THE END OF THE FAMILY?

...Such an image ignores the inherent contradiction in seeing the family as a group and in seeing it as a collection of individuals living together for the sake of convenience...

...One essay in the firs...

...The nuclear family is crumbling to be replaced...

...But what does that mean...

...The objective and analytic way in which Ross and Sawhill approach their subject is both refreshing and dismaying...

...After all, how is anyone to know whether she or he is truly self-fulfilled without applause from a warm and loving group, unless it be the sound of one hand clapping that would convince them...

...Berelson speculates that this babyishness and its attractiveness to adults may be extremely important in motivating the care and rearing of the young in all species...

...As a pediatrician, child develpmen-talist, mother, wife etc...

...volume illustrates nicely the value and drawback of the books and perhaps of the whole project...

...It may be that the "free-floating couple," Shorter talks about will prove to be mother and child rather than man and woman...

...If Howell's prescription seems a bit naive to hard-nosed realists, it nonetheless has the merit of pointing to where the real responsibility must ultimately rest with those who choose to live in families...

...Everyone has had an experience of the family, often a very particular kind of family, long before they have had to think about it: who and what we are is partly explained by living in families...

...Such post-modern dyads exist, of course...

...Part of the crisis has to do with child-rearing capabilities and values: How do we raise children and to what purpose...

...And reexamination is necessary because over one in ten families with children is now female-headed and our prejudices against such arrangements lead to social policies that exacerbate rather than ease the problems of such families...

...the quality of the personal relationship, good or bad, is thus more likely to affect marital stability than economic need...

...Little, Brown, (Vol...

...This scenario is modified in black families where unemployment places black men at a disadvantage in beginning or maintaining families...

...Hovvell's book sees the family as an autonomous social entity absolutely necessary for human life and capable of renewing itself and reshaping the larger social forces that impinge upon it...

...In Shorter, an historical perspective combines psychology and demography to suggest that family forms and behavior are largely molded by larger economic and social necessities...

...We live in families, willingly or unwillingly, because for most of our childhood and for a good part of our adulthood we need a group either as a support or as a medium for our generative and creative inclinations...

...In these days of unbridled solipsism few dare to say "permanent ties to others," perhaps only because they feel overwhelmed by the statistical evidence of impermanance: the high divorce rate and the abandonment of children by one or both divorcing parents...

...The Ross-Sawhill book suggests that families headed by women will continue to form an ever greater proportion of the total number of families and that low income is the single most important deterrent to successful child-rearing in such a family...

...The divorcee in such circumstances is also likely to remarry...

...it is another to imply that if poverty disappeared as a correlative of female-headed families, it would not make much difference if families only had one parent...

...He offers as a piece of experimental evidence the attraction by both humans and animals to the quality of babyishness in infants attraction "verified in studies of the changing size of eye pupils" when adults are shown pictures of progressively more babyish human and animal faces...

...His intriguing speculation aside, Berelson's essay points up the telling flaw in both volumes...

...We are social animals and who and what we are comes from the biological, social, economic, and psychological ties we have to others...

...moral urgings to improve our attitudes and policies can inspire us...

...We are not collections of independent, free agents hanging out together in families...

...Now Talbot and his colleagues well know this in fact, Marian Edelman in her work with the Children's Defense Fund has been one of the people who has most consistently and dramatically pointed this out...

...Beginning with how people in families need to communicate with one another, Howell goes on to suggest how they ought to deal with and communicate with the world outside...

...Objective" stances vis-a-vis the family may be colored in a way that writing about lasar beams or pigeons are not...

...Juvenile delinquency, a traditional measure of child-rearing failure, rather than typically occuring in a mother-headed family, is more likely to occur in conflicted homes with mother and father both present...

...Such an outcome seems dismal, since children need more caring adults, not fewer...

...One is tempted to dismiss their conclusions as an absent-minded and sentimental Rousseauian peroration...

...The first book contains two volumes, one a collection of essays presented before the Harvard Interfaculty Seminar on Children, the other a summary by Nathan B. Talbot of the discussion, opinions, and recommendations flowing from that seminar...

...What needs rational planning is not parents and families but the policies and institutions which affect the cohesion and child-rearing capabilities of families, many of which are neither benevolent or supportive...

...Partially a criticism of the ways in which welfare policies and unequal wages damage rather than help families, Time of Transition also examines other issues involved in family instabbility and female-headedness among alt classes...

...This universal dilemma is compounded for Americans by political and social attitudes that see the individual as the primary arbiter of values...

...too often they are willing to put their lives in the hands of people who, after all, have only a professional responsibility for the outcome...

...The collection of essays represents the work of many of the best thinkers and doers in children's policy: Jerome Kagan, Lawrence Kohlberg, Urie Bron-fenbrenner, Marian Wright Edelman, among others...

...As one of the last places where non-rational life flourishes the family has its drawbacks as an arena where rational planning is the organizing principle...

...For, from an historical perspective, what seems most predictable about the family is not its demise but infinitely greater varieties of its expression...

...Shorter is right in arguing that behaviors and attitudes shift with economic and social changes but families tend to absorb these shifts without necessarily changing form...

...It is these broader questions of social cohesion and social responsibility that are taken up in Raising Children in Modern America and Helping Ourselves...

...Yet the most important question Shorter raises remains: Is the "post-modern family" a metaphor for the end of the family...

...Given the fact that institutions and professionals meant to support families and children perform as inadequately as they do and given the fact that most families cannot raise children single-handedly, exactly how can anyone hope to make families work in this society...

...some regard it as deviant...

...Bernard Berelson's essay "The Value of Children: a Taxo-nomical Essay" is both intriguing and excessively cerebral and professorial...

...Of course, not everyone is sanguine about all this variety...

...One of the book's more controversial hypotheses is that, as new job and educational opportunities become available to women, more marriages are likely to end in separation and divorce...

...Realistic or unrealistic expectations aside, the outcome of child-rearing is a major measure of how families are functioning...

...In contrast to the diversity of these outlooks there are some common themes...

...Refreshing because all of these matters need to be analyzed in order to illuminate the different ways different kinds of families cope with varying economic and social conditions...

...Most schools, most child welfare agencies, foster-care agencies and adoption agencies maximize benefits to those who run and staff them usually to the detriment of the children and families that they were created to serve...

...Yet attaining it and treating the family as one more sociological, psychological, or economic phenomenon, we may close ourselves off to the sacral character the family has for many people...

...When we speak of the family as if it were a collection of individuals instead of a group, we use the language of rights and we speak as if family members have legal claims against one another...

...MARGARET O'BRIEN STEINFELS The Making of the Modern Family EDWARD SHORTER Basic Books, $15 Time of Transition: The Growth of Families Headed by Women HEATHER L. ROSS & ISABEL V. SAWHILL The Urban Institute, $4.95 Raising Children in Modern America: Vol...

...Yet I do not see how these problems can be resolved by rational analysis or moral urgings...

...Women's Lib, while stoutly defending itself against charges that it is anti-family, regards many aspects of traditional family behavior as little better than slavery...

...Families often don't want to have choices, make decisions, assume responsibilities...

...The Talbot books represent a collective effort at analyzing current family problems and conclude that failure to consider children first in personal and social planning lies at the heart of these problems...

...Orthodox ad herents of most religions regard birth control as a deviance from the primary purposes of sex...

...But will they replace the "nuclear family" which still in some places and at some moments displays "traditional family habits...

...Edward Shorter's history of The Making of the Modern Family supports the view that cohesive families depend on cohesive, perhaps even rigid and controlling, communities...

...The Ross and Sawhill vision conjures up an image of the family as a nonprofit, philanthropic organization providing individualized social services...

...Dual-career families are frowned upon by many psychiatrists and psychoanalysts since these forms interfere with the child-rearing responsibilities of the mother...

...And the question of whether or not to have children appears to be about to replace the only recently established How Many...

...Recommendations that urge the creation of yet another benevolent, supportive screening program suggest that despite keen analysis and weighty discussions, the Harvard Inter-faculty Committee does not have any answers for us and probably for themselves, since it is unlikely that they would submit themselves or their children to such a program unless it was run by Jerome Kagan...

...Greater economic independence among married women means less financial dependence on husbands...

...inevitably these laissez-faire attitudes come into conflict with values which support family cohesion and stability...

...Isabel Sawhill and Heather Ross, two economists, working from census data, argue that, contrary to the prevailing myth, female-headed families are potentially as successful at rearing children as two-parent famlies...

...The present panic over the demise of the family has reached hysterical levels from those who wish it would, those who wish it wouldn't, and those who are "value-free" and think it will die anyway...

...by the free-floating couple, a marital dyad subject to dramatic fissions and fusions, and without the orbiting satellites of pre-pubertal children, close friends, or neighbors...

...Now given choice about marriage, about child-rearing, about loyalty to communities, thpse who live in families have ari arena\for working out an alternative to individualism an alternative which given time may again seem viable...

...His thesis will hold only if one confounds, as he does, demographic and psychological changes in order to prove that particular psychological attitudes dictate family form...

...The loosening of community bonds leads to the loosening of family ties and a shift beginning in the eighteenth century from what Shorter terms the traditional family to the modern family, to the post-modern family, which by any definition seems to be no family at all...

...Rational planning, systematization, and screening, are potentially useful but limited ways to organize anything, including children and families...

...Our society's problems in child-rearing and family life can be categorized, analyzed, and criticized in a rationalistic framework...

...Even conservatives and neo-conservatives who defend The Family are as steeped in individualism as the liberals they charge with encouraging family breakdown...

...I) $17.50 (Vol II) $8.95 Helping Ourselves: Families and the Human Network MARY C. HOWELL Beacon, $8.95 The prodigality of publishers combined with the shrinking of the family may soon bring us to the state where there are more books about the family than there are examples of it...

...Even the most individualistic among us necessarily repress keenly felt desires and the most communal let slide an important and sacred custom...

...even as we write we may be deeply involved in a family...

...Howell knows both sides of the coin...

...In speculating about the many reasons people want to have children, Berelson hesitantly advances the notion of a parental instinct...

...When social scientists and humanists, in general, are throwing up their hands about nurtru-ing behavior, Berelson reminds us that not all human behavior rests on conscious regard for social custom and practices, that there may be forms of behavior which incline us to respond to and nurture the young even if it is not socially fashionable or economically viable...

...Vol...

...In fact, the limited tolerance for the choices we have may explain the wringing of hands and gnashing of teeth whenever the subject of the family comes up...

...But what people actually do may not be what they ought to do even if their minimum moral quest is self-fulfillment...

...Shorter argues that these three family types have had a sequential relationship, that is, that they have displaced one another over time...

...That theme points to a more fundamental one, the increasingly non-permanent state of marriage...

...In those centuries which Shorter describes, everyone lived in families because there was no choice...

...Lacking a social consensus about the family, it is not surprising that these four books give overlapping and contradictory explanations of the nature of the crisis that they all agree the family is passing through...

...In fact, they have been driven back to the old progressive notion that control of the family from outside can adequately substitute for care and concern within...

...Perhaps children should enjoy a greater percentage of national resources and perhaps the rights and wishes of adults ought to be relative to children's welfare, as the group recommends...

...And her essential proposition is an old one: basic trust and caring...

...I: Problems and Prospective Solutions...

...The movement from one to another of these family types embodied changing attitudes toward individual development, community, romantic love, and sexuality, reflected in differing behaviors toward parental authority, community customs, mother-infant relationships, domesticity, and partner selection...

...The tone of desperation in many of these recently published books, including some reviewed here, suggests nothing so much as those drowning in the sea of confusion throwing life preservers to those traveling with equanimity on the family boat...

...That notion strikes at the heart of the absolutely primary resource for a family's well-being, namely a group in which loving and caring adults do weigh choices, establish priorities, and make decisions for all members of the family and where sometimes a child's welfare is secondary...

...Our families are now in peril, and the most likely source of real help seems to lie in the magic of caring, to be discovered within ourselves and all those we learn to trust...

...we read about them in popular sociology all the time...

...Mary Howell in Helping Ourselves precisely addresses this problem...

...Dismaying because what appears to be "value-free" is loaded with biases that go unstated and unexamined...

...Without a coherent political philosophy concerning the family and without a language expressive of anything but individual rights, we find our society in an extremely confused state as to what the family is and what it ought to be doing...

...Time of Transition suggests that other kinds of families, traditionally regarded as unsuccessful in rearing children, may do better than we think...

...It is one thing to argue that social policy ought to be modified so as not to penalize female-headed families, and that women should secure a good education and calculate their money-making potential before marriage...

...Black women who tend to be better educated and have higher-paying jobs than black men can often maintain a family without the support of a husband...

...But that's unfair, for like all of us, they have a language problem in speaking of the family...

...And as background to both those issues there is the decline of community and the social network that supports family life and child-rearing...

...In short, distance is hard to attain...

...Caring institutions and helping professions manipulate people, often undermining any but the strongest families' sense of competence and confidence...

...If: What Parents Should Be Doing tor Their Children NATHAN B. TALBOT, M.D...

...Without repeating their complex and intricate statistical analysis, let an example suggest the merit of their book: family behavior and child-rearing is exceedingly complex and overall explanations of what leads to success or failure need to be taken apart and re-examined...

...Finally, the unfortunate limit of Shorter's thesis allows him to explain the causes of emerging forms while ignoring the persistence of "atavistic" ones...

...men and-women raising children need more emotional, intellectual, and financial support, not less...

...Or is the "post-modern dyad" simply one more family variation to be adopted by certain portions of the population and lived through as a post-adolescent stage...