The Two-Income Trap - Elizabeth Warren [91]
Our advice here is born out of hope rather than sound financial reasoning. If you feel called to be a parent, we hope you will follow your heart. Yes, you may lose your home, and you may go bankrupt. We hope the joys will outweigh the financial pain. And besides, what other advice would you expect from two working mothers who believe in the great American middle class and who pray for its strong future?
But if you become a parent, we believe that you have an extra duty beyond providing for your child’s needs; you also have a duty to speak up. The data in this book show that families cannot protect themselves alone. So write your representatives in Congress, petition your school board, and speak out. There are 63 million parents in America, and with them, you are strong enough to make a difference. If you are to survive financially, you and other parents must band together for change. The survival of your interest group—parents—depends on it.
Bankrupt Children
There is one more reason you should act. Not for yourself, or for other parents, or for future parents. You should take action on behalf of the children.
This book is certain to make some people angry. Those who are convinced that the problem with American families can be summed up by materialism and irresponsibility will denounce us as hopeless apologists. Spokespersons for the lending industry will puff about how much good all that debt has done for the American family. Politicians who have taken millions of dollars to protect the giant banks will pointedly ignore this book while they loudly reaffirm that they are “pro-family.” And there will be no shortage of people who will continue to denounce the financially unlucky as moral failures.
But there is one fact that will be hard for even our most vocal critics to ignore. This year, an estimated 1.6 million children will go along for the ride when their parents declare bankruptcy. That means that more kids will be listed in their parents’ bankruptcies than will sign up for Little League. Or adopt a dog from the humane society. Or get braces on their teeth.17 If current trends continue, by the end of the decade one of every seven children in the United States will have lived through their parents’ bankruptcy.18
Much like divorce, bankruptcy is about a destabilized family. A whole nation has focused on the difficulties that children face when their parents divorce, while the problem of financial distress among middle-class parents is widely ignored. And yet, in any given year more children will live through their parents’ bankruptcy than their parents’ divorce. 19 For these children, bankruptcy is not simply a matter of having less spending money or getting fewer new clothes. Like the children of divorce, the children of economic failure lose the life they once knew.
In some cases, the effects of deteriorating family finances are subtle, difficult for a child to comprehend. Mom cries a lot, Dad sits home all day, and the heat has been shut off. In other cases, the fallout is abrupt. A foreclosure notice stuck to the front door, a cramped apartment on the other side of town, a new school. And sometimes the spillover is totally unexpected. Sara Swerdling, a thirty-eight-year-old mother in California, tried to insulate her eleven-year-old son from the financial 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