Families in Trouble

...Much of the soothing expert talk has run along the lines of being open to alternative arrangements, treating "life-styles" as morally identical peas in a pod...

...For parents this isn't merely a pocketbook issue but a matter of basic values, as is another issue that emerged as a dominant concern—loss of time with children...

...Social science pieties reassure us that what may seem to most ordinary Americans to be a "breakdown" in families, neighborhoods, and communities is, in reality, a process of "adjustment" as old-fashioned ways slowly come to conform to newer realities representing "progress...

...One problem with giant child care bills that privilege government-provided services is that they disproportionately channel benefits to two-career families, thereby transferring tax dollars from the lower-middle-class and the poor to the middle class...

...Finally, we must tend to a workable public philosophy...

...The "rehabilitative" approach is at least as costly as "getting tough," and the evidence suggests it is not arguably more effective...

...q 266 • DISSENT...

...Minimally, child-care policies should help to sustain a family life centered on children...

...Fully 70 percent of juveniles in state reform institutions "grew up in single-parent or no-parent families...

...Here the classic fissure in American society between individualism and community really hits home, and individualism, cast in a distinctly materialistic mode, seems to be winning...

...Children growing up outside richly textured, complexly obligated networks of specific others are deprived of the most precious gift of all— "the gift of society...

...After dramatic progress was made in reducing hours of work between 1900 and the New Deal, efforts at work-hour reduction stalled...

...Under the headline "Profiles of Today's Youths: Many Just Don't Seem to Care," the New York Times recently sketched a portrait of an "indifferent generation...

...Half the working mothers say they envy the mothers who do not have to work...

...This "collapse of family structure," argues Zinsmeister, is "historically unprecedented in the United States and possibly in the world...

...The first is official language, spoken by experts and opinion leaders in politics, the media and academy...

...But we do know that the present welfare system promotes forms of clientage that further erode familial and community solidarity...

...Where the value of the home as a center of economic and cultural activity was once again recognized, the demand for greater child care involvement and household responsibilities would not be so threatening to so many men...

...Whitehead concludes that the "fundamental conflict between parentasparent and parent-as-paid-worker is the single deepest source of stress and anxiety in the American family today...

...One recent study of seventy-two adolescent murderers found that three-quarters came from single parent homes...

...To be sure, families coexist with those who live another way, whether heterosexual and homosexual unions that are by choice or definition childless, and so on...

...The basic question is: what is growth for...

...Thus, in addition to refundable tax credits as a way to direct assistance, a family-leave policy that helps parents raise their children is needed...

...What is at stake in the family debate, and our response to it, is nothing less than our capacity for human sociality...

...The most recent survey of mothers by the Roper Organization and Whittle Communications not only finds hostility toward nonworkSPRING • 1991 • 263 Families in Trouble ing mothers from working mothers and vice versa but reports that fully two-thirds of working mothers see themselves as working out of necessity, not by choice...

...We have fear at home, fear in the halls, fear in the streets, with more of the same to follow unless ways are found to rebuild communities by saving what can be saved of the essential mediating institutions of families, churches, neighborhoods...

...The most apathetic and alienated are eighteen to twenty-nine years old...

...Funneling benefits to those most in need in a way that encourages rather than penalizes family maintenance is the way to go...

...The political fallout of our moral crisis is reflected in the irony of a morally exhausted left embracing rather than challenging the logic of the market by endorsing the relentless translation of wants into rights...

...What hurts their ability to raise their kids . . . is materialism...

...We remain devoted to a strong picture of family life...

...Being a parent isn't just another "life-style...

...Children lost to society in increasing numbers may be a growing phenomenon but it is one we must name for what it is: a loss, a crying shame...

...It is clear that families are stressed, but there is ample evidence that getting more of us into full-time labor so that we can buy more services and goods that, in turn, create further needs and expectations only traps us in an ever more stressful economic treadmill...

...At great effort, they "arrange their working lives to maximize the time their child spends in the care of a parent or relative and to minimize the time spent with nonrelatives...

...These figures are alarming," according to Evelyn Lowery, president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference Women...

...Judicial services are stretched to the breaking point...

...Terrible misery is encapsulated in such 262 • DISSENT Families in Trouble figures: high mortality rates for newborns or newborns with many health problems, including growing rates of crack-addicted babies, and further pressure on a welfare system that has done precious little to create policies that encourage marriage and employment, factors that, together with completion of high school, remain the single most effective assurances of a life not lived in poverty...

...Buell argues that among the many benefits a shortening of the work week, hence a reconceptualizing of work in the construction of human identity, opens up is the greater possibility of coparenting...

...In 1950, by contrast, the figure was a mere 4 percent...

...John Buell has argued for several years that any discourse about the family must take a long, hard look at the question of time...

...Signs of Difficulty, Possible Remedies here is mounting evidence that American children are more and more in peril, in part because they are less and less assured of the sustained care, support, and safety that comes only with order in their immediate environments...

...None of this is surprising, nor is it "blaming the victim," a by-now tedious retort aimed at silencing any serious discussion of the troubles we face...

...In the long run, child care and family life will be better served by policies shortening working hours and easing the time constraints on working parents, rather than enabling the driven ascetism of the upwardly mobile to become the norm to which all will be forced to aspire...

...Raising a child is rather weightier than raising exotic fish...

...But we have made it almost impossible for families to flourish...

...This confusion permeates all levels from the marketplace to the home...

...Protecting, preserving, and strengthening family autonomy is a way of affirming our commitment to the individual and to that democratic society that best speaks to the aspirations of individuals...

...The decline of the family is cited as one reason for the appearance of the civically uninterested and cynically self-interested as a paradigm for young adulthood—that, and the paucity of "civic education...

...The second is family language, spoken by ordinary middle class families...

...Wolfe responds: because they rely either on the market or the state "to organize their codes of moral obligation" when what we really need is "civil society —families, communities, friendship networks, solidaristic workplace ties, voluntarism, spontaneous groups and movements—not to reject, but to complete the project of modernity...

...As Theda Skocpol has argued, "Newly devised policies must speak with a consistent moral voice to all Americans, whether as recipients or as taxpayers, reinforcing rather than undermining fundamental values such as rewards for work, opportunities for individual betterment, and responsibility for the care of children and other vulnerable people...

...The family would be better able to foster self-reliant persons who understand that they have responsibilities to others that are not simply instrumental...

...By that we do not mean an overarching dogma or agenda...

...On the other hand, many conservatives love the untrammeled (or the less trammeled, the better) operations of the market in economic life but call for a restoration of traditional morality, including strict sexual scripts for men and women in social life...

...The "emotional core of family concerns in grassroots America" is a pervasive fear that "their children are adopting the values of an aggressively materialistic, individualistic and consumerist culture...

...Facing that task alone, in deteriorated housing, in broken-down neighborhoods, in poverty, or in the grip of drug dependency makes it harder still...

...The percentage of black infants born to unmarried mothers was 62 percent, compared with 17 percent of white infants...

...Children are bearing the brunt of a profound cultural shift whose negative features we are now in a position to observe and whose continuing costs will last much longer than our own lifetimes...

...No social order has ever existed—not one—that did not privilege certain practices as preferable to others...

...Before moving to an alternative way of thinking about families that eschews the by-now familiar ritual dance between "more welfare state" as the panacea or "more free market and individual responsibility" as the solution to our ills, let us note that despite the massive changes of the past three decades most people in our society still desire families consisting of two parents with their children...

...Barbara Dafoe Whitehead, who spent much of the late 1980s doing focus group research with lower-middle- and middle-class families, argues that our national debate on the family "is being conducted in two separate languages...

...Forty hours remains the norm, but high-stressed middle- to upper-middle-class families find "bread winners" putting in many more hours, as do the wage earners in lower-middle-class homes, where at least one spouse may work several jobs...

...They weren't doing their duty as parents simply by providing basic needs and even luxuries...

...But the burden of proof must be SPRING • 1991 • 265 Families in Trouble placed on those who would interfere with, or substitute for, the family...

...Such a program must be designed in a way that parents are helped through the moment of a child's birth but, at the same time, the regulations and requirements are not so cumbersome as to threaten to devastate small "mom-and-pop" businesses, which often work out such arrangements with their employees in any case...

...What they needed was time to teach "sound values," but that time more and more evaporates...

...The data on this are utterly clear and undeniable...

...Day care is a dilemma, for if we listen to parents, what is most needed is more time to spend with children rather than more assistance in providing out-of-home care for children...

...Parents told her they could no longer raise their children properly because they had "no time...

...They do this by working different shifts or combining a night or weekend job with a weekday job...

...that pictures work as some sort of "fulfillment" the only irritant the lack of money from the government to fund day care and parental leave...

...For all our success in modern America, there is a sense that something has gone terribly awry...

...The strongest predictors of domestic violence are single-parent households, unmarried couples (often a biological mother and her children with a boyfriend unrelated to those children either by birth or by acceptance of legitimate, legal responsibility for their well-being), and un- or undersupervised foster care situations...

...That is, all credible studies show a strong positive correlation between completion of high school and marriage and subsequent long-term employment...

...A better solution, or at least a place to start, would be the provision of income tax credits to families where at least one parent works and where the family is earning less than $11,000 per year...

...So would guarantees of decent health 264 • DISSENT Famines In Trouble care...

...Obviously, there are no guarantees...

...Even People for the American Way hopped on the bandwagon, arguing in a report that "young people seem to have a half-formed understanding of citizenship, stressing rights but ignoring responsibilities...

...Relying on the state and on a licensing system that threatens to wipe out small, informal neighborhood and community child-care arrangements would contribute to trends that are currently part of the problem...

...What happens if one does listen...

...Second, a child support strategy should speak to the fact that the single most favored ideal of family life, among all groups and across all income levels, is the two-parent family...

...The upshot is that more of us work outside the home and for longer periods of time than has been true for any civilization in history...

...Parenting under modern conditions is hard for two dedicated people to handle well...

...The experts and ideologues have failed to consult their ostensible constituencies—the world of middle- and lower-middle-class families, struggling to stay afloat and to sustain the ideal of family life the professionals say is on the wane and to which some say "good riddance...

...Indeed, according to Bureau of Labor Statistics, this "traditional" family comprises the nation's largest single category of families with preschool children...

...We rightly cherish our freedom, Alan Wolfe has argued in his recent book, Whose Keeper?, but we are "confused when it comes to recognizing the social obligations that make . . . freedom possible in the first place...

...Both these logics are doomed to self-destruct...

...Parents," she reports, "are mad as hell at what they see as dominant values in the culture...

...In 1989 the House Committee on Children, Youth and Families reported a "national emergency" of growing violence by and against youth, with homicide becoming the leading killer of black males ages fifteen to twenty-four, whose victimizers are themselves black males in the same age bracket...

...How can we create the conditions that help sustain the desperate efforts of parents to hold their families together and to give their children a moral education...

...We might yet perform a rescue operation that preserves the best about American society—its generosity, its sense of spontaneous concern for others, its volatile mingling of rootedness with individual freedom...

...He claims that despite their technological affluence Americans enjoy less leisure time than did Stone Age men and women...

...Family imagery permeates our deepest aspirations, fears, resentments, and hopes...

...Contemporary American society puts sustained pressure on families to succumb to an increasingly driven and harsh cultural surround...

...This call for a recuperation of "mediating institutions" is not yet another lament for a return to the past, but it is a call for a rethinking of what in and from the past is worth cherishing and preserving...

...The National Adolescent Student Health Survey indicates that "nearly two percent of all students [338,000 students nationwide} carried a handgun to school at least once" in 1987...

...On grounds of distributive justice this seems correct...

...Family experts have long tried to cajole us with jargonish language along the lines of, "It's no decline, it's merely change...

...While growing maternal employment and family diversity are important trends, more than one-third of all families with preschool children consist of homemaker mothers married to breadwinner fathers...

...But the acceptance of plural possibilities does not mean each alternative is equal to every other regarding specific social goods...

...Whiteheads' parents had no doubt that children were suffering when they lacked the time and attention of others uniquely devoted to their well-being...

...What dominates family talk by contrast to expert talk is "moral education," not more and better programs designed to fill the gaps left as the family is deinstitutionalized Whitehead found that the vast majority of parents believe that "the safest and best child care is provided by a parent or a close relative," and they design child care arrangements to follow this principle...

...Is this evidence of a benighted and fearful traditionalism or a recognition that children are best served when those caring for them have a strong and continuing emotional link to them as individuals rather than as the generic users of a paid-for service...

...Karl Zinsmeister in a piece in the Atlantic, "Growing up Scared," offers a terrifying portrait of the ways in which increasing numbers of American children are being scarred by violence in the home, in the schools, and on the streets...

...More and better day care, therefore, is not perceived as a "solution" by these parents because it does nothing about the problem of too little time...

...Universal social policies (like Social Security) are more politically viable than provision of high-priced services disproportionately available to a few...

...This is what parents are saying—despite the fact that no one appears to be listening...

...Whitehead also found what she called a "strong and highly emotional consensus" about perceived hostile forces...

...But the "prime subject of the grassroots conversation is how parents can do a decent job of raising their kids in a culture that is unfriendly to parents and children...

...rather, we have in mind the more modest but no less vital effort of locating where our deepest values lie— where the best part of ourselves resides...

...A family-leave policy would help...

...The data tell the tale: since 1975 murders committed by juveniles have increased three times, rape two times, robberies five times...

...Notes the Times: "Most experts agree that the violence reflects a breakdown of families, schools and other community institutions...

...Although the left continues to argue for taming the market in a strictly economic sense, it follows the market model where social relations are concerned, seeing in any restriction of any sort of lifestyle an unacceptable diminution of choice...

...Even if children aren't abused under these circumstances, they live in fear...

...The "new" may be cheap and bogus—its newness guarantees nothing about its value...

...Massachusetts spearheaded the rehabilitative course of treatment, but its current commissioner of the Department of Youth Services concurs with the deputy superintendent of the Boston Police Department when he claims, "We have never had the violence among young people we are experiencing today...

...These languages are foreign to one another...

...First, one must tend to what might be called "the politics of time...

...Why should anyone be surprised that children are beaten, women brutalized, and men, too—with women overcoming the physical strength disparity through the use of handguns against abusive partners...

...Even as violence wipes out thousands of young people each year and throws thousands of others into the arms of a strained judicial system, nearly one in four American infants is born to an unmarried mother, six times as many as four decades ago...

...This assessment is reinforced by the Times survey, which indicated that the only issues that get the attention of the young are those that stress personal freedom narrowly construed...

...Through all this driven effort, we have created a society dominated by what Hegel rightly saw as an endless dialectic of "needs creation," the world of the market and its social relations...

...The rights of persons are fundamentally social...

...Youth themselves, that always suspect category, appear to confirm such dire assessments...

...The preoccupation of the official debate is how to get both parents into full-time work and fund child care...

...But this isn't the way those on the front lines view the matter...

...This appears to run counter to the incessant P.R...

...The cost of expanding jails and other facilities threatens to break the back of many state budgets...

...Yet many Americans are unemployed or underemployed...

...With this cluster of articulated discontents, one can begin to raise fresh questions about culture and priorities and what implications might flow for family policy itself...

...Is it an end in itself or should it be seen as a way to enhance the possibility that persons—parents, in this case—will fulfill their ideals of the vocation they have undertaken...

...Perhaps future increases in productivity could be taken in the form of shorter hours, rather than in the proliferation of more goods and services, which only create new needs and addictions...

...Ethically responsible challenges may loosen those terms, but they do not negate a normative endorsement of family life...

...Another Times report sketched the "rising tide of violence" by adolescents, "with a record 100,000 of them confined in correctional institutions on any given day...

...Every social order forges terms of inclusion and exclusion...