Major funding for Frontline is provided by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.
Additional funding is provided by this station and other public television stations nationwide.
You may have all of the resources available to a family, welfare, food stamps, the WIC program, operating within a family, and it's still not enough.
Tonight on Frontline, a generation of American children is being raised in poverty.
Do you have any money at all today? None at all.
One out of four children in this country is poor. They are sick.
This baby has been home for more than two weeks. He has developed an infection.
They are hungry.
Do you have other food in the house?
They need more help than the government can give. What future do they have?
Tonight, Growing Up Poor.
From the network of public television stations, a presentation of KCTS Seattle,
WNET New York, WPBT Miami, WTVS Detroit, and WGBH Boston.
This is Frontline with Judy Woodruff.
Good evening. A shocking statistic about our country.
In this, the world's wealthiest nation, almost one out of four of our children lives in poverty, approximately 14 million.
That's an increase of over 50% in the past 10 years.
The statistics also tell us that half live in families without fathers, and race is a factor.
Nearly half of all black children and a third of all Hispanic children are poor.
Tonight, a film about what it's like to grow up poor, and about some of the people, the professionals, who care for these children.
The film is called Growing Up Poor. It's produced by Edward Gray, and directed and reported by Mark Obenhous.
Like many other cities in the Midwest and Northeast, Chester, Pennsylvania is in decline.
It now ranks as one of this country's most impoverished urban areas.
Older residents recall a time when Chester's economy was booming, when the shipyard and factories ran day and night.
But Chester's fortunes began to change in the 1960s.
Sun Ship, the Ford Motor Company, Westinghouse, Boeing, and dozens of smaller satellite industries closed down or cut back drastically.
Today, a generation of people is growing up in Chester dependent on welfare, and the numbers of these dependent families and children are growing.
No fact about this city is more striking than that Chester has the highest birth rate in the state of Pennsylvania.
One third of its population is under 18 years of age.
These children are growing up in a city whose public parks and recreational facilities are in disrepair.
A city whose cultural institutions have been abandoned.
A city where the last movie theater turned to pornography in 1971 and closed altogether in 1979.
This is a film about what it is like to grow up poor in a place like Chester, Pennsylvania.
The Chespen Health Center is part of a network of medical facilities serving the people of Chester.
Most of its patients are children whose mothers receive public assistance.
Their health care is paid for by Medicaid, a federal and state program for the poor.
Almost all come from households where the yearly income is well below the federal poverty line.
I think that to some extent the environment in which some of these children grow up,
the environment of maybe a single parent household and maybe having the parent and possibly even the grandparents never really having been able to have a full-time job,
some of these kids when you ask them what they want to be when they grow up when they're six, seven and eight,
they say I don't know or I don't want to be anything.
And that's sad.
It's almost the majority of the kids that I see will answer that to that question.
And that may be because their role models have never been able to have a job or a career.
And I think in that way the environment in which they're living has impacted on them.
What are those tardies?
Where were you?
Home.
Why were you always late?
Look at this.
A D in English, a C in Geography, an F in History, a D in Mathematics, a D in Science,
a D in Reading.
How are you ever going to get a job after school?
I don't know.
If you don't pass or if you pass, can you read?
Can you read okay?
A little bit.
You can read okay.
Can you read some of this?
What does this say?
Middle, school, report card.
I think a lot of our families don't dress education starting from the very young.
There are no role models for the children to see.
They see their parents receiving welfare checks.
They don't see their children, they don't see their parents going out every morning
to a job and bringing in a paycheck to pay for their various needs.
They, so therefore they feel, well if my mother can feed seven children and we're not doing
that bad, we're still living, well why should I go out and get an education, finish school
and try to look for a job?
How many children do you have in the house?
Right now?
All my kids.
How many is all?
George, Mirna, Ramon.
Okay, so the four children, four children.
Does their father live there too?
No.
Father doesn't live there?
Does he see the children?
He don't come around.
He doesn't come around?
Does he ever see them?
Two months.
Excuse me?
Two months.
Two months?
He hasn't been around for two months?
Okay.
Is Mara's father the same as the other kids?
Or they have different fathers?
Does Ramon see his father?
But I heard his father, a friend of mine told me his father was in jail.
His father's in jail?
What's he in jail for?
He takes drugs.
I don't like that.
Margaret Rudy is a 34-year-old single mother who was born in Puerto Rico.
She was beaten as a child and her hearing and speech have been impaired ever since.
That's how she does.
That's not, that's how she does.
Okay, that's not crawling.
That's creeping.
She's a little creep.
Margaret Rudy's infant daughter, Myra, is being monitored for a syndrome called failure to thrive,
which is strongly associated with poverty.
Since her birth, Myra has not grown or developed according to norms for her age.
Okay.
She's just not growing well according to her growth curves.
She's falling off the growth curve.
Her growth curve should be fairly constant.
Where are we?
She started off at the 25th percentile for weight and then she went up to the 50th percentile for weight.
She grew along the 50th percentile and all of a sudden fell dramatically off the curve,
did not grow at all, then resumed a normal 10th percentile curve,
fell off the curve again to the third percentile and now is slowly creeping up to the fifth percentile.
Myra did very well.
She gained six ounces in one week and that's very good.
Okay.
That's very good.
We want, she needs to continue to grow like that.
Otherwise, we will have to again consider putting her in the hospital.
Okay.
The problems that are above and beyond our abilities to deal with as far as impacting on medical care in the community are many.
People, you know, supposedly have enough to eat, whether they get welfare food stamps or whatever,
but we have multiple kids who are malnourished and a lot of them, not a lot of them,
but some of them are malnourished because the families don't have enough money for food.
Sometimes it's because they don't budget money well, but they don't have a whole lot to budget
and that's above and beyond our control and that definitely impacts negatively on us.
The other, one of the other things that impacts negatively on our ability to provide medical care to the kids here is the education in the community.
Some of the single young parents haven't completed school
and just don't have the kind of sophistication or education that allows them to work very well with us.
The staff at Chespen was concerned with Margaret Rudy's ability to comply with the medical recommendations for her baby.
The case was referred to Jackie Blunden, a community nurse who provides in-home health care to poor children in Chester.
Here, now, move that, it's ok, now, now.
Well good, she has gained weight, great.
Alright baby, ok Margaret, alright, it's ok, it's ok.
Yeah, being a good girl, huh?
You're not going to be able to have a heart, eh?
Oh, okay, Margaret, you've already got welfare coming in, you've already got WIC, okay?
The father of this baby is responsible for helping you to feed her, okay?
Now, I would like to go visit him since he doesn't have a phone, all right?
I'm going to have to stop off at that address, here, I'll give you baby, okay?
And I'm going to ask him to buy some baby food for her.
Do you have any money at all today?
None at all.
Okay, you said that you were going to borrow some money from a friend, okay, what friend?
How much are you going to ask her for?
Ten dollars?
Just for her, okay.
Do you have other food in the house?
Because we don't have enough money, I only got meat.
Okay, you have some meat, but you don't have anything else in.
No, I don't.
Vegetables?
Yeah, but I don't have no rice.
You've got beans, and you've got spaghetti.
Yeah, but then, they like have wrong beans.
I can understand that they like, you know, you'll just have to work with what you have.
Now, when does that check come in?
It might just come in right in the morning, in the bank.
What day?
Thursday.
This Thursday coming up, okay?
And my food stamp.
So you have at least something to eat between today and Thursday.
The financial basis, the financial support for a majority of the families that I work
with is welfare, and there are two checks that you can expect in a month's time that
have to cover over a two-week period of time.
For the most part, the women that I work with, when they get money, they spend it on what
they see as their immediate needs, and maybe one of the things that either myself or one
of the caseworkers that works closely with us may have to teach this woman is how to
spread this check over a period of two weeks, and that becomes very difficult when you have
an infant who may be sick, who may get sick in between that two-week period of time, who
yes receives WIC vouchers, the WIC program that's a federally funded program where that
mother's income is supplemented or her food is supplemented by the federal government,
and that word supplement has to stay in the forefront.
It's not the only source of her food situation.
She gets food stamps, but you've got to remember, too, that depending on how many children
you have working within the family and what their age group is and what their particular
needs are, you may have all of the resources available to a family, welfare, food stamps,
the WIC program operating within a family, and it's still not enough to keep that family
fed on a minimally standard basis.
Three weeks after this visit, Children and Youth Services, a state agency, took Margaret
Rudy's children away from her and placed them in foster care.
The children's nutrition was apparently not the only issue considered.
The court records in this case are sealed, but Margaret told us that the children were
taken because her six-year-old daughter had been sexually abused by a neighbor.
Though there is no certainty that poor children are more likely to suffer abuse than middle-class
children, every health professional we met agreed that abuse is one of the most serious
threats to the mental and physical well-being of poor children.
Three times a week, six-year-old Danny Willoughby and his mother, Hazel Porter, see a children's
therapist at the Crozier-Chester Mental Health Center.
Danny was away for a weekend with his father, and he came home and he was bruised all over
different places, and that was the first sign that something had happened to Danny.
There was violence to him, which upset me because I didn't want to see Danny go into
the same thing that I had, violence happening in the home, violence happening to him.
I felt that with the violence I went through as a child, I didn't want to see him go
through it, but yet he's experiencing it.
He has been abused.
When Danny has a severe problem or something happens to him, he regresses back in time
to where he wants to be safe.
Can you tell me what you're so upset about?
Why is it you don't want to talk about it?
What are you afraid of?
Okay, well maybe Lana can start off and then...
After we were worried about him throwing his lunch away, well, last night he told me that
the kids out in the back were telling other kids, these were older kids, were telling
other kids that they were sticking drugs in their lunches and stuff.
So that's why Danny said he's throwing his lunches away because he's afraid that somebody's
putting stuff in them.
Okay, well tell me a little bit about the lunches that are made at school.
Are you afraid there's drugs in them too?
Yeah.
Okay.
Is that why you're throwing them away too?
Yeah.
What do you think would make you feel better about that?
Is there any way you can think of taking your lunch so you would feel comfortable?
Yeah, making it myself.
So in other words, if you make your lunch, you won't be afraid?
Yeah.
What about if mom makes your lunch?
That would be okay too because I know she wouldn't put drugs in it.
Certainly in Danny's case, the abuse that he was subjected to has clouded and colored
his way of seeing life.
One of the problems with abuse is that it's cyclic and it's passed on from generation
to generation and the only hope is that you break in.
We as therapists can break into the cycle and stop it so that the Danny's and all the
children, when they get married and have kids of their own, the cycle will be broken.
They'll see that there is a different way.
What I can remember is both my parents were alcoholics.
They drank, they argued, they fought.
There was times where they would get violent with each other.
You would see them, one would wind up with a cut arm or a cut leg or they would take
and I know at one point in time, my mother was in the hospital and my father got mad
because my mother's cat got a hold of the bird and killed the bird.
So my father decided since the cat killed the bird, he killed the cat and made us watch
it and cut the cat's head off through the cat in the furnace and then made us go up
and eat breakfast.
I never forgot it.
I started seeing a therapist myself and they pointed it out, did you ever realize that
what you went through as a child, when you left home, you thought, well, you know, I'm
getting married to get away from it.
And instead I got married to someone that was just as bad as my own parents.
If I didn't do things exactly as he wanted, I would be the one getting beat up and hit
and pushed around.
Until the one time when he tried to choke me to death, I said, that's it, and I left.
And I moved back to Pennsylvania with my parents and, you know, my dad says, well, now you're
happy you found out what life's about, but he says, well, that's what life is.
He says, mom, your mom and me fought and we argued, but we loved each other.
I said, yeah, you loved each other, but, you know, did you have to do that all your life?
And I just turned around and I went right into the same situation.
Danny is also hyperactive and has chronic school problems.
Chespin is treating his hyperactivity with the drug Ritalin.
She says she can definitely tell if he's late on his real one at lunchtime because he can't
sleep at all.
What about in the morning?
She says he's okay for about an hour and then he starts up.
Now, tell me about this medicine you use.
What are the kids telling you at school?
I'm taking drugs.
What's that make you feel like?
Bad.
Did you, what did you tell them back?
Nothing, cause they were already gone.
Well, you know who gives you the pills, right?
Yeah.
Yep.
And I wouldn't give them to you if I thought they were bad, would I?
So the next time the kids tell you that you're taking drugs, tell them that you're taking
medicine that the doctor gave you.
Okay.
What do you think?
If they're still there.
I think the problem is that these kids need so many services and need so much help and
were we all able to provide it, these kids would have a much more optimistic future outlook,
but based, but that's the ideal and we don't have the ideal and we have to work with what
we've got.
I, they don't, they aren't going to have as many opportunities as a lot of other kids
because they've, they've come from such a deprived background from, from, and their
worldview, the way they see people, the lack of, the lack of trust in the kids that come
in here, a lot of my work is just building trust and, and, and helping these kids see
me as someone that, that is going to be there, that will take care and provide and help them.
And if they can get that from me, if we can do that together, they have a much better
chance than if they hadn't and then it's kind of, then we send them on their way and,
and see what happens, but that would be, that's an optimistic way of looking at it.
But how many kids have that opportunity in Chester?
Not an awful lot.
Even though Chester's environment places acute strains on the mental health of its
children, a mother who wants her child to see a psychotherapist like Robby Booker will
have to wait an average of four months for an appointment.
Agencies providing in-home health care are equally short of staff.
Community nurse Becky Drew is Jackie Blunden's partner.
These two are the only visiting nurses assigned to the care of Chester's 14,000 children.
A duck, what's a duck say?
Every other week, Becky Drew visits three-year-old Amy Seals.
Amy was a failure to thrive baby and is now showing signs of developmental delay.
Looks like a carrot there, that was close.
What's that?
Baby.
Baby?
What's this?
Phone.
Phone, all right.
What are these?
How many times a day do you get to do the book with her?
Once a day.
Once a day?
All right, Dad.
Let me see what you do with her.
Here, look at, with Mommy.
Okay, would you sit on your lap?
Let me see what you do with Mommy.
She doesn't talk a whole lot with me.
Little baby, see they're coming out of the eggs.
And there they are right there swimming with Mommy.
Does she tell you or do you point to the things to tell her?
She does.
She does it.
Do you know about how many per day that she does it?
Can she name every one of these on here or does she just name one and it's the same one
all the time?
She names some of them.
Some of them.
A lot of times these mothers, especially with their first child, they probably didn't plan
that.
The child came along.
Whether or not they were ready for that responsibility or not didn't matter.
They had the child.
Lots of times with the second and the third and the fourth it was the same situation.
They never planned on having the children.
They never even asked themselves, can I take care of these kids?
How can I be responsible for these children?
The children came and they were there and you go from there.
And that's where when you go into the home, you try to help in every way that you can
and try to be a sort of role model and to show them how to do things.
I never take anything for granted as far as what anyone knows or what they don't know.
You've taken them rectally before?
Ever?
Oh, okay.
Twist it as you put it in and never, never push.
If you feel any resistance at all, you don't push.
Many times when we're caught into a case, the child is sick.
That's why we're there.
There is a sick baby that needs attention.
There is a mother who has this baby at home that needs to be taught what to do with the
baby's condition, the baby's problem.
That is when you see the different parenting skills that need to be taught.
All right, find the arrow first of all and that will be 98.6.
What number did you say?
98.
Okay, now find the 98 line and then the next big line would be what?
Oh, okay.
99.
Right.
Okay, so it's 99.6.
Right.
A lot of the single mothers that I see that have four or five children, they are many
times overwhelmed.
I like to think I may be helping by maybe showing them some things that may help them
deal with their sick baby or their child who may be premature, send home early.
Try to interject different ways of handling some of the stresses.
I like to feel that maybe through watching the mothers watching some of the things that
I do or the way I interact with the children that maybe they can see there may be different
ways of dealing with things.
Patty cake, patty cake, patty cake, patty cake.
The best thing that I can do lots of times is to just perform.
That's a job.
You know?
It might not seem like much and it might not be approved by Blue Cross and Blue Shield,
but when you come right down to it, that is a treatment that has to be taught.
Oh, yeah.
Yes.
Oh, yeah.
Becky Drew visits 16-month-old Louisa Rechick because she has cystic fibrosis.
Her 24-year-old mother, Cicora Santiago, is unmarried, pregnant, and has four other children.
Two-thirds of the children born in Chester are born to unmarried women.
Oh, yeah.
Is it sore?
Where did you cut it on?
A big piece in there.
Where did you put on it?
On both sides.
Good.
Having children is one way of having somebody to love you, and when you have that not only
just the mental but the physical thing from a child, that hugging and that touching and
that feeling wanted and loved is a very important thing.
It's fulfilling.
It makes you feel like you have a purpose in life, and when you don't have money and
you don't have a so-called cushy life or what have you, having a child in a way is making
that life that you have worth it.
You don't think about are you going to put them through college or are they going to
have enough clothes on their back, even with food to eat, things like that.
It's just the fact that you need to be loved and you need to be wanted by someone, and
a child fulfills all of that, and a lot of these women fulfills it in me, too, as a mother.
I can understand how they feel about that.
When you have a kid that is sitting on your lap and hugging you no matter what you do,
it's a nice feeling.
It gives you a sense of purpose.
Kitty Wright is 18 and the youngest of her mother's nine children.
Six years ago, she was crippled in a fight with a neighbor.
Her 19-year-old boyfriend, Jeff Jones, is a high school dropout.
Their baby was born after Kitty's junior year in high school.
Were you married, widowed, single, divorced, single?
Kitty and I knew each other in elementary school.
We just started getting back together.
It was about two and a half years ago, maybe a year and a half ago, I'm not really sure.
And we just decided we liked each other again and started going out.
It was kind of like we started dating, then we went steady, then kind of like made a commitment
to each other, and Jeffrey came along accidentally.
It wasn't supposed to be this soon, but I had plans on getting married and all before
Jeffrey came with Kitty, and that's about it.
In Chester, one out of every four babies is born to a teenage mother.
There's a lot of kids having kids today.
It's really weird how a community of kids can all have babies, like my friends and all.
They're all having babies, including me.
They were mostly accidents.
I had protection.
She didn't because she was on the pill before and she's trying to get a birth control now
where she was on all kinds of birth control before and it messed up her system, says she
couldn't take birth control.
Now she's trying to get another birth control because I'm tired of what I have to use.
But yes, we did have protection.
It was an accident, but it must have been a hole in it.
We had diarrhea yesterday a couple of times.
How's that doing today?
I haven't changed.
He hasn't gone.
So that's not it.
It's real watery or?
It's squishy.
Children get pregnant.
Teenagers get pregnant because they want to get pregnant.
They want to have babies.
It's not for lack of birth control.
Every child knows where to get birth control.
Every teenager knows where to get birth control.
They could even tell us where to get birth control.
It's available, it's not expensive.
In fact, a teenage girl who would like to get the birth control pill does not need the
permission from her parent to be treated at a medical facility for gynecologic care in
order to get birth control pills.
She's what we call an emancipated minor when it comes to sexual matters and she can sign
for her own care and therefore get birth control pills.
The girls want to have babies.
The baby's doctors, concerned with his low birth weight and Kitty's physical limitations,
wanted the baby to receive home nursing care.
Jackie Blunden was familiar with the case.
During Kitty's pregnancy, she had been a frequent visitor to Kitty's home.
That's not a life or death thing, you know, with the family planning.
That was just for your own, you know, your own protection.
I am a little concerned now with you right now about your, your coughing.
I'm just hoping you're not coming down with a bad cold because remember when you told
me you went out with your friends before the, I think it was before the baby came home.
You went out with your friends to the movies.
Yeah, in Norringham.
Yeah, I don't know what happened.
Yeah.
See, that's the kind of thing I, I get concerned about because when you take the baby home.
I didn't roll in Norringham, I sat in the car.
You sat in the car.
But between the movie house and the car, what happened?
I was in the rain.
You got pretty well soaked, right?
Right.
So that's what I wanted to check out with you, okay?
Because if it does develop into something, the first one to pick it up from you is going
to be you know who, okay?
Because you're around them all the time.
What have you been eating?
What has Jeff been feeding you?
Ice cream, candy bars, potato chips.
Soda.
Now, I'm sure that he's opening your mouth and force feeding you too.
Yeah.
Oh, he is.
Yeah, see, he don't really feed it to me.
He just gives me the money and says, here, do what you want with it.
Oh, well, that makes a whole big difference than do what you want with it.
I just like junk food, so I'll have to directly eat and get soda float or something.
Thanks, baby.
When a person doesn't know something or doesn't know how to do a particular task, it seems
almost easy to think that, well, just teach them how to do it and they'll pick it up.
But you can't teach maturity.
That's something that comes with age and grace.
And unfortunately, for many of these adolescent moms, physically, they're capable of reproducing
and having children earlier and earlier.
It's not unusual to see a 12 or a 13-year-old girl in the clinic setting, preparing for
her first delivery.
That's a difficult case to handle and needs a tremendous amount of community support and
family support in order to successfully have both mother and baby nurtured within their
own home situation.
Kitty, could you call your mom and ask her to come in, please?
Mom?
What?
Come here.
I will make my visits in conjunction with not just the mother of the child, but whoever
the person, the extended family member may be.
And usually it's women in the family who would make themselves available as a role model
for the adolescent to learn mothering behaviors.
Unfortunately, you find yourself in situations where you don't find a suitable role model.
I'm not lying.
I'm just telling you what they're telling me on the phone now.
I'm calling the borough just to verify that the inspector was out yesterday.
She wasn't able to tell me that.
Jackie Blunden discovered that Kitty's mother had been unable to arrange with the town for
repairs to be made to a broken sewer main.
The sewage was contaminating the water supply.
Please don't walk away while I'm talking to you.
If you don't sign that agreement, then it's going to be up to you to fix the sewer.
And it's got to be done.
You've got to get this problem straightened out right here, right now, okay?
Okay, if you and I both had the money to do it, she would have had it done, all right?
Now this baby has been home for more than two weeks.
He has developed an infection.
And the longer that this goes on, the more health problems we have, okay?
So if this isn't resolved within 48 hours, I'm going to have to return to Children and
Youth Services and have mom and baby placed someplace else until it is fixed.
Thanks a lot for your information.
Right.
Bye.
Many poor mothers are afraid of Children and Youth Services because of the broad powers
that the agency can exercise over their lives.
In the most serious cases, the agency can take children away from their parents.
This is my last resort.
You need help, Kitty.
And you need it now.
Okay?
You just can't afford to pay for your own counselor to come in and help you out, right?
Have you ever worked with Children and Youth before?
Have you?
Huh?
Okay.
Yeah, hi.
This is Jackie Blunden.
I'm calling from Delaware County Home Health.
I need to speak with an intake worker on a family situation with a physical, okay, now
it's not an abuse thing.
It's the environment, the physical environment of the house.
By the time Children and Youth Services was ready to respond to Jackie Blunden's phone
call, Kitty had left her mother's house.
Kitty, Jeff, and the baby all moved to Jeff's mother's apartment in a neighboring town.
Relations with Jeff's mother had frequently been strained in the past.
Could I ask why you chose to come back here?
Because you know, the last time I spoke with you, I understood that this was off-bounds.
Because I didn't want to get hurt.
Okay.
There was no place else to go.
I talked.
Okay.
I talked.
Because of my mom.
Okay.
What's going on right now with your brothers and sisters?
Who had been a help to you before in the same situation?
Because they're all jerks.
That's a real detailed answer, Kitty.
That really helps.
You know, they're all jerks.
They all don't have the room because they all have kids.
First of all, there's not a brother or sister around here, around this immediate area, but
one.
And I couldn't go to any of them except that one.
Okay.
Now, which one are you talking about?
Sammy.
Okay.
Now, the last time that we had a problem, Kitty went to Carol's house.
And that's too far away from my work.
And she's an off-line.
He couldn't stay there anyway.
Well, he couldn't stay overnight there is what I understood Carol to say.
He couldn't stay overnight.
And she's mad at me anyway, so I see.
All right.
What does she need at you for?
Because we moved out.
Because you moved out.
Okay.
And did she understand what was going on at home?
Yeah, but my mom thinks that he's her baby and she's supposed to take care of him all
the time.
Is that what your mother said?
And he's supposed to be with her for the rest of her life.
And nobody's supposed to take him away from her.
So she makes up this whole big story and tells my brothers and sisters and gets them all
mad at me.
And of course, they're all going to believe her.
Okay.
So you're saying your mother lied about what was going on at home?
Yeah, because she doesn't want nobody to have the baby but her.
What was happening here over the weekend?
Is there any partying going on?
No.
Is that what, is that another thing your mom lied to me about then?
That when she called?
Oh yeah, we did have a party Friday night.
Oh, okay.
But that was just for a little while and there wasn't that many people here.
We were in bed by 11 o'clock.
Okay.
Was there drinking going on?
Yeah, and they were drinking.
Were you drinking?
No.
Yeah, a little bit.
What's a little bit?
Like I think I had about two glasses of beer and that was it.
Are you doing anything else?
No.
Are there any quailers, meth, anything here at all?
No.
Pot?
No.
How many glasses of beer gets you dizzy or gets you feeling good?
Do you understand where I'm going here?
Okay.
Do you understand?
I don't know.
Okay.
I know that it's important for you to keep in contact with your friends.
Suppose your friends come over tonight and another spontaneous party breaks out.
We've got mom here who's an alcoholic.
Well, what's going to prevent it from happening?
Me.
Because the baby.
Well, why didn't you do that on Friday night?
Because the baby wasn't here.
So the baby is the key.
As long as the baby's here, no drinking will go on.
I won't say that.
I said there won't be any partying going on.
There won't be people over here drinking.
I had a couple parties that I did a lot of other stuff, but there won't be any of that,
definitely.
Okay, why?
Why?
What's going to be the guarantee on that one?
What's going to be the guarantee?
Because I love my baby.
Okay.
All right.
See, I needed to hear you say that.
I love my baby.
I did.
And I know that you do.
Okay?
And what I'm trying to get you to think about is everything that you do will now affect
this little guy.
Okay?
You're going to be his eyes, his ears, his feet, everything for him until he can get
to the point where he can do it for himself.
Okay?
All right.
And that's going to be a couple years, a good 18 years.
Okay?
I want my son to be at least better than I was, his father, who messed up his life.
I want my son to be a doctor or a lawyer or an electrician, something with good paying
money for the future.
And I want to push him through school, not like my parents did to me.
My parents didn't care.
That's why I quit.
That's probably why I'm here today.
But I'm going to push my son through school, make sure he graduates and goes on to college,
because I have hopes, high hopes for him to become a doctor someday or at least something
with good paying money.
Kitty Wright returned to high school for her senior year in a township adjacent to Chester.
Jeff continued to work part-time in a car wash.
While Kitty was at school, teenage friends cared for the baby.
After six weeks of classes, Kitty dropped out of high school.
And how you meet those needs will differ with the kind of culture that you have.
Although Chester has a sizable white community, two-thirds of its teenage population is black.
Chester High School is 92% black.
These teenagers contend with a school environment that is very much like the streets of Chester.
Where violence and drug dealing are rampant.
Chester, man, Chester ain't no good.
Put it this way, if I had a kid, I wouldn't want to grow up in Chester.
Why is that?
Because it's not a place to grow up, Kitty, got a number of major drugs here.
It's like everybody getting shot over ten cent pieces of coke, you know?
Ten cent piece ain't no bigger than that, you know?
People getting shot over that, you know?
A number of big fights and stuff like that.
Now what if my kid walking down the street, right, and some dope dealer come up to him
and say, yo, I got that coke, get him on some coke heroin, anything, you know, not in Chester.
I wouldn't want my kid to grow up there, put it that way.
Andre Armstrong is a student at Youth in Action.
Youth in Action is an alternative school for juvenile first offenders and students who
have been suspended from Chester High School.
He broke the spokes out, he spoke, he stuck his foot in there and the spokes came out.
Boy, was that an accident?
I don't know what it was.
Well, it's not worth, you know, threatening someone's life.
And Larry, you gonna go home now?
Tommy Lee Jones is the founder of Youth in Action.
Children are very afraid when they're afraid of something.
They get rough and tough and they put on that facade so that you can't see the real hurt
that they're feeling inside of them.
Kids see everyday fathers home all day long, not working, so therefore they have a different
role model.
The world of work is on the main line.
The world of survival is in the city of Chester.
You do what you can to survive and this is what the young people have been told from
the day they are born into the day that they die.
You must learn how to survive.
And it's like living in a jungle.
The strong survive and then the weak perish.
And then you must learn how to be very strong.
And you start out very early being very strong by going to the store when you're two and
three years old by yourself, as opposed to having your mother carry you.
You know, taking care of your little brothers and sisters, you know, when you're just old
enough to walk yourself.
You know, these are some of the things that young people, that our young children have
to do.
They experience a very hard life before they're out of inter-kindergarten or daycare centers.
Donald Boone is a former Chester High School teacher.
The students in Boone's class at Youth in Action have arrest records on charges ranging
from petty theft to assault.
If the question is no, tell why on the back of this paper.
On the back of the paper or I'll give you long paper.
Why y'all write all that?
Number one.
Why not?
You know I don't like writing.
You don't like writing.
I tell you, you need writing.
You never wants to write.
Mr. Boone.
Oh, we got to do this right then and then.
Why would it be on the paper to do what's on the paper?
That'd be the same thing if you went on a job and you're not going to file a direction.
See now?
Here we go.
But why not?
Here we go.
Because I always try to relate while you're doing something.
Oh man.
I'm making a comparison.
Excuse me some paper, man.
Excuse me some paper.
Mr. Boone.
Now, you was just at court yesterday, right?
I know.
If you look at our city, most of the type of students that I had, their parents, their
parents basically are maybe supplementing or totally on some sort of welfare system.
So they look at, well, boom, this is a handout.
So really somebody owes me something.
I am concerned.
You know why I'm concerned?
Because I'm from here, then I feel as though they will be the future.
And I look at them now, they're poor future because they're not trying to get ready for
the future.
I guess the question, every time you put out a magazine and I asked them, what will you
be doing the year 2000?
We did a little role playing here, like how old will you be?
What are your goals?
And I tried to show them that year 2000 is basically only 15 years away.
Where will you be the year 2000?
And it was very interesting.
They said what they wanted to be doing, but yet it's like we're not willing to fight for
it.
I think a lot of kids here in Chess, they have to learn that no one is just going to
give you anything you have to get out there and work for.
And this is not being taught.
I want to have a lot of money, drive around in big cars, spending 20s and 10s, do all
that kind of stuff.
That's just how I want to be.
Have a lot of money and live right.
I dreams all the time that I have two jobs and that I have my own house and I get me
a car and my son have everything because he be bugging me about this and bugging me about
that and I have a dream that we travel and it just be us two, nobody else, just us two.
I had a dream one time, I had, what did I do?
I was working in construction and when I made it, I mean I say every week, during the week
I would look like a bum in junk, wearing my work clothes and stuff and as soon as on the
week I was living I had like two cars, a nice house, you know that's why I wanted to be.
I want to be living just like that.
That's living.
Anytime you got two cars, a nice house, not apartment, a house, you know you making that
good money, I mean like nice crib and everything, always got food in your refrigerator and stuff
like that, that's good, that's living.
I come from a family with 10 sisters and brothers.
We lived in the project but my parents taught us to work and make something better of yourself
and they taught us to try to help our community in any way that we can and I find that a lot
of parents aren't really teaching their children the true values of society or what society
has to offer or what they should be giving back to society.
If they would start in the schools and then start, the parents do their jobs as being
parents, they will have a future, I do believe that, but they would have to start now.
You couldn't, they couldn't wait until the child became 11 or 12, 5 or 6 would be the
time that you would start.
Here in this city you would have to start at an early age, not 11, 12.
I have to and I can't get no job and I had kids or something like that.
I might sell drugs for a while, make a good 10 grand, put it in the bank and all that,
put the money in the bank and I think that lasts me much, good to pay the rent, feed
my children for a while.
If I have to sell drugs to survive, I don't have to do it.
It's wrong selling drugs because it's against the law, but I still do it anyway because
I want to and because nobody can stop me out in the street from selling drugs except the
cops if I get caught and they really can't stop me, you know, nobody can tell me what
to do.
Can I say something, I don't think it's true that you should be going around telling people
that you're going to shoot them or you're going to bring this and bring that because
Johnny was telling me before that he was walking through the bend and you put a gun in his
face.
He told me the day when he came down that day he was going to come down near the night
with a sawed-off shotgun and he was going to rip my pockets off.
I've had people tell me, you know, it's no use, you know, working with these kids, there's
nothing that you can do to help them, but if we aren't very careful we're going to create
some monsters that we aren't going to be able to deal with.
This is what's happening here in the city, just our children are not being cultivated,
they're not being, you know, raised the way that it should be, so unfortunately they're,
you know, wasting away, you know, between the ages of 15 through 17 and by the time
that you're 18, 19 years old, 20, 21, you haven't achieved anything, you sort of want
to forget it and that's what happened, that's why there's so many on the corners, young
people whose lives have been wasted away because there's no dream for them, no hope.
The average kids will not have a future here because parents are not being parents, they
are just making babies.
They're not taking that commitment and saying, well I'm a parent, I'm going to be a parent,
I'm going to be a role model, I'm going to make sure that I try to raise this kid to
my best ability that I can, but this is the situation that really all of the young people
are in in Chester and I wonder what will it be like for them, not in five years, hey,
two years or three years, will it get any better or will it get worse?
From the looks of it now it's getting worse.
The future of many of these children that we don't even see or touch, it's hard to
determine what it's going to be.
I think that everyone has a survival instinct and how a child deals with their life and
with their surroundings and environment is an individual state.
I don't know what could become to them or become of them.
Hopefully somewhere along the line they're going to run into, into somebody who may shed
a little light into their lives and hopefully it'll be more than just a TV program that's
going to show them how to beat somebody up.
It's difficult to say what kind of a future they're going to have, I don't know.
For too many children in cities like Chester the cycle of poverty will not be broken.
They are growing up without a sense of possibility, without a realistic expectation that the future
will be better than the present.
The men and women who are working to improve the lives of Chester's children make a difference,
but they can reach only a few.
A final thought.
Over the past decade the growth of poverty among children has sharply risen even as that
among our elderly has appreciably declined.
The voting power of the elderly on Capitol Hill is a political fact of life.
Children however cannot lobby for themselves and thus our society in the normal order of
business and perhaps without realizing it may have left its children the most vulnerable
and unprotected.
Next week on Frontline, a unique look at the Soviet Union through the eyes of American
tourists who set out to find what the average Russian is like.
American tourists go in search of a happy Russian.
They have different ideas about us and we have different ideas and I still don't know
why we can't get things, why things can't be simpler.
Amid a carefully managed tour.
So as you see the session of brainwashing has started we are ready to go on.
There are glimpses of another Russia.
I don't think that I'm the best communist.
I'm not care because they don't bother me you know they don't come and say Sasha how
do you live and Sasha what do you do and Sasha I agree with the socialist system or not.
You know we we suppose that the committee of the state security.
The program is called Russia love it or leave it.
Next week on Frontline.
I'm Judy Woodruff, good night.
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