Family reconstruction

...Worst of all, children become either a pity or a predicament—some "thing" to be efficiently managed, kept out of sight, under the guise of non-authoritarianism, to grow at their own "groovy" rate unbothered by nasty adults...

...This mode involves an active, morally engaged and theoretically reflective approach to the crises and changes affecting family life...

...I call it family reconstruction...

...Although most statements of the family deconstruction option are not so extreme, they all share the presumption that the contemporary family is a thoroughly debased and hopeless institution and must be utterly eradicated or entirely transcended...

...Men and women alike are experiencing identity shifts and lacunae that are profoundly disorienting...

...The family reconstruction position involves a commitment to a particular ideal of family existence that does not repeat earlier terms of female oppression or exploitation...

...The deconstruction mode, a reactive-active stance, winds up covertly buttressing that mode with which it might be seen to be in implacable opposition, the family retrenchment mode...

...One example of dangerous "deconstruction" in the absence of viable functional alternatives to the family may be found in Shulamith Firestone's radical feminist "classic," The Dialectic of Sex...

...Conflicts that emerge from "outside" get displaced "inside," into the very heart of the family's emotional existence...

...She is an associate professor of political science at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, where she teaches courses on feminist theory and psychological and political theory...

...This is the moral imperative which animates the family reconstruction mode...

...The Carnegie Council estimates that one-fourth to one-third of all American children are born into families with financial strains so great children suffer basic deprivation, with 12-15 percent of these families, falling below the United States government's official poverty line...

...That is all too often our current reality...

...Just as Marx's theory of alienation presupposes an ideal of human existence that would hold in the absence of damage done by exploitative and oppressive social structures, so the picture we now have of what happens to children in the absence of strong, early attachments to specific adult others, allows us to assert that we are dealing with an axiomatic of authentic human existence...

...It begins with an affirmation: some form of familial ties and mode of child-rearing is essential to attain the minimal bedrock of human social existence...

...The point I wish to make now is that children incur an assault to their humanness, an affront they will know in the very tissue of their bio-psychic beings, if they suffer the diseases of neglect and non-attachment...

...This requires the continuing presence of specific beloved others, for it is only through powerful, eroticized relations with such specific others, parents or their permanent, not temporary, surrogates that the child will be nurtured and protected in a way that allows his or her creation of self and others to be structured and mediated by parental care and concern...

...It treats the human body, particularly the woman's body and its role in the reproductive cycle, with contempt...

...In either case, the family collapses or is smashed...

...I see three basic responses to the pressures I have sketched briefly...

...To state a presumptive case for familial ties, to argue that they are required to make us minimally human, is not to detail the specific familial forms within which the creation and nourishment of humanity take place...

...for human beings to flourish a particular ideal of the family is necessary...

...The retrenchment approach, for example, seeks to negate the changes of heart, mind, and social arrangements brought about by the women's movement...

...It involves the notion that "progress" of some sort or another demands that we replace the family with other kinds of more efficient or less "destructive" ways of raising children, perhaps by turning them over to beneficent people trained for that very purpose...

...External pressures on the family and inner changes in family life—the "sexual revolution," alterations in intimacy, in the very touchstone of male-female relations—have increased tension between men and women even as they have opened up new possibilities for authentic reciprocity...

...Let me explain...

...The second response, family deconstruction, is also a troubling one...

...As Erik Erikson argued years ago, parents who are frustrated and demeaned, rendered helpless in worklife and citizenship, will have great difficulty instilling such bedrock beliefs, ways of being, inside the family...

...But these changes cannot be denied: one can only attempt to repress them...

...thus, the retrenchment group and the deconstruction group, each in its own way, distorts the future by denying real human beings in the present...

...The family has frequently been singled out by certain segments within the feminist movement as the institution most deeply implicated in the oppression of women...

...One can envisage this response as a reactive-passive vector...

...The deconstruction mode also fails to treat its human subjects with the respect due reflective agents...

...Children, if they are to be both morally and socially responsible and potentially self-reflective adults, must be reared in a highly charged emotional setting in which they are loved in a manner that establishes basic trust...

...In other words, the child's developmental needs and requirements are never taken into account...

...Individuals in the grips of family retrenchment react to events swirling about them by withdrawing into a militant reaffirmation that is indistinguishable in practice from a form of passive resignation...

...Inflationary pressures bear heavily on families and are the single factor which most fully accounts for that dramatic upheaval represented by the rise of the numbers of working women: most women work because they have no choice and at low-paying, dead-end jobs...

...Christopher Lasch, on the other hand, laments the breakdown of traditional modes of family authority and cites that breakdown as a key factor in the emergence of the "new narcissism in America...

...Firestone depicts a social world of stark lovelessness in which pervasive force, coercion, manipulation and crude power roam undifferentiatedly over the landscape, suffusing society unto its innermost parts...

...These ties cannot emerge in abstract, diffuse, non-familialized settings...

...The first is family retrenchment, a kind of family chauvinist movement, an attempt to reproduce a very traditional notion of the patriarchal family...

...The Carnegie Council on Children criticizes, and calls for reform of, those institutions which sap the self-esteem and power of parents...

...Specifically, they, and French social theorist Jacques Donzelot in his recent book, The Policing of Families, (Pantheon) are concerned with moves by the state and bureaucracies to further rationalize all dimensions of social life, including the family, in accordance with the imperatives of a capitalist or state socialist political economy...

...Women must either destroy this world utterly or, according to another radical feminist, Susan Brownmiller, occupy the power structure in sufficient numbers to achieve a stalemate in the next war...

...August 1980: 431...

...Those caught up in familial retrenchment seek, often rather desperately, sometimes merely wistfully, to "turn back the clock" to some imagined good old days when men were men, women knew their place, children kept their place, and all was well...

...The family, she argues, is in its essence a political institution, pervaded by the domination of the "female sex-class" by the "male sex-class" and serves as the key linchpin in a larger world order seen as a "total male power structure...

...This response sometimes calls itself radical but it is in a deep sense nihilistic...

...In so doing, one creates a false veneer of certainty based on denial that can only worsen the tensions -and strains Upon family members, for it fails to respond creatively to the challenges (for crises are also challenges) of the day...

...That is a future task which demands Our best and most worthy efforts...

...A being without a presumptive need for attachments of a specific kind—concrete, particular and continuing—would not suffer distortion and damage if such relations were absent...

...This is where the heart of "politics and the family" truly lies—not in overpoliticizing our most intimate relations and turning the family into the war of all against all but in fighting the pressures at work from the outside which threaten to erode, impoverish, or preclude the flourishing of our most basic human ties...

...How do we, as social critics devoted to some ideal of family life, respond to these various and relentless pressures from all sides as well as "inside...

...All of this adds up to what social theorist Jurgen Habermas has called a jean BETHKE ELSHTAIN is a political theorist who has studied at the Boston Psychoanalytic Institute...

...legitimate crisis," the widespread draining of our social institutions, public and private, of their previous normative meaning and significance...

...It's as if such persons were saying: "This is too much for me...

...THERE IS, hdwever, an alternative...

...It is only through the child's internalization of specific others that he or she can later identify with non-familial human beings...

...There is, of course, an irritant in the image, and that is that in order to provide such trust and security for their children parents, in turn, must experience trust and security themselves in their relations with one another and with the "outside world...

...What this means is that those of us devoted to the family reconstructive mode cannot carry out our supremely important effort unless or until there are real structural changes in American life...

...What we call human capacities could not exist without a familial mode...

...On the question of the family—"love it or leave it" —women have been, and are, bitterly divided along class, ethnic, religious, and ideological lines...

...The child's need for a foundation of love and learning in an environment that favors and provides long-term particular attachments is denied...

...THE FAMILY IN A TIME OF TROUBLES-1 Family reconstruction JEAN BETHKE ELSHTAIN IT HAS become a truism of our time that the contemporary family or, more accurately, contemporary families are under enormous social, economic, and ideological pressures...

...Each of these approaches to the crisis of contemporary family life ultimately fails to make contact with the deepest evolving needs of those human subjects who comprise the heart of the family's existence...

...I shall pretend I can make all these 'evils' go away by retreating within my four walls and embracing the bygone days of order, authority, and paternalism...

...In Firestone's scenario for the future, test-tube babies will replace biological reproduction Commonweal: 430 and every aspect of life will rest in the beneficent hands of a "new elite of engineers, cybernetricians...