In Today's Conversation with Leith Anderson, Robert Putnam shares his research and stories showing the growing class gap among kids in the United States and offers ideas for how we can address the disparity.

In this podcast, you’ll hear from a renowned social science researcher on:

The experiences of young people growing up in different economic classes;

Statistics and trends explaining a growing economic gap among Americans; and

How churches can be involved in caring for all of our kids.

Read a Portion of the Transcript

Leith: Professor, America is abuzz over your new book, “Our Kids.” And I’ve got to tell you, I’m amazed at how many people I talk to who have already read it. In it, you claim that there is a large and growing class divide in our nation that’s more than money and more than race. So, what are these classes? And what’s happening here?

Robert: Well, what’s happening, is in the bigger picture is that there is of course — this is widely known — a growing inequality and income distribution. People who are less affluent and less well educated have not really had a raise for almost 30 years. So there is a growing income gap, and as I say that’s been widely discussed. Our society has become more segregated by social class, by education and income. People are more likely to live near people of a different race or a different religion, are more likely to have friends or to even marry people from a different race or a different religion. But in social class terms, in terms of education and income, we’re less likely to live near people who have a different income or educational level than we used to. Our kids are less likely to go to school with kids from a different social background. And we’re even less likely to marry someone from a different class or background. So in that sense our society has become more and more polarized into really two different societies: an affluent society of college educated Americans who are doing pretty well — I’m not talking just about the ultra rich, I’m talking about people basically in the upper third of American society, which amounts to people who have a college education — and a growing gap I should say between them and the lower third of American society — people who have not gotten past high school, they may have a high school degree but they have not gotten past high school. And that gap, that divide, that really serious divide between those two Americas is I think causing grave problems especially for kids. That — as you know ­­— is what the book is focused on, which is what difference does all this make for our kids.

Leith: Do these classes know about each other? I know generally they know about each other, but are they aware of how different their lives are?

Robert: No. I think that’s one reason I wrote the book actually, Leith. Because I think, you know when I was growing up in the 50s — or even more recently than that — lots of people knew people from the other side of the tracks. I mean, I grew up in a small town, and I describe this a little in “Bowling Alone,” my hometown was a small town. And there were, of course, some people in town better off than others, but we all played on the same teams. And we all went to the same school. And we dated, and many of us went to church together. So there wasn’t such a big class divide, and we knew about the lives that other people led. That’s less true now — much less true. And therefore, lots of people of goodwill who are on the upper side of what I call the opportunity gap — that is people from college educated backgrounds — simply are unaware of how bad things have gotten down in the lower third of American society. That’s why there are so many stories in my book of kids from what I call rich kids and poor kids. I have lots of stories, because I want to say to readers of the book who are likely to be themselves pretty well ed...