Children of the Future

...Get out as early as you can, And don't have any kids yourself...

...And we shouldn't forget the Goldbergs...

...Yet there is a way in which, regardless of the historical reality, everybody's nostalgic fantasies are right...

...The parents may not be married...

...Outside of the trust-fund set, there are few families that don't simply need the money...

...It didn't work because so many families, even in those sacred middle-class suburbs, have moved out of Norman Rockwell country and won't look back...

...When Barbara Bush righteously denied everything—her husband's mistress, her children's crookedness— SPRING • 1993 • 223 Children of the Future instead of being admired for her saintliness, she was reproved for living a lie...

...None of us is free from fantasies like this...

...Many Americans were, and are, disturbed to see the Enlightenment come so close to home...

...It's strange to go through this post-sixties material twenty years later...

...Everybody in these families may not be "blood" relations...

...the children of the future will be so free and radiant that they will need poetry to feel and understand their parents' inner wounds...

...Family law has developed the institution of joint custody: now there don't have to be zero-sum wars between parents, and children can have two solid homes, and ex-spouses who can't agree on much can agree on this and work like hell to keep it intact for the sake of the children...

...Here, too, parents have found or created new structures for support...

...In fact, it didn't work that way...

...All these services exist differentially around the country today, but they are dependent on private incomes or local budgets, which means they get slashed just when and where they are needed most...

...How much longer could American women be expected to ignore their own...

...I know my picture of family life today leaves out a deep structure of feeling: nostalgic longing for a self-sufficient family of the past, a family that was everything to us, whose love warmed and enveloped us completely...

...It's why, in 1992, they so decisively rejected "the family" as a symbol of rigidity and regression...

...when they land, they live in wretched slums, work themselves to death in jobs the natives won't accept, put up with vicious insults and injuries (and every time and place has a racist and xenophobic repertory all its own), subject themselves to enormous amounts of crap, and alles fur die kindelech, everything for the kids, as they used to say when I was a kid...

...What can they have been thinking of...

...The most salient of "family values" in 1992 may be honesty in confronting a family's real troubles...

...They may not understand the relationships among the adults who are taking care of them...

...And we are reaching out to grow: even before we know 224 • DISSENT Children of the Future anything, reaching out is the way we love...

...Remember, real wages in the United States have been falling since 1973...

...the bad news is that it's leveled off at about one out of two...

...Will the Clintons add a family therapist to the White House staff...

...In the middle class, they will grow up surrounded by networks of psychiatrists, teachers, social workers, counselors, lawyers, mediators, coaches, tutors, nurturing them and helping them survive their parents even as they help their parents hold them together...

...From the moment we are born, we are beings who are made to grow...

...Or from their own lives...

...Hillary Clinton, on the other hand, won admiration for not lying, for confirming the rumors, openly expressing her disgust with her husband, but saying she still loved the guy and hoped they could work it through...

...People sell all they have, travel steerage, often declass themselves, anything to get out...

...was thought a crime . . . . —William Blake, "A Little Girl Lost," 1790s They fuck you up, your mum and dad...

...the Sex Pistols said, "We are the future/there is no future...

...They fill you with the faults they had, And add some new ones, just for you . . . . —Philip Larkin, "This Be the Verse," 1970s One of the marks of modern times is that masses of ordinary people have come to believe that their children's lives could be a lot better than their own...

...Like the Grinch who stole Christmas, this guy wants to grab hold of everybody's family hopes and smash them against the wall...

...They still say it, the Russian bakers and Indian stationers and Korean fruit-and-vegetable people on my block, and the parents of my students at CCNY, in more languages than I can keep track of...

...The big thing is that mothers en masse were going to work...

...These changes can help explain the spectacular backfire of the GOP's "family values" campaign...

...We could enrich our inner 1950s with a program note—maybe from Stephanie Coontz's recent study, The Way We Never Were (Basic Books, 1992)—to say how the GI Bill, FHA housing loans, the federal highway system and the whole vast cold war defense economy created a new suburban middle class "far more dependent on government handouts than any socalled 'underclass' in recent U.S...

...Americans over the last twenty years have been very imaginative and resourceful in putting these support systems together, with no government help...

...So the proportion has tripled, and a family structure that was pretty rare thirty years ago has become typical today...

...Tomorrow's families are going to have a far wider range of forms than yesterday's...

...After all, since the 1950s, American society has been going through the most intense agitation, redefining and working through the meaning of civil rights...

...But today the unraveling of marriages doesn't mean the destruction of families...

...Our parents know we are going to grow, and they want to help us grow: that's part of the way, even in the beginning, the way we're loved...

...I've been disparaging nostalgic fantasies...

...then he grins at us wickedly while he stomps the shards, even as his own feet are torn up by the broken glass...

...Children of the future age," William Blake's lyrical invocation, evokes this romantic faith...

...So many people seemed so sure (some sad, some glad) "the family" —as if there were only one—was "dead...

...Sometimes it does split, right down the middle...

...They may be of the same sex...

...one group called themselves Devo, in honor of humanity's Devolution...

...The generally genteel poet Philip Larkin, England's Poet Laureate, when he wrote about the family, sounded just like a punk...

...In the United States, unlike Western Europe, the only people who get that help are people already on welfare...

...Paul said she should...

...Millions of women, over the past two decades—not only women who were proud to be called feminists, but also women who scorned or feared the word—have been learning to apply those old Jeffersonian ideals, "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness," to their own lives...

...instead, they tend to fall in love again as soon as they can pick themselves off the floor, form new bonds, start new families, have more children (if they're too old, they adopt), and crowd the betting windows to wager on the future again...

...For people who grew up in the Great Depression, the Joad family formed a prime nostalgic archetype...

...Where both people are out in the world, there's more substance of fire, more life to share, more there there...

...What looks so weird, twenty years after, is the assumption that once modern women cease to be deferent, they are bound to become indifferent...

...In the Punk Rock of the 1970s, the myth took the form of a counter-Woodstock, spat into the face of the 1960s: "I belong to the blank generation" said Richard Hell and the Voidoids...

...They will be, in John Stuart Mill's wonderful phrase, "experiments in living...

...Over the last two centuries, as the world has opened up, this belief has become one of the driving forces for mass migration...

...Those who grew up with television are likely to find, twenty and thirty years later, the Walton, Ingalls ("Little House on the Prairie"), Nelson and Cleaver families playing endless reruns in our brains, peremptorily loud, impossible to evict or turn off...

...There will be a lot more stepparents around, and the stepchildren may belong to different generations...

...Many children of those garden suburbs, who grew up on those comedies, have found themselves in tragic deserts now that the cold war faucets are being turned off...

...All these professional helpers and carers work for money, as they must, and yet, in this la ronde whose social boundaries are so fluid, any one of them may turn into something very like family, and turn out to stand by their children and stand up for them for life...

...Plenty of families are experiments in living today: just take a look at the families out shopping with their children any Saturday on Upper Broadway, or check out your favorite mall...

...There are many layers...

...The Western European countries that Clinton has shown he knows about suggest some simple basic services that families need: family allowances, day-care centers, public schools that aren't crumbling, after-school and summer programs for children, community health services, including preventative medicine, birth control and abortion, prenatal care, family counseling, psychiatric help before (rather than after) things fall apart...

...Moreover, the very pervasiveness of divorce has mostly dissipated its stigma, and given the children, for company, plenty of other children like themselves...

...But the scaffolding shakes, the props are precarious, the parents lie awake in bed together at night worrying that somebody (or one body too many) will get sick the next morning and the whole structure will crash...

...Meanwhile, ex-wives and ex-husbands, thrown on their own, rarely live like swinging singles (as it used to be thought they would...

...Simultaneously, the Bush family was held up as a sort of Norman Rockwell icon, a family that had stayed together all these years (photo op: Barbara with grandchildren...

...What has happened, instead, for the most part, is that men and women discovered how thrilling, as well as grueling, life in a two-income and two-career family could be...

...With women as well as men struggling to be who they are, it's no surprise if both sexes feel under intolerable pressure and put intolerable pressure on each other...

...As grownups, we miss this state of total envelopment, and shouldn't we have the right to...

...history...

...You have to wonder...

...They may be of different races...

...Unconditional love is the condition we all (or almost all) are in when we're born and in our first few months of life...

...Was it from John Locke...

...But still, he upholds an equation proclaimed by the soppiest sentimentalists: "the family" equals the future...

...His poem, quoted above, reads like an apotheosis of the family counter-romance...

...Their deepest belief— sometimes, it seems, their only belief—is a belief in progress...

...that given a chance to live for themselves, they will become utterly cruel and uncaring for others—for men and children, for love and nurturing, for any sort of family tie or social bond beyond their momentary whims So many writers (of both sexes) used to talk this way...

...Is this what's meant by "Treat your spouse like a lover...

...they often come to feel it's they themselves who are the lambs, and their parents' visionary hopes are bonds that chain and crush them...

...Again and again, since the Age of Revolutions, romantic faith in the future has generated a dialectical antithesis, a counter-romance...

...His rap ends with Swiftian nihilism: Man hands on misery to man...

...It deepens like a coastal shelf...

...That campaign highlighted many of the Clinton family's troubles, especially Bill's adultery (but also his brother's drug addiction), and intimated that it was really all Hillary's fault, not just for going to work, but for thinking her work had some value independent of her husband, and generally for having an attitude and not knowing her place...

...But the experiences of going out to work, of being part of an enterprise and a work force, of having co-workers, of contributing to something outside one's own household, address more than material needs...

...For our nineteenth- and earlier twentieth-century time slots, we should add a couple of domestic horror shows like The Case of Dora and The Sound and the Fury...

...Where did they get that perverse equation, FREEDOM = INDIFFERENCE...

...Since 1962, the percentage of working mothers with children six to seventeen has risen from 42 percent in 1962 to 76 percent in 1992...

...What was happening was that millions of families were reconfiguring themselves...

...The crucial point is that our federal government has to pay for them out of tax money, and has to make them available to all Americans as basic rights...

...children's generation will enjoy a glorious future...

...Actually, Americans know this, even if they don't know they know it...

...The BLS breaks down this statistic into mothers with children from six to seventeen, and those whose children are under six...

...So, if we want to incorporate family values into our lives, our private lives and our collective life, we've got to think of our families as groups of people who are meant to grow...

...It can be done, but it is going to cost plenty, and it's time for the Clinton family, which has impressed so many of us with its honesty, to start being honest about this...

...keep those sleazy sons off camera, please), supposedly because the wife had given up not only her work but her beliefs—most strikingly, her belief in women's right to choice—and had submitted herself unto her husband, just the way St...

...But the grownups out there will be giving alles fur die kindelech, and the children of the future will be getting a lot of love...

...The Clintons, with two incomes and two careers, an unsubmissive wife, an overachieving husband who comes not only from the wrong side of the tracks but from an abusive, "dysfunctional" family and a past that still haunts him, and a large complex of serious troubles worn openly on their sleeves, turned out to be close to millions of contemporary families' hearts...

...If Clinton's slogan, "Invest in the American people," means anything, it means this: not only to serve and help the children, but to reduce the crushing anxiety level of all the parents who lie awake in the dark and try to make the life forces add up...

...A comic spinoff: 222 • DISSENT Children of the Future sometimes, say in interludes when they find themselves with exactly thirty-five minutes alone, and aren't totally worn out, they can enjoy the frisson of an illicit affair...

...Can we assess mothers' motivations...

...They may not mean to, but they do...

...But even if we could have this back somehow, it can't last...

...Today's couples break up far more often than their parents did...

...to not have kids is to "get out as early as you can" from life...

...Divorce today, as much as in the Karenins' day, opens floodgates of rage, guilt, and existential panic...

...But they shouldn't be surprised...

...The good news is that over the last decade or so the divorce rate has leveled off...

...The adults may not understand them either...

...If we compare the proportion of working mothers—that is, mothers in the labor force with children under seventeen—we find that in thirty years, from March 1962 to March 1992, it has more than doubled: 30 percent for 1962, 67 percent for 1992...

...The speaker in Blake's poem is wretched in the present age, but confident that his (her...

...Christopher Lasch expounded this sort of theory in academic language in his 1970s cultural studies, The Culture of Narcissism and Haven in a Heartless SPRING • 1993 • 221 Children of the Future World, which proclaimed as an incontrovertible fact of modern life "the death of the family...

...Two-income families with children have been forced to develop a vast infrastructure of playgroups and sitters and nannies and day-care centers and after-school programs...

...Here are some numbers, hot off the presses from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS...

...Single parents have developed elaborate networks to share responsibility for each other's children, so they can get at least some slack to take responsibility for themselves...

...Alas, in the history of culture as much as in the history of families, children tend not to appreciate parental sacrifice...

...0 Andrew LichtenstentimPAcT VISUALS SPRING • 1993 • 225...

...Sometimes this grim myth has appeared as a counter-American Dream, as in all the great American plays—by Eugene O'Neill, Clifford Odets, Lillian Hellman, Arthur Miller, Tennessee Williams, Sam Shepard— about children who are crushed by their parents and/or their parents' sins...

...The most striking rise has been for mothers with children under six: 20 percent were working in 1962, 58 percent in 1992...

...Maybe, so that the fantasies don't drown us, our inner networks need supplements...

...We want to be happy, and nothing makes humans happier than feeling loved...

...So what can President Clinton do for real families...

...Of course, there's not much time for there to be there: a working couple with children pretty much has to make dates to be together, and not many dates will be open...

...The children may spend time shifting homes...

...Today's children of divorce don't skulk alone in corners, as yesterday's did: they are likely to grow up surrounded by stepparents and godparents and stepsiblings who fill their lives and give them all the love they can take...