Time to Hear from American Youth on Issues That Affect Their Future
Try to name a teen or twenty-something you’ve heard from in public life lately -- other than Greta Thunberg. Half a century ago, America heard from a thousand: the delegates to the 1971 White House Conference on Children and Youth, which addressed the pressing problems of that decade. Starting in 1909, during the presidency of Theodore Roosevelt, this event occurred every ten years. But since 1971, it hasn’t. It’s time for another.
It’s time because these gatherings have fostered serious insights and recommendations, some of which have become law. What’s more, they helped propel many delegates into public life, including me. I became a Superior Court judge in Los Angeles.
I was one of the youth delegates -- ages 14-24 -- to the week-long 1971 conference, which took place in Estes Park, Colorado. The atmosphere was bracing, its sense of purpose, palpable. With the help of some 400 adult delegates, with every state and U.S. Territory represented, we divided ourselves into ten task forces: Foreign Relations, Environment, Race & Minority Group Relations, Drugs, Education, Draft National Service & Alternatives, Economy & Employment, Poverty, Values Ethics & Culture, and Legal Rights & Justice (the task force on which I served).
We weren’t a collection of wild radicals or ramrod conservatives. The organizers said that they used data from the United States census to ensure that the delegates they selected represented the young. As a result of their research, only 20% of us were college students. Twenty-seven percent were working youths. African Americans made up 16% of the delegates. Others included Latinx youth, Native Americans, young housewives, and youths in the military.
Nor was the conference an excuse to party. This was 1971, during the Nixon administration and the height of the Vietnam War. We kept three high-speed Xerox machines going with 1,500,000 sheets of resolutions and recommendations. Let eighteen-year-olds vote. End the draft and form an all-volunteer army. Recognize as acceptable any sexual behavior between consenting, responsible individuals. I’m not saying we delegates caused these changes in decades to come, but I believe we contributed to what eventually led to the tipping points.
Some of our resolutions are as urgent now as they were then. “The greatest blemish on the history of the United States of America is slavery and its evil legacy…” wrote the task force on Values Ethics & Culture. The many delegates also insisted that every American should receive health care and that the President should go on television and officially denounce racism. The Environment panel used consultants to write a bill proposing a national group of volunteers to work on environmental projects. Praising our efforts, the New York Times editorialized that we “sent to Washington an eloquent message of concern about the nation’s present course….an anguished call for leadership of courage and hope, rather than of expediency and fear.”
Earlier conferences were just as productive. According to the Child Welfare League of America (CWLA), direct outcomes from the last seven of these gatherings “included a commitment to ending the institutionalization of dependent children, the first significant report on child health and welfare standards, the creation of CWLA and the U.S. Children’s Bureau, the development of a national Children’s Charter, and legitimacy given to the benefits of creative freedom and healthy personality development on children’s well-being.”
The 1950 Mid-Century White House Conference emphasized the importance of healthy personality development and how social, educational, health, recreational, and religious institutions help shape children’s personalities. Nineteen sixty’s Golden Anniversary White House Conference on Children and Youth invited young people and published their reports. There were 210 work groups, whose recommendations in the arts, for example, proposed improvements in creative writing, visual arts, music, theater, and dance. The pediatrics work group credited past White House conferences for reducing the death rate for infants, preschool children, and youths.
Mine is not the first call for a new White House Conference on Children and Youth. In an article written over ten years ago, the Child Welfare League of America all but begged for another. Unfortunately, every presidential administration since 1971 has either ignored the tradition or chopped it into tiny tidbits that lacked the heft of a full-fledged national event.
“Children and youth are inherently our most valuable resource and their welfare, protection, healthy development, and positive role in society are essential to the Nation.” This is not me talking. It’s the United States Congress, which in 1990 said that in a legislative finding. In 2008, legislation in both the House and Senate was introduced to try to convene the event again in 2010. And more recently, over 350 organizations requested the establishment of a White House Office on Children and Youth and a federal Children’s Cabinet, as well as reviving the White House Conference on Children and Youth.
The problems we face now -- climate change, racial tension, poverty -- bear a disturbing resemblance to what confronted the nation in 1971. What’s worse is that in the years ahead, they will impact the young more seriously than the older generations who now hold power. This is especially true with respect to climate change. We won’t see the worst of it; they will, and their ideas might easily contain some seeds of solutions. My year’s delegates made it clear that, in the words of the preamble to our final report, “We are motivated not by hatred, but by disappointment over and love for the unfulfilled potential of this nation.” We cared. I’m sure the new generations do, too. Let’s hear from them.
About the Author:
Anthony J. Mohr was a delegate to the 1971 White House Conference on Children and Youth and is now a 2021 Harvard Advanced Leadership Initiative Fellow. Anthony has over twenty-six years of service within the criminal and civil justice system at the state level. He most recently sat on the Superior Court of California in Los Angeles County, where he presided over civil and felony trials. Earlier, he was a judge of the Los Angeles Municipal Court, and in private legal practice. Among his numerous professional affiliations, Anthony served on the Executive Committee of the Los Angeles Superior Court and chaired both the Superior Court’s ethics review and response committee and the statewide Committee on Judicial Ethics of the California Judges Association. He serves on the Board of the Anti-Defamation League’s Los Angeles Region.