A Minor Revolution: How Prioritizing Kids Benefits Us All

by Adam Benforado Narrated by Adam Benforado

Overview

A revelatory investigation into how America is failing its children, and an urgent manifesto on why helping them is the best way to improve all of our lives-from the New York Times bestselling author of Unfair: The New Science of Criminal Injustice

“Compelling . . . an extremely sympathetic and worthy attempt to protect kids . . . [Benforado] has written a book that reads like a manifesto. His ideas are bold, to the point, and ambitious.”-The Atlantic

At the dawn of the twentieth century, a bright new age for children appeared on the horizon, with progress on ending child labor, providing public education, combating indigence, promoting wellness, and creating a juvenile justice system. But a hundred years on, the promised light has not arrived. Today, more than eleven million American children live in poverty and more than four million lack health insurance. Each year, we prosecute thousands of kids as adults, while our schools crumble. We deny young people any political power, while we fail to act on the issues that matter most to them: racism, inequality, and climate change.

Through unforgettable stories, law professor Adam Benforado draws a vivid portrait of our neglect. We are there when Ariel is placed in an orphanage after her parents are locked away for transporting marijuana, when Harold first gazes in disbelief upon the immaculate lawn of an elite private school after a childhood of asphalt play yards, when Wylie is hit with a paddle by his public-school principal as punishment for taking a moment of silence to protest gun violence. When Tyler runs for governor at age seventeen, we are also there to witness the extraordinary capacities of young people.

Our disregard for children's rights is not simply a moral problem; it's also an economic and social one. The root cause of nearly every major challenge we face-from crime to poor health to unemployment-can be found in our mistreatment of kids. But in that sobering truth is also the key to changing our fate as a nation.

Drawing on the latest research on the value of early intervention, investment, and empowerment, A Minor Revolution makes the urgent case for putting children first-in our budgets and policies, in how we develop products and enact laws, and in our families and communities. Childhood is the window of opportunity for all of us.

Editorial Reviews

From the Publisher

Compelling . . . An extremely sympathetic and worthy attempt to protect kids . . . [Benforado] has written a book that reads like a manifesto. His ideas are bold, to the point, and ambitious.”—The Atlantic

“Ambitious . . . His unifying argument is anti-inertial. . . . The book blew my mind.”—Salon

“A bracing, encyclopedically researched, surprisingly hopeful take on how we could get ourselves a better country by enshrining children’s rights in the law.”—New York

“Adam Benforado has created a powerful new way to look at American society through the lens of our children: at once our biggest assets and our most vulnerable members. He weaves compelling real-life stories with legal and economic analysis to deliver a bracing indictment of our society’s self-sabotage. He doesn’t end there, however; his final recommendations for how to change course are both revolutionary and accessible.”—Heather McGhee, New York Times bestselling author of The Sum of Us

“An urgent call for us to rethink our societal priorities and start putting children first. Adam Benforado doesn’t just expose the wrongs done to kids around the world and in our own backyards—he offers a road map for righting them.”—Adam Grant, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Think Again and host of the TED podcast Re:Thinking

“A Minor Revolution is a major revelation. With a prosecutor’s precision and a reformer’s passion, Adam Benforado has crafted an agenda-setting book—one that offers a startling look at the present and a hopeful path for the future.”—Daniel H. Pink, #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Power of Regret, Drive, and A Whole New Mind

“Adam Benforado’s accessible new book combines vividly written case studies with a comprehensive review of the latest scientific research to offer a simple but radical prescription for what ails America—put our kids first. It is a must-read for anyone of any political persuasion who is concerned with restoring the American dream of equal opportunity and upward mobility.”—Robert D. Putnam, New York Times bestselling author of Our Kids

“A Minor Revolution will forever challenge the way you think about America’s treatment of her children.”—Dorothy A. Brown, author of The Whiteness of Wealth

“A Minor Revolution sounds an alarm bell we all should have heard one hundred years ago. Maybe, maybe, this time we’ll listen.”—Janti Soeripto, president and CEO of Save the Children US

“A thoughtful and practical manifesto for large-scale reform . . . Benforado argues persuasively for the need to prioritize children’s welfare by the government, the law, businesses, and the community as a whole.”—Kirkus Reviews

“In this persuasive and wide-ranging study, [Benforado] show[s] an urgent need to ‘put children first.’ . . . . Deeply researched and passionately argued, this is an irrefutable call for change.”—Publishers Weekly

Kirkus Reviews

2022-12-13
A law professor and father demonstrates how keeping children at the forefront can ensure a robust society.

Benforado argues persuasively for the need to prioritize children's welfare by the government, the law, businesses, and the community as a whole. Once the focus of progressive reformers, the rights of children have retreated into the background. No longer “in the vanguard,” the U.S. has “fallen behind other advanced nations on protecting children at every stage of development." Benforado examines children's lives from infancy to the cusp of adulthood, suggesting changes that could affect them profoundly. National parental leave, for example, would foster parent-infant attachment. Investing in early childhood education, as well as greater access to health care and housing, would lessen the economic inequality that impedes many children's futures. "In America today," writes the author, "one in six kids grows up in poverty. In our largest cities, one in seven has experienced eviction by the age of fifteen." Benforado suggests reforms to the criminal justice system to account for the harmful impact of a parent's incarceration, and he lays out the reasons we must reconsider harsh sentences imposed on young offenders. The author cites psychological and sociological studies to support his proposal of granting the vote to adolescents, who, he contends, are often more politically literate than many adults. Even partial suffrage would give young people input on issues that are particularly relevant to them; alternatively, their votes could be weighted based on age. Young people's voices, perspectives, and leadership, the author believes, can bring about changes in areas beyond government. "On many issues," he asserts, "young people may encourage us to rethink long-held assumptions, reform antiquated practices, and seize opportunities." Citing researchers' findings and abundant firsthand testimony, Benforado underscores his main point: Children are being victimized "not from our deliberate actions to disadvantage" them "but from our lack of awareness."

A thoughtful and practical manifesto for large-scale reform.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940174997905
Publisher:	Penguin Random House
Publication date:	02/07/2023
Edition description:	Unabridged

Read an Excerpt

Chapter 1

The First Years

The Right to Attachment

The boy was put out with the chickens. He wasn’t yet two. The reasons remain hidden in the past. Sujit’s mother killed herself. His father was found stuffed in the trunk of a taxi. There is not anyone left to ask, though there were witnesses. In the rural village outside of Suva, Fiji, the neighbors noticed the boy from time to time, penned in the coop, underneath the house out of the sun, tied up with the hens. But, for years, he was left there.

When social workers finally intervened, Sujit was eight. He could not speak. And he didn’t move like a boy. He would hop, perch. When food was brought to him, he’d knock over the plate and peck at the meal on the floor. The sounds that emerged from his mouth were like bird calls. He didn’t want to sleep in the bed they made for him at the Samabula Old People’s Home. He set down to roost on the stone.

There are animals that do not require caregiving when they emerge into the world. Megapodes are like that. The stocky, chicken-like birds do not parent. They spend their days on themselves: stalking the wooded landscapes of the Pacific islands kicking up leaves in a search for centipedes, lizards, termites, shoots, and seeds. While most birds incubate their eggs with their own bodies, megapodes lay theirs inside warm mounds of decaying vegetation or in sand piles naturally heated by the sun. Their offspring dig themselves out when they are ready. The youngsters emerge with eyes open, able to run and forage. Within an hour, they can fly. They aren’t taught; they aren’t nurtured. Even in their first day of life, megapodes are completely independent, off to explore without mom or dad. One chick, only a few days old, was spotted flying twenty-five miles out at sea.

We are not like that. We need our people from the moment we are born. And when we do not have them—when we are denied those nurturing bonds—the consequences can be devastating and permanent. The tragic experiences of profoundly neglected children like Sujit—those locked in basements alone, forgotten in institutions, lost to regular human contact—reveal just how essential our human connectivity is for development.

That was not at all clear to experts a hundred years ago. As the Children’s Bureau’s 1914 publication Infant Care exhorted, “The rule that parents should not play with the baby may seem hard, but it is without doubt a safe one.” The influential psychologist John Watson echoed the sentiment in his 1928 book Psychological Care of Infant and Child: “Let [the child] learn to overcome difficulties almost from the moment of birth. . . . If your heart is too tender and you must watch the child, make yourself a peephole so that you can see it without being seen, or use a periscope . . . and, finally, learn not to talk in endearing and coddling terms.” Be a megapode parent, in other words.

It was not until the middle of the twentieth century that we began to rethink the value of detachment, prompted in large part by our primate relatives. While rhesus monkeys share roughly 93 percent of their DNA with humans and demonstrate similar behavior, they develop roughly four times faster. They can also be randomly assigned to particular early-life conditions in a controlled laboratory experiment. When, in the 1950s, Harry Harlow showed that orphaned baby monkeys preferred a terry cloth “surrogate” with cradled arms over a wire mother that offered milk but no surface to cling to, it suggested that we’d been overlooking something critical in early development: for primates, comfort might be a greater necessity than food. And in numerous subsequent experiments, we’ve gotten a picture of just how important parental attachment is to the life course.

In one recent study, researchers tracked generations of rhesus monkeys over three decades. When they were born, each monkey was either raised by its mother or placed in a nursery. The nursery conditions were designed to be enriching, with plenty of nourishment, human care whenever needed, and playtime with other baby monkeys—just no mom. At eight months, all monkeys were brought together and reared in identical conditions. Each generation that followed was subject to the same protocol.

What researchers found is that early-life attachment between a child and their mother yields significant health and social benefits, not simply to the child but to subsequent generations. Monkeys allowed to develop a strong attachment to their mothers and descended from a lineage of monkeys bonded to their moms had the best health and rose the highest up the monkey hierarchy as they aged. They had the strongest chance at securing the rhesus good life, as measured in access to choice food items and grooming from the most coveted partners. The intergenerational benefit of being from a line of mother-raised monkeys, though, didn’t accrue to those who were themselves reared in the nursery. As the authors concluded, “[P]arenting is the primary channel of intergenerational transmission of early-life advantage.” And if you’re denied that special bond at the very beginning, it doesn’t matter that things get better later. After just eight months, the monkeys were all treated the same, but they were indelibly, forever different.

Unfortunately, the research on human children paints the same picture. Young people deprived of nurturing attachments in the first years of life miss out on an essential basis for their healthy development intellectually, emotionally, socially, physically, behaviorally, and morally. Secure bonds are the foundation for learning about and exploring the new world. It is within these vital relationships that we gain our sense of self, how to navigate the social landscape, how to learn, how to trust, how to control ourselves, and how to love. The costs of isolation manifest in learning disabilities, interpersonal struggles, and poor physical and mental health decades into the future.

Seventy-six years ago, Dr. Benjamin Spock published The Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care, indelibly reshaping the way we raise our children. Though it is often described as the bible of child-rearing, it’s really more of a user’s manual: a how-to guide, marrying the logic of a Vulcan with a down-to-earth empathy. I was a Spock baby, as were my parents before me. Spock, a Yale-trained pediatrician, didn’t buy the conventional wisdom of his time that warned against excessive affection. He wanted parents who were involved with their kids. For him, the equation was simple: “Useful, well-adjusted citizens are the most valuable possessions a country has, and good . . . care during early childhood is the surest way to produce them.” But there was more standing in the way than the scowls of elderly neighbors who thought children were best neither heard nor seen. Indeed, in Spock’s view, the biggest problem was a quite modern development: the rise of families where both parents worked outside the home. While Spock couldn’t rise above the cringe-worthy sexism of his time, he recognized the fundamental dilemma that posed: “It doesn’t make sense to let mothers [or fathers!] go to work making dresses in a factory or tapping typewriters in an office, and have them pay other people to do a poorer job of bringing up their children.” As he reasoned, “It would save money in the end if the government paid a comfortable allowance to all mothers [and fathers] of young children who would otherwise be compelled to work.”

Today, we know that there are many positives that come from having parents successfully pursuing careers outside the home. But Spock’s core claim remains true: it makes sense for parents to spend more time with their kids, particularly when they are very young, and investing in giving parents time to do that makes sense for society.

Especially in the early years of life, the research is clear that greater parental investment makes a significant difference. Paid childcare leave is linked to reduced mortality and better health. With time off from work, women are able to breastfeed longer and infants get more one-on-one attention. Paid leave also supports parent-child bonding, which is associated with improved physical and cognitive development.

The benefits of increased parental involvement in early child-rearing appear to extend far into the future. When researchers looked at what happened after Norway changed its maternity leave policy to guarantee women four months of paid leave in 1977, they found that the increased time mothers spent with their kids correlated with reduced high school dropout rates and higher incomes at age thirty. The effects were largest for mothers who had the least education.

Part of the reason may be that early bonding promotes later connectedness between children and their parents. In one study of 1,319 mostly socioeconomically disadvantaged families, fathers who took two or more weeks of leave had children who, at age nine, reported greater closeness, communication, and engagement with their dad. And the children of engaged fathers demonstrate numerous advantages as they mature, from superior language development to more advanced social and cognitive skills.

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