https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/18/opinion/coronavirus-school-closures.html
In yesterday’s NYT op-ed, Nicholas Kristof claimed that “remote learning is proving to be a catastrophe for many low-income children.” That last phrase – “low-income children” – caught my eye. I don’t remember having really paid attention to it before, though I must have seen the term used in articles any number of times over the years.
How many children in America have any income at all? I’m guessing here, but I imagine that most children – i.e., people under 18 years of age – probably have no income whatsoever until and unless they get summer jobs or part-time jobs during their junior high or high school years, or full-time jobs if they drop out of school or leave home.
When I was a kid, my parents gave me a small weekly allowance: fifty cents? a dollar? two dollars? I don’t remember exactly, but it wasn’t much by today’s standards, though it seemed like a lot to me at the time. And when I mowed the lawn, my father paid me something – maybe a quarter or two. Again, I don’t remember exactly. Was that my income?
According to Merriam-Webster, income is ”a gain or recurrent benefit usually measured in money that derives from capital or labor.”
A weekly allowance is clearly a “recurrent benefit,” but it doesn’t derive “from capital or labor,” unless the allowance is contingent upon fulfilling certain household chores or fulfilling other assigned tasks.
My first paying job outside the home was as a Munchkin in a San Diego Starlight Opera production of The Wizard of Oz, when I was eight. I received a single, crisp new twenty-dollar bill for appearing several weekends in a row in that musical. (I still know the tunes and lyrics to all the songs in the show.) I also received my Social Security number and card at that time. Having been paid twenty bucks as an eight-year-old, would I have qualified as one of San Diego’s “low-income children”?
I know the term “low-income children” doesn’t actually mean what it says. Rather, it refers to the children in low-income families. But words do have meaning. There actually are teenagers who work for a living, whose income is low. They are the real ”low-income children.” The teenagers who star in the Netflix series “Stranger Things” are “high-income children,” not because their parents make a bunch of money but because they earn it themselves.
We should not expect kids to earn a living. Nor should we use language which implies that they do. A more accurate term than “low-income children” is “children from low-income families.” Try that one on for size, Nick Kristof!