10.10/The Interior Life/The Private Life

Children and Parenthood in New York, 1989–2001

The Separation Agreement

Two Childhoods

Ten to twelve million was the estimate, at the high end, of how many American children between five and thirteen came home each afternoon in 1989 to a house with no adult in it, a house key worn on a string or a shoelace around the neck because there was nowhere else reliable to keep it.² The word for the condition — latchkey — dated to the 1940s, when the country’s mothers went into war-production plants, and by the late 1980s it named an unremarkable social fact rather than a crisis: a childcare-supply gap, tracked as such, not a child in danger. A few miles south, on the Upper East Side, a different and much newer childhood was being assembled for the children of the same decade’s other economy — met at the school gate, walked to a playground, walked home, fed, bathed, and put to bed without an unsupervised hour anywhere in the day. The arrangement had no name yet.

For the latchkey child, the logistics that filled the gap were improvised and unpaid. A neighbor a floor or two up, paid in nothing but the standing favor, held a spare key for years at a stretch. The child let herself in, called her mother’s workplace — a hospital nursing station, in a great many cases, nursing being one of the few professional jobs open to a woman without a four-year degree — and called again later if the line didn’t answer the first time; there was no machine to leave a message on before the middle of the 1980s. On the walk home, the corner bodega served as the block’s checkpoint: the owner knew the child’s face and knew her mother’s schedule, and treated the two minutes spent buying a candy bar as an unannounced attendance check as much as a sale. After-school programs existed — a Boys & Girls Club branch, a YMCA program, Head Start for the youngest — but ran chronically underfunded against a demand that outran every slot available, and against federal cuts to social-service funding earlier in the decade, so that by the second half of the 1980s the informal network — the woman with the key, the bodega, the older kids who walked the younger ones, the church mothers who knew every child on the block — was carrying weight the formal system did not.

The supervision gap between the two childhoods widened across the 1990s under pressure from a parental fear fixed in place by two abduction cases: one from years before the decade began, still open throughout the period, and a second, in 1993, whose coverage reached a Manhattan household with no personal connection to California at all.³⁴ Stranger-abduction homicides numbered in the low hundreds nationwide in a given year, against a child population of many tens of millions, and parental anxiety ran well ahead of the incidence rate: a hazard statistically rare enough to remain a genuine surprise to any one family became, across enough families, the hazard everyone assumed was closing in.⁵ The Upper East Side child’s after-school hours — school, pickup, forty-five minutes at the playground, home, snack, homework, bath, a parent’s key in the door around seven — answered a fear that the Bronx child’s afternoon, running on the same clock as it always had, did not have the household income to answer.

The women who staffed that Upper East Side schedule — overwhelmingly Caribbean and Filipina, commuting in from Queens, the Bronx, and Brooklyn — occupied their own contact zone between the city’s classes, a relationship this account treats at length in its record of the city’s inter-class contact.⁶ What belonged to the parents alone, rather than to the two women’s relationship to each other, was the calculation of covering the hours at all: whom to hire, what to pay, and how long a family could keep affording the answer.

The Tiered Economy of Care

A professional Manhattan couple choosing among the available options entered a market divided into distinct, clearly priced tiers — an au pair on a one-year visa, a Caribbean nanny paid by the week, a licensed daycare center, an unlicensed one — each carrying its own hours, its own visa status, and its own waiting list.⁸ What belonged to the parents, rather than to the specific tier chosen, was the arithmetic underneath all of them: a licensed daycare slot running twelve to eighteen thousand dollars a year against a starting editorial assistant’s salary of eighteen to twenty-two thousand meant that full-time formal care alone could consume three-quarters of the lower earner’s gross pay before rent or anything else was subtracted. The second income existed, in a great many of these households, mainly to purchase the arrangement that made the second income possible, and for a junior staffer the net gain approached zero. The ones who kept working through a child’s infancy were disproportionately the ones with a parent nearby to help or a partner earning enough to make the arithmetic beside the point; a large share of the rest left the job, left the city, or spent a year on a waiting list before any slot opened at all — a wait that, for the more sought-after infant programs, commonly ran past a year and sometimes began before the child was born.

The Every-Other-Weekend Father

The separation agreement that dissolved a marriage also settled, in the same document, the question of who kept the children on which days. A Park Avenue custody lawyer’s hourly rate and a contested case’s total legal bill were sums a certain kind of editor carried in his body for the rest of a career, whether or not he ever named them at his desk.

Absent an agreement to the contrary, a New York court applied a “best interests of the child” standard that produced a recognizable default: joint legal custody, so both parents kept a say in major decisions; primary physical custody with the mother in the large majority of cases; visitation running every other weekend, Friday to Sunday, plus one weekday evening; and child support fixed by statutory formula under the state’s 1989 Child Support Standards Act — seventeen percent of the noncustodial parent’s income for one child, twenty-five percent for two, twenty-nine percent for three — paid, in the overwhelming run of cases, by the father.⁹ What the agreement produced, for the parent on the losing end of the physical-custody default, was a specific and recurring weekend, arriving on a schedule his office calendar never had to acknowledge.

The Career Woman

A professional woman who reached her late thirties in New York across this period without children had, at her disposal, almost no vocabulary that did not carry an explanation built into it. “Career woman” framed childlessness as a trade already made; “she never married” stood, on its own, as a complete account of a woman past forty, and both phrases were still in ordinary use in 1989. Neither admitted the possibility that a woman had simply decided against children and considered the matter closed. A colleague, a source, or a relative who asked whether she had any — routine opening small talk in the period — required her to manage the questioner’s mild confusion at a “no,” and a woman past forty-five who volunteered that she had never wanted them still met, from family especially, the assurance that she might yet change her mind.

The technology behind the era’s fertility coverage had arrived recently and improved slowly. By 1993, in vitro fertilization was performed at 260 active clinics across the United States, at an average charge of a little over six thousand dollars a cycle — closer to eight to ten thousand dollars in practice once medication was added — for odds that one leading clinic put at thirty-two percent per embryo transfer for women under forty that year, though the rate nationally, and for older patients specifically, ran lower.¹⁰¹¹ Insurance covered almost none of it: one contemporaneous actuarial estimate put the cost of adding the procedure to a standard employer health plan at under three dollars per employee per year — a workforce of a thousand could have been covered for a sum a mid-sized company would not have noticed leave the budget — and almost no employer added it, a decision renewed year after year without a memo naming it.¹⁰ A woman who tried the procedure and did not conceive did not, as a rule, discuss it at her desk, and the same silence covered the woman who had never tried at all.

The Correspondent’s Absence

Washington Heights, running north from roughly 155th Street to the island’s tip, held the country’s largest concentration of Dominican immigrants by 1989, anchored by Fort Tryon Park, the Broadway commercial strip, and a dense network of bodegas and Catholic parishes. The neighborhood’s dominant high school, George Washington, on Audubon Avenue, had by 1989 an overwhelmingly Dominican student body and a large, aging building fallen into overcrowded disrepair; the school as an institution, and the public-education system it belonged to, are treated in this account’s record of the city’s schools.¹² The neighborhood’s visible drug trade in these years belongs to this account’s record of the crack epidemic elsewhere; what belonged to a Washington Heights child specifically was an ambient map of his own block — which corner, which street after nine at night — that every teenager there carried the same way his neighbors did, largely apart from a parent living somewhere else who could not have drawn that map even trying.

A correspondent posted overseas for years at a stretch — filing from Sarajevo, from Kigali, from a hotel whose phone line cost enough per minute to keep a call to four — maintained a household in a neighborhood like this one by proxy, through a sister, a former partner, a mother: someone else who decided, in practice, what the money he sent was actually spent on, because he was not there to decide it himself. He did not know his son’s girlfriend’s name in a given year and could not have described the school’s social geography the boy was navigating that same year. He came home from a posting to a photograph on someone else’s nightstand that had not been updated since he left. The absence was structural rather than a failure of feeling: a wire transfer and a four-minute call were not a smaller kind of parenthood so much as parenthood conducted entirely at second hand, from the one person who was actually in the room.