It’s refreshing to see newspapers stay on top of the many ways the economic downturn hurts small children and their families. In ailing Michigan, the Heritage newspapers reported some startling data from the annual Kids Count survey in the Michigan Data Book, finding that poverty affects one out of every four children in a state hit hard by auto industry layoffs.
The report, produced by the Michigan League for Human Services, found “stark disparities for minorities in Michigan threaten the well being of large numbers of young children and their families.”
EarlyStories would like to see journalists go beyond reporting the depressing but not surprising numbers and talk to some of the families about how they are coping. What government efforts, if any, are there? What programs are being cut? Who is hurt? What are nonprofits, also struggling, doing to help?
Are any leaders emerging during these terrible times? Journalists might want to look for inspiration at the story Paul Tough, a New York Times wrote this week in Mother Jones Magazine about the efforts of Geoffrey Canada of Harlem’s Children Zone to combat poverty and educate children in a poor New York City neighborhood.
The piece describes the efforts of Canada and Harlem Children’s Zone to educate poor parents and children in ways large and small, including a simple trip the Harlem Children Zone aimed at exposing young children to everyday language.
“The point wasn’t to learn about nutrition, but rather about language—how to fill an everyday shopping trip with the kind of nonstop chatter that has become second nature to most upper-middle-class parents, full of questions about numbers and colors and letters and names,” Tough wrote, describing what he saw on the trip with parents to a local supermarket. “That chatter, social scientists have shown, has a huge effect on vocabulary and reading ability.”
Tough’s magazine piece looks at an effort to solve some of the most intractable problems of poverty, and grew out of his new book on the Children’s Zone.
The supermarket anecdote is great example of the kind of show-don’t-tell journalism needed more than ever right now, alongside the data and statistics quantifying the ways children are hurting in tough economic times.
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