It Takes a Village Read online

  Perhaps most important are the lessons I have learned from my daughter and her friends and from children all over the world. Children have many lessons to share with us—lessons about what they need, what makes them happy, how they view the world. If we listen, we’ll be able to hear them. This book is about the first and best lesson they have taught me: “It takes a village to raise a child.”

  No Family Is an Island

  Snowflakes are one of nature’s most fragile things,

  but just look what they can do when they stick together.

  VERNA M. KELLY

  IWANT YOU to know a little about my family, because my experiences, like everyone’s, have informed my views. Whether or not we are parents, we were all once children, and that alone gives us opinions on the subject of raising them.

  I grew up in a family that looked like it was straight out of the 1950s television sitcom Father Knows Best. Hugh Ellsworth Rodham, my father, was a self-sufficient, tough-minded small-businessman who ran a plant that screen-printed and sold drapery fabrics. He was the only employee, except when he enlisted my mother or us children or hired day labor. He worked hard and never encountered a serious financial setback. But like many who came of age during the Great Depression, he constantly worried that he might. “Do you want us to end up in the poorhouse?” was a familiar refrain.

  He grew up in Scranton, Pennsylvania, as the middle of three boys, surrounded by a multitude of kinfolk on both sides of his family. He attended Penn State, where he was a loyal member of the Delta Upsilon fraternity. He graduated with a degree in education in 1935. His first job after college was back home in Scranton, selling lace curtains, but he moved to Chicago when he was offered a better job, selling textiles throughout the Midwest.

  One of our favorite pastimes as children was listening to him tell stories of his life “before you were born.” We loved hearing how, as a boy, he would go down into the local coal mines to find mules who were blind from spending their lives underground and would lead them out into the sun. He also hopped freight trains and then jumped off as they rolled slowly along the countryside. One time, however, a train took off so quickly he wound up riding all the way to Binghamton, New York. A boy doing any of that today would be called “delinquent.”

  Another time, after he had hitched a ride on the back of an ice truck, he was rammed from behind, and his lower legs and feet were badly broken. He was taken to the hospital, where the doctors wanted to amputate both feet. His mother, a formidable woman, barricaded herself in his room, refusing to let anyone in until her brother-in-law, a country doctor, arrived. Then she ordered him to “save my sonny’s legs.” He did, and my father went on to have an active childhood and sports career, lettering in football in high school and college. Sometimes Mother knows best too!

  After Pearl Harbor, my father joined the navy, became a chief petty officer, and trained recruits at Great Lakes Naval Base, north of Chicago. He and my mother, Dorothy Howell, were married in 1942 and lived first in apartments in Chicago, where I was born in 1947. After they had saved up enough cash, they bought a house in the city of Park Ridge. My father didn’t believe in mortgages or credit, then or later.

  By upbringing and conviction, my father was a devout Methodist, who prayed kneeling by the side of his bed every night. He also was an old-fashioned Republican, who, until he met Bill Clinton, eagerly pulled the “R” lever in every voting booth he entered.

  I saw my father as the emissary from our home to the outside world, a place he perceived as very competitive. He was determined to give me and my two younger brothers, Hugh and Tony, the life tools we needed to survive and thrive. That meant, among other things, paying higher property taxes to live in a suburb that supported the schools his children attended. It meant periodic object lessons like driving us down to skid row to see what became of people who, as he saw it, lacked the self-discipline and motivation to keep their lives on track. It also meant having high expectations and pushing us to meet them.

  When I brought home straight A’s from junior high, my father’s only comment was, “Well, Hillary, that must be an easy school you go to.” By raising the bar, he encouraged me to study even harder, and in fact, comments like that spurred me on. I realized later that this well-meaning motivational ploy could have had the opposite effect on a child of a different temperament than mine, who might have decided she could never live up to the expectations that had been set for her.

  As it happened, my father’s parenting tactics were harder on my brothers than on me, perhaps because they were boys. They idolized him, and he saw them as appropriate subjects for the training methods he had applied in the navy to prepare young men for combat. He was less certain of how to treat a daughter, beyond broadly encouraging me to do whatever I did as well as I could. He often told us, “When you work, work hard. When you play, play hard. And don’t confuse the two.”

  My father was devoted to his own family and took us to visit them every August at Lake Winola, outside Scranton. We stayed at my grandfather’s cottage, which had neither hot water nor an indoor bath or shower. We kids didn’t mind. We loved exploring the mountain in back of the cottage, fishing in the Susquehanna River, and swimming every day “to stay clean.”

  The whole clan, along with friends and neighbors who dropped by regularly, sat for hours on the front porch of the cottage, chatting and playing pinochle. Part of what I loved about those vacations was spending time with my grandfather, who had come to America from Durham County, England, as a young boy and had started working in the lace mills at eleven. He was proud of the high school diploma he had earned through correspondence courses, and of the gold watch he had received after working in the same place for fifty years. My grandmother died when I was quite young, but my grandfather, along with my great-aunts and great-uncles, steeped us in stories of the family’s life in England and Wales. Those vacations were a big part of my childhood, not least because they provided some of the best times I ever had with my dad.

  My father constantly reminded us how many advantages we had compared to his generation and to most people in the world. “You will never know how lucky you are” was a phrase I heard more times than I can count. He and the fathers of most of my friends were men who had paid their dues and then devoted their energies to giving their families the financial security they themselves had missed. If my friends and I were foolish enough to ask for extra pocket money or an advance on our allowance, we received the classic lecture about money not growing on trees or how they had walked miles to school through the snow. All of our fathers thought we had easy lives compared to theirs.

  When the neighborhood fathers took us ice-skating on the Des Plaines River, they stood around the fire drinking hot toddies, trading stock market lore, and, yes, complaining about politicians. We may have rolled our eyes, but we learned a lot from watching and listening to them, even when they were not interacting with us directly. None of them could have explained what “quality time” was. They were just there for us—at dinner, on weekends, during holidays, as part of our daily lives. They were fulfilling the traditional paternal role, supporting the family financially, guiding us into the uncharted terrain of adulthood by toughening us up, scouting out dangers ahead, and preparing the way.

  My mother assumed an equally traditional role, providing the unlimited affection and encouragement that smoothed our path and balanced the pressures my father imposed. She organized our daily lives and fed us with her devotion, imagination, and great spirit. She attended every school and sports event and cheered for us whether we scored or struck out. She taught Sunday school, helped out at our public school, and was there when we came home for lunch. She entertained our friends, took us to the library, and made sure we did our chores.

  My mother loved learning and spent hours discussing our school projects and typing our papers. She had not had the money to attend college, although she later took college courses for credit. But during the hours I spent with her, I learned so
me of the most important lessons of my life—above all, what it means to have unconditional love and support.

  My family, like every family I know of, was far from perfect. But however imperfect we were, as individuals and as a unit, we were bound together by a sense of commitment and security. My mother and father did what parents do best: They dedicated their time, energy, and money to their children and made sacrifices to give us a better life.

  IN 1994, the Carnegie Corporation issued a comprehensive report, Starting Points, which details the conditions that are undermining the development of America’s youngest citizens—its infants and toddlers. In the report, child development expert Dr. David Hamburg, the Carnegie Corporation’s president, describes the ideal landscape in which to plant a child: an “intact, cohesive, nuclear family dependable under stress.” That description calls to mind the family in which I grew up.

  My parents also had a lot of help from the village in raising my brothers and me. Our community was a visible extension of our family. We were in and out of our friends’ yards and houses constantly. We played softball, curb ball, and a form of tag called chase-and-run, and we staged elaborate team contests modeled on the Olympics, all under the watchful eyes of parents.

  On summer nights, our parents sat together in one another’s yards or on porches, chatting while we kids played. Sometimes a few of the fathers dressed up in sheets and told us ghost stories. We marched with our Scout troops or school groups or rode bikes in holiday parades through our town’s small downtown, to a park where all the kids were given Popsicles.

  Our relatives were a visible, daily part of the village as well. Grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins all pitched in if illness or some other misfortune strained the family. When my brother Tony had rheumatic fever at nine, he had to stay in bed for months, recuperating. Our grandfather came from Scranton and sat for hours at Tony’s bedside, playing card games and reading aloud until he lost his voice.

  There were plenty of other caring, responsible adults who did their best to see that all the children in the community were getting the attention they needed. From librarians to crossing guards to Scout leaders, adults looked out for us, made sure we had enough to do and a place to do it.

  There was a consensus among adults that they needed to present a united front when dealing with children. Adult authority gave us both a structure to our lives and a target to rebel against. We knew what the rules were, even if we sometimes broke them.

  Community resources were managed for the benefit of children. The land surrounding each school served as a park and playing field for kids all year round. The schools were open summer mornings for sports and arts-and-crafts programs run by teenagers.

  The church was an important presence in our lives. My brothers and I went faithfully to Sunday school and were usually back at church at least once more during the week for youth group meetings, athletic competitions, potluck suppers, or play rehearsals.

  Our church exposed us to the world beyond our all-white middle-class suburb. Sunday school teachers taught us that prejudice was wrong in the sight of God and explained that the reason God made so many different kinds of people was to enjoy their diverse beauties and gifts, like a garden’s various fruits and flowers. Those simple but powerful lessons were reinforced by our youth minister, who took us to meet black and Hispanic teenagers in downtown Chicago for service and worship exchanges. He also arranged for a group of us to meet Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., when he came to Chicago to speak.

  Because my village was so secure, I had a hard time imagining what life was like for those in less fortunate circumstances. My church gave me concrete experiences that forced me to confront the reality of inequity and injustice. Without my knowing it at the time, my village was starting to expand. The stability of family life that I knew growing up was not limited to my privileged little pocket of the world, of course.

  I’ve talked with my friend Marian Wright Edelman, president of the Children’s Defense Fund, about her childhood in segregated Bennettsville, South Carolina, during the 1940s and 1950s. In her books The Measure of Our Success and Guide My Feet, she describes the web of relationships that her family sustained and was sustained by. Her father and mother not only raised five children and ran a church; they also took in foster children, tended the sick and elderly, and were leaders in the black community. Marian and her family encountered brutal instances of racism, but they had something much stronger to lean on: their religious faith and their commitment to one another. They were a strong family anchored in a village that supported them against the evil and injustice of the larger society.

  For good or ill, our families and the environments in which we live are the backdrop against which we play out our entire lives. Families shape our futures; our early family experiences heavily influence, and to a degree determine, how we forever after think and behave. At the same time, our families are shaped by the forces at work in the larger society—and by the village, whether it is a suburb or a ghetto, in which the family lives. That is why it is important for us to try to understand the personal and social forces that formed our own families, and how they shaped—and continue to shape—both our lives and the village around us.

  THOSE WHO urge a return to the values of the 1950s are yearning for the kind of family and neighborhood I grew up in and for the feelings of togetherness they engendered. The nostalgia merchants sell an appealing Norman Rockwell–like picture of American life half a century ago, one in which every household was made up of stable parents, two kids, a dog, and a cat who all lived in a house with a manicured lawn and a station wagon in the driveway. Life seemed simpler then, and our common values clearer.

  I understand that nostalgia. I feel it myself when the world seems too much to take. There were many good things about our way of life back then. But in reality, our past was not so picture-perfect. Ask African-American children who grew up in a segregated society, or immigrants who struggled to survive in sweatshops and tenements, or women whose life choices were circumscribed and whose work was underpaid. Ask those who grew up in the picture-perfect houses about the secrets and desperation they sometimes concealed.

  The longing we feel for “the way things used to be” obscures not only the reality of earlier times but the larger settings in which the family finds itself today, as it struggles with the effects of broken homes, discrimination, economic downturns, urbanization, consumerism, and technology. Whenever someone bemoans the loss of “family values,” I think about the changes that began when I was a child in the 1950s which have dramatically altered the way we live, much as the automobile reshaped the lives of an earlier generation.

  Nobody predicted the magnitude of the changes, good and bad, that the technological revolution would bring. The advent of television is the most obvious instance. We got our first set in 1951. It was a fascinating novelty, and my father complained that we would watch television all day, starting with 6:00 A.M. mass for shut-ins, if he would let us. But television was not nearly the presence in families’ lives or the influence on their values that it has become.

  Another big innovation was fast-food restaurants. We lived near the very first McDonald’s franchise in America, in Des Plaines, Illinois. I can remember how the sign announcing the number of hamburgers sold was changed from week to week. But most of us still ate dinner at home, at the same time every night, facing each other at the table and “minding our manners.” Going out to eat—even for a hamburger—was a special, memorable occasion. Today I know adults so busy with their jobs that they cannot tell you the last time they had a family meal that included their kids—and excluded the television set.

  Starting in the 1950s, we also began to move around more. When President Eisenhower championed the country’s massive federal highway system and airport-building program for national defense reasons, few people imagined how those roads and airports would come to influence family life. I took my first plane ride when I was in high school; my nephews flew acr
oss the country as infants.

  New roads permitted more people to commute to work in cities from suburbs like mine and to settle even farther away. The construction of highways broke up some existing neighborhoods and sapped the economic life of others. Daily visits with cousins and grandparents became rarer as businesses began transferring workers all over the country. We were among the lucky who could choose to sink roots and stay in one place.

  Advances in telecommunications were just starting then too. The houses in my neighborhood typically had one phone downstairs and one upstairs, with only one line. Children had to limit their time on the phone and use it in a public part of the house. We were not slaves to our phones; if someone called and we were out, they would call back if it was important. No one had an answering machine. And there were no cellular phones to interrupt what we were doing or to distract us from those around us.

  In many ways, families like mine had the best of both worlds—the prosperity generated by new technology and mass production, without the conflicts and anxiety these developments inflicted on households and individuals within a few decades. We could attain a comfortable standard of living on a single income, typically the father’s. Even with a limited education, people could find work and expect to keep it until retirement, without worrying about being rendered obsolete by automation or information technology. A third of the work force belonged to unions, and the gap between what workers and their managers were paid seemed like a fordable stream.

  Most of all, we felt that we were part of the same enterprise. It may have been the cold war that brought us together, but together was how we felt. When President Eisenhower urged us to study more math and science after the Soviet Sputnik was launched, we believed that our President and our country needed us to do that. President Kennedy’s call to public service inspired many of us too. We were not subjected to a daily diet of second-guessing and cynicism about the motives and actions of every leader and institution.