In Her Words: ‘No time to be a child’

The upended lives of teenage girls.

View in browser|nytimes.com Continue reading the main story September 25, 2021 Erin Schaff/The New York Times By Alisha Haridasani Gupta Gender Reporter "Black girls deserve to be children." — A poem by Azariah Baker, a high school student in Chicago Continue reading the main story ADVERTISEMENT For the past year and a half, Jamese Logan, a 15-year-old in Lanham, Md., found herself looking after four children. Her aunt died of cancer in May, leaving her children, the youngest just over a year old, in the care of Jamese's mother. And when Jamese's mother goes to work, it has been Jamese's responsibility to look after her cousins, juggling their needs with her homework and virtual school. For Yanica Mejias, a 17-year-old in Gaithersburg, Md., these last 12 months have been a huge financial strain. Her parents divorced in November, and Yanica, her mother and her 14-year-old sister moved into the basement of her aunt's house. Yanica took on extra shifts at a burger restaurant to help keep the family afloat. "It was kind of like we were starting from zero," she said. And Azariah Baker, a 15-year-old in Chicago, has been caring for her 70-year-old grandmother, who had a stroke at the start of 2020, as well as her 2-year-old niece. Her grandmother is the legal guardian for Azariah and her niece but since the stroke, which left her extremely fatigued with blurry vision and headaches, Azariah has done the heavy lifting at home. She would wake up every day at 7 a.m., make them all breakfast, then log on for virtual school at 8 a.m. Continue reading the main story ADVERTISEMENT When school was out, she'd go to work at a grocery store. Then she'd come back home and cook dinner. She often felt overwhelmed. "I remember one night, I was making dinner and I was having a panic attack. I was crying, I felt like I couldn't breathe, and my heart was racing," Azariah said. "But then my alarm went off for something in the oven," she said, and she put her own needs aside. These three stories encapsulate the ways in which the pandemic has affected the lives of young women of color across the United States, even if they weren't directly touched by the coronavirus. Black and Hispanic youth were more likely to have lost a parent or a family member to Covid-19. They have fallen further behind in school than their white counterparts, and they had far higher unemployment rates last year than older adults and young white women, even during the summer, when youth employment typically goes up. Some of those who held on to or found new jobs became crucial breadwinners because their family members were more likely to have been laid off. Black and Hispanic teenage girls were also more likely than white girls and their male counterparts to shoulder care responsibilities at home, according to a report by the Institute for Women's Policy Research. At the same time, they were leading racial justice demonstrations across the country, most notably last summer, channeling their energy into confronting and changing systemic inequities. "Black girls were on the front lines of racial justice movements, they were essential workers and they were primary caregivers," said Scheherazade Tillet, a founder and the executive director of A Long Walk Home, an organization that empowers Black girls in Chicago. "There's no other group that was all three of those things at once." All of this has taken a psychological toll. In June, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported a sharp spike in emergency room visits after suspected suicide attempts by girls ages 12 to 17 in the first months of 2021 compared with 2019. This is possibly because of "more severe distress among young females than has been identified in previous reports during the pandemic," the report said, though the study didn't break down the data by race. A survey of over 2,000 young people, published in June by the nonprofit organization America's Promise Alliance, found that 78 percent of girls ages 13 to 19 reported in the past 30 days at least one sign of decreased mental health, such as feeling distressed or being unable to sleep, compared with 65 percent of boys. A Long Walk Home found in a survey of about 30 girls that nearly 70 percent reported increased anxiety and an inability to sleep in the last year. Twenty-seven percent reported having suicidal thoughts. Crittenton Services, an organization based in Washington, D.C., and Maryland that supports girls of color, found that out of the nearly 400 girls in its network, 63 percent felt stressed, and half had trouble sleeping, according to an internal survey that was shared with The Times. "This is the crisis that they have come through," Ms. Tillet said. "So what systems are in place now to support their emotional and psychological needs?" Behind the numbers are lives upended, dreams shattered, the burden of suddenly becoming a caregiver or a provider. A Long Walk Home found that many girls in its network felt like they'd lost their childhood, or as Azariah put it: "There was no time to be a child." And as schools and some workplaces open their doors again, the burdens for these young women are still very present. They may even be greater. But these are also tales of resilience, of girls who become leaders in their communities and rise to the occasion for their families, with creativity and determination buoying them through crises and chaos. Keep reading the stories of Jamese, Yanica and Azariah here. Subscribe Today We hope you've enjoyed this newsletter, which is made possible through subscriber support. Subscribe to The New York Times with this special offer. What else is happening Here are three articles from The Times you may have missed. A memorial near where the body of Sabina Nessa was found in Kidbrooke, in southeast London.Ian West/Press Association, via Associated Press "How many more women have to die?" The case of Sabina Nessa, 28, whose body was found in a London park, has renewed national outrage over violence against women in Britain. [Read the story] "Truth." Chris Cuomo sexually harassed me. I hope he'll use his power to make change, writes Shelley Ross, a veteran television journalist and former executive producer at ABC and CBS. [Read the guest essay] "Not looking like myself any longer." Linda Evangelista, the '90s-era supermodel, said side effects from a fat-freezing procedure caused her to become depressed and turned her into a recluse. [Read the story] In Her Words is written by Alisha Haridasani Gupta and edited by Francesca Donner. Our art director is Catherine Gilmore-Barnes, and our photo editor is Maura Foley. Write to us at inherwords@nytimes.com. Follow us on Instagram at @nytgender. 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On Politics: A guide to the twisted thicket of bills in Congress

It's head-spinning: the debt ceiling, an infrastructure bill, a spending bill. We're here to help.

View in browser|nytimes.com Continue reading the main story September 23, 2021 By Maggie Astor Stefani Reynolds for The New York Times Note: Tonight's newsletter is arriving late because of production issues. We apologize for the delay. You know that GIF of Donald Glover carrying a stack of pizza boxes into a room, only to freeze upon seeing that everything is on fire? Let's talk about Congress. Unless you're a congressional reporter or staff member — or, really, even if you are — you could be forgiven for wondering what is happening there this week. It's a great big dumpster full of substantive political disagreements and cynical posturing, tangled so tightly together that it can be hard to tell which is which. And the stakes are alarmingly high. First, there are two things Congress needs to do: fund the government by Oct. 1 and raise the debt ceiling by sometime in October. These are basic, Government 101 responsibilities, and the consequences of failure would be catastrophic. Republicans are insisting that Democrats fulfill them alone, while making that almost impossible. Then there are two things the Democrats who control Congress want to do: pass a $1.2 trillion bipartisan infrastructure bill (a priority of moderate and conservative-leaning Democrats) and pass a $3.5 trillion partisan package containing much of President Biden's domestic agenda (a priority of progressive Democrats). The bipartisan bill is supposed to receive a vote on Monday. But it probably won't have enough support from progressives to pass unless the partisan bill passes first. But there's no way the partisan bill can pass that quickly. But the moderates and conservatives won't agree to postpone the vote. Like I said, it's a mess. Let's look at the four fires one at a time. The debt ceiling Refusing to raise the debt ceiling — a limit on how much the federal government can borrow to make expenditures that Congress has already authorized — is basically a game of chicken with the economy. If the ceiling isn't raised in time, the U.S. can't pay its bills, including essential obligations like Social Security benefits, military salaries and interest on existing loans. Continue reading the main story ADVERTISEMENT This would be economically ruinous, and while the country has come close to doing it before, it has never happened. Congress has always acted in the end. The particularly exhausting thing about this latest running of the exercise is that both parties acknowledge the debt ceiling must be raised — but Republicans are insisting that Democrats do it alone while simultaneously preventing them from doing so through regular procedures. Unlike in past runnings, Republicans are not demanding anything in exchange for their support. They are simply refusing, citing their opposition to Democrats' planned spending, even though the increase is needed to cover something else: spending that Congress has already approved. (The Trump administration's 2017 tax cuts have contributed significantly to the debt ceiling's being reached, and it would have to be raised even without another penny of spending by Democrats.) While the Senate minority leader, Mitch McConnell, is arguing that it is the responsibility of the party in power to raise the ceiling, Democrats voted to do so on a bipartisan basis when Republicans were in power. In other words, the whole thing is about political posturing. And even Republicans who have sometimes bucked the party line are playing along. Continue reading the main story ADVERTISEMENT "Democrats can solve this all by themselves," Senator Mitt Romney of Utah told reporters this week. "They have the votes to do it. Do it." In theory, that's true — if Republicans don't filibuster. But Republicans intend to filibuster, creating a 60-vote threshold in the Senate that Democrats cannot meet alone. Democrats could avoid a filibuster by using the budget reconciliation process, but that is filled with parliamentary obstacles. In a statement on Wednesday, Representative John Yarmuth, Democrat of Kentucky and chairman of the House Budget Committee, said it would be impossible to complete it before the government defaults, and called on McConnell to allow Senate passage of a regular bill that the House passed this week. Funding the government Congress needs to pass legislation to extend government funding for another couple of months, until it can negotiate full spending bills for the fiscal year that begins Oct. 1. If it doesn't, the government will shut down. Continue reading the main story ADVERTISEMENT Unlike a debt default, this has happened before, most recently in December 2018. But it would still be deeply harmful, both to the economy and to the government's pandemic response. On its own, the temporary funding measure is not controversial, and in fact, it includes crucial spending — for disaster recovery, for instance — that Republicans and Democrats alike want for their states. But because Democrats packaged it with the debt ceiling increase in an effort to pressure Republicans to support that, it is caught in the crossfire. Democrats passed the funding and debt ceiling bill in the House on Tuesday with no Republican votes, but they can't do the same in the Senate because of the filibuster. The bipartisan bill About six weeks ago, the Senate approved a $1.2 trillion package (including $550 billion in new federal spending) to strengthen the nation's physical infrastructure. The vote, after months of tortuous negotiations between the White House and lawmakers from both parties, was unusually bipartisan, with 19 Republicans joining all 50 Democrats in support. But the House hasn't taken it up yet, because a majority of the House Progressive Caucus won't vote for it until the larger, partisan bill (more on that in a minute) passes. Biden and top congressional Democrats — including Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senator Chuck Schumer, the majority leader — agreed on a "two-track" strategy that ties each bill's fate to the other's. They settled on this as the only way to pass both, given the competing priorities of the party's progressive and conservative wings. I wrote about the reasoning behind that strategy last month. Pelosi had struck a deal with the conservative faction, promising a vote on the bipartisan bill by Sept. 27 if the faction would support an immediate procedural step to advance the partisan bill. Nothing has changed since then — except that Sept. 27 is in four days, and the partisan bill is nowhere near done. Which is a problem, because if the bipartisan bill comes to the floor on Monday as promised, it will almost certainly fail. Representative Pramila Jayapal of Washington, the leader of the House Progressive Caucus, told Pelosi this week that more than half of her nearly 100 members remained committed to voting against the bipartisan bill before the partisan one is finished. That is more than Republican support for the bipartisan bill can realistically make up for, especially after the House minority whip, Representative Steve Scalise of Louisiana, announced on Thursday that he would urge Republicans to vote against it. The question now is whether Pelosi will postpone the Sept. 27 vote, infuriating the members to whom she promised it, or whether she will let it go forward and fail. (If she goes the latter route, the House could still pass the bill later.) The outcome will shape negotiations over the partisan bill. The partisan bill Democrats are divided over how large the partisan bill should be and what it should include. Senators Joe Manchin III of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona have said they won't support the full $3.5 trillion that top Democrats have proposed. Also in question is what the bill can include while remaining within the strict parameters of the budget reconciliation process, which is the key to maneuvering it around the filibuster. The Senate parliamentarian, the chamber's rule enforcer, decided last weekend that a proposal to create a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants did not meet the criteria. The Senate could overrule her, but senators who aren't willing to dispense with the filibuster are unlikely to support an end run around the parliamentarian either. Whatever the total cost of the bill ends up being, a wide array of Democratic priorities — universal prekindergarten, climate change mitigation, social safety net expansions and more — will be competing for inclusion. But without an understanding of how big the bill can be and still pass, it is hard for lawmakers even to get to those choices. Biden spent Wednesday and Thursday meeting with congressional Democrats across the party's ideological spectrum and asking holdouts like Manchin to provide a dollar amount they would support. So far, they haven't done so. Subscribe Today We hope you've enjoyed this newsletter, which is made possible through subscriber support. Subscribe to The New York Times with this special offer. RECOMMENDED READING Pool photo by Matt York Arizona's Criticized Election Review Nears End, but Copycats Are Just Getting Started The inquiry into the 2020 vote, derided as a badly flawed partisan exercise, has already spawned imitators in other states. By Michael Wines Sarahbeth Maney/The New York Times For Parents ​of Disabled Children, School Mask Wars Are Particularly Wrenching In Tennessee, where the governor allows families to ignore school mask mandates, some parents are making excruciating calculations each morning about whether to send their children to school. By Erica L. Green Were you forwarded this newsletter? Sign up here to get it delivered to your inbox. Is there anything you think we're missing? Anything you want to see more of? We'd love to hear from you. Email us at onpolitics@nytimes.com. Continue reading the main story Need help? Review our newsletter help page or contact us for assistance. You received this email because you signed up for On Politics from The New York Times. To stop receiving these emails, unsubscribe or manage your email preferences. 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