulls them back.” 22
    Not all parents try to shield their children the way Sara Swerdling did. Sometimes the protection goes the other way. Many children, some as young as nine or ten, learn to screen the incoming phone calls to shield their parents from bill collectors. Charlene Dorset, a travel agent in a small town in Pennsylvania, describes a low point after her husband’s business failed: “Two men came to our door [when I was at
work]. They said that they read that we were going to be foreclosed on and that they would either buy the house [at auction] or give us loans to help us out. My son told them to get off the property and never come back. He must have looked so small and skinny next to those two men, but I don’t think he even knew it, he was so mad.”
    If you care about children—about whether they succeed or fail academically, about whether they are self-confident or self-loathing, about whether they are thriving or under so much stress that they can’t sleep at night—then you should care about family economics. If you care about children, then you should speak out.
    Conservative columnist William F. Buckley Jr.