What is it like to live on Outer Cape Cod and have a new baby? The feeling of isolation can be overwhelming, Becky Fischer told Independent reporter Olivia Oldham in last week’s front-page story about the support group for new mothers that Fischer runs at the Cape Cod Children’s Place. “New parents frequently find that playgrounds are empty and that play groups are few and far between,” Oldham wrote.
There aren’t very many moms in that group: sometimes there are as many as six, sometimes just one. The number of children has been steadily declining here. Enrollment at Eastham Elementary, the Outer Cape’s largest primary school, has fallen by nearly 40 percent in the last two decades. The rate of decline at Wellfleet Elementary, which has just 91 pupils this year, is about the same as Eastham’s.
We’ve grown accustomed to living our lives in a place where we almost never see a child. Last month Teresa and I went to New York City to visit family and friends for a few days. One of the most striking aspects of the city to me was how many children there were everywhere. That shouldn’t be surprising, really. The median age of New York City residents is 37. In Eastham, Wellfleet, and Truro, the median age is nearly 60.
Olivia’s article about the mothers’ group reminded me that one of the editorial goals we set for ourselves when we started the newspaper was to make the Outer Cape’s children and young people more visible. Allen Gunn has done a fine job covering Nauset High School’s athletes for us. But I don’t think we’ve succeeded in the larger goal.
“If we don’t invest money in families, there is no future for any of us.” That statement by an Italian official was quoted in a New York Times story this week about how the alpine region around the city of Bolzano, in the country’s far north, has maintained a healthy population of children by developing “a thick network of family-friendly benefits,” including nursery schools, after-school programs, and summer camps, as well as discounts on groceries, baby products, health care, energy, and transportation costs.
All of the Outer Cape towns now have programs that help families pay for preschool. That’s good, but there is nothing like comprehensive policymaking here designed to reverse the catastrophic loss of children in our communities.
Am I calling for some kind of government-run social engineering program? Maybe I am.
What do we call the decisions that drove young people away and helped squash birth rates on the Cape? According to the Cape Cod Commission’s data, Barnstable County had a rapidly growing population and workforce in the 1980s and ’90s, but that trend flatlined around 2003.
Last May, in a report on the Cape’s demographics, Amelia Roth-Dishy wrote that researchers found they were “skewing perilously old” and a “legitimate cause for alarm about sustaining any sort of economy here.”
A year later, conditions are even worse. Do we need to call the folks in Bolzano for advice?