HARD TIMES FOR THE AMERICAN FAMILY

...Social services now are fragmented and frequently demeaning and they further disinherit and delegitimate parents...

...Economics and what the world goes through is reflected in all of us," said one psychologist...

...It has historically been the case that in situations of great insecurity and economic travail, including inflation, people are more likely to seek, or to acquiesce in, authoritarian solutions of the Right or Left...

...Life, for such women, became a whirlwind of busywork rather than coequal productive work, and part of the busywork was consuming those products, including more and more gad-getry, that in turn spiraled ever upward the norms for "good housekeeping...

...The signs and symptoms of the classical syndrome known as "maternal deprivation"—more properly social, structural deprivation—are on the rise, sure evidence of children abandoned to overcrowded, understaffed places where they are stashed and not truly loved or cared for...

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

...People report feeling weighted down, anxious, desperate, angry, frustrated, and exhausted...

...asks rock star Bruce Springsteen, himself a man of working-class origin, in a recent song...

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

...Nevertheless, the structure of our political economy is the single most important feature in a transformation of American familial life and patterns so rapid it amounts to an unintended social revolution...

...Families became primarily emotional or affective institutions: They socialized the young to take their part in the larger society as adults...

...That is, the typical family in the past served as an economic unit of its own, as a school, a welfare institution, a house of correction, and a vocational institute...

...One problem with all this is that a variety of groups, including feminists, homosexual lobbies, professionals who work with families, and the New Right protest that the way most Americans, ineluding policy makers, define the family is narrow, ideological, and prejudiced...

...For the...

...I don't want government defining what families are and then gearing its policies accordingly...

...We are familiar with this history for it is a story to which each of us, in one way or another, is linked...

...Few academic specialists attempt to see the family, first, on its own terms, as a set of powerful social relations with their own vital integrity and meaning to social participants themselves and, second, as one dimension of a wider community conceived not in functionalist terms, but as an ideal of the social and political life...

...small farmers were squeezed out...

...The Carnegie Council on Children reports that in 1948 only 26 per cent of married women with school-age children worked outside the home...

...Wives and husbands "rub each other raw" in struggles over economic issues and this rebounds on the children...

...Jobs were most often in or near homes and neighborhoods, though even before World War II demographic shifts and economic dislocations were beginning to break up this traditional and somewhat idealized pattern...

...In an article headed "Economic Squeeze Sets Off Crush of Family Tensions," Steven V. Roberts of The New York Times reports: "Around the country, from New York and New England through the industrial Middle West to Texas and Arizona and points west, many Americans feel themselves slipping into a whirlpool of economic pressure and uncertainty...

...Indeed, many women indicate that they would rather not work but must to make ends meet or simply to survive...

...this is the first time in our history that the typical school-age child has a mother who works outside the home...

...Writes John Romanyshynm, author of Social Welfare: Charity to Justice: "We have extolled family life but have rarely nurtured it in this society...

...And it tied people into a spiral of rising consumerist expectations, and job patterns which required purchasing one car, then two, and all the rest...

...Most of this country's severely endangered babies and children are the children of poverty whose mothers are employed at low-pay, dead-end jobs and who are cared for through what Selma Fraiberg calls "the desperate child care plans~ of the poor...

...When the families of new immigrant groups had experienced extraordinary economic, social, and cultural dislocation upon arriving on American shores, there was still a sense, at least partially accurate, that a cushion of friends, kin, church groups, other self-help associations, and political machines would step in to help families in need of aid and take some of the sting off the worst deprivation and despair...

...Children without neighborhoods to play in had to be shunted about or shut in with the television set...

...There was a time in America when the family was part of a larger network of kin ties and communal links...

...This is a project for the long haul...

...So long as families are not creating too many "deviants," in sociological language, they are "doing their job...

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

...For Americans working classes the dream of a better life stayed mostly out of reach and their lives soured on that account...

...The Council concludes, "Changes in American family structure have been fairly continuous since the first European settlement, but today these changes seem to be occurring so rapidly that the shift is no longer a simple extension of long-term trends...

...Consuming grew into a way of life...

...Instead, the most coherent and humane agenda would be one that addresses basic issues of human survival and deprivation, that moves toward children's allowances, guaranteed income, and a comprehensive national health policy...

...It locates families within a supportive web of human, social ties...

...Is a dream a lie if it don't come true/or is it ten times worse...

...We have specialized in "people-changing" programs, assuming that if somehow we got the poor to "shape up," they would go about creating decent, striving middle-class families like the rest of us...

...It would be a serious error to locate the complete and full explanation for the state we are in, for that crisis of the family that has itself become a constant feature of contemporary social reality, in economic forces and constraints...

...Given this scenario, many experts have called for Americans to adopt a National Policy on Families and have demanded explicit, comprehensive governmental intervention in the creation of a family policy that aims at buttressing, supporting, and guiding the family in certain directions...

...The approach I suggest, one I call "family reconstruction," requires real structural changes in the American political economy...

...But the economy in the sense of a political economy is a complex interrelated structure that sets, for Americans, a vast context for living—a context which has been called "the culture of productivity...

...Those strains have been exacerbated and heightened over the past five years as inflation has soared and reached into the very heart of working and middle-class American family life...

...Yet the top 20 per cent receive 41 per cent of the family income overall and own 60 per cent of the country's wealth, even as the bottom 23 per cent receive 5.4 per cent of the family income and have no assets at all...

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

...The wider social network, itself in part an extension of the family, also permeated each family's inner workings by helping to give self-reliance and self-respect and to serve the emotional as well as the physical needs of a family's children...

...By March 1976, that figure had doubled...

...The political portents of this stress, and people's reactions to it, are potentially dire...

...Reaganomics only threatens to make matters worse—much worse...

...Urban renewal devastated old neighborhoods...

...Our welfare and relief policies, at least since 1967, penalize the welfare mother who does not work and who would, in most instances, do a much better job of caring for her children, if she had minimal help in doing so, than those alternatives now available to her as she is forced out into the job market and prevented from setting up a viable family environment...

...There is a tendency, in discussions of this topic, either to fall into a doomsday mentality and foresee the end of Western civilization if something isn't done, and soon, about the crisis of the family, or to lapse into a cozy assurance that things are really not all that bad, that reports of family strains and collapse and fragmentation are exaggerated, and that people still, most of the time, grow up in families and create new families and live out their lives in families...

...There is much truth to this "functionalist" approach to the social history of the family...

...In societies beyond the most simple, the family is one feature within a larger social system, and some see the family as merely performing "functions" for that wider realm as well as within it...

...No society has yet been discovered in which a familial form did not exist...

...Real estate speculation boomed and suburbs were born, by definition community-less places where aggregates of persons with no intrinsic ties to one another began to live out ever more enclosed and self-seeking lives, turning inward upon themselves...

...Those who see the numbers of women in the labor force simply as some sort of victory for, or vindication of, feminism are terribly off base...

...With men away, women began to work in industry in large numbers— the famous phenomenon of "Rosie the Riveter...

...With these previous functions dispersed, all that was left to the family, goes the argument, was something called "the nurturant socialization of the young...

...I believe individual family members, and many particular families, show great resilience, good humor, and strength of character when confronted with the possibilities and the pitfalls that modern life offers up...

...The human cost of the new affluence, however, spread unevenly as affluence has always been, was subtler and harder to get at, particularly if one explored the phenomenon through a functionalist perspective which held that all was well if all was somehow holding together...

...The startling and saddening truth is that this country does not provide a viable family wage for a very large minority of its members and offers only a modest, even subsistence, wage to the majority...

...indeed, conflicts that emerge outside get displaced inside, into the very heart of the family's existence...

...The Council adds that statistics, including the 700 per cent increase in the number of children affected by divorce since the turn of the century, only begin to hint at the stresses that have accompanied the social and cultural transformations resulting from profound shifts in the political economy...

...The entire countryside was permanently altered—defaced, many would say—with superhighways and freeways, and the economic "health" of the automobile industry became synonymous with the health of the political economy as a whole...

...Old habits of thrift and preservation, of making do and making things last, melted away before the onslaught of what became our throw-away society...

...So powerful is our emphasis on the individual that, for the most part, our programs designed to deal with social problems have tended to ignore the fact that the individual is part of the family unit...

...They argue that the modern family has become what it is in part because previous familial functions have been reassigned elsewhere...

...No feminist victory can be claimed unless the individual has a choice, and most women who go to work do not...

...This affluence came at a high cost in human relations...

...But this family cannot exist in isolation from the economy...

...There are individual and familial survivors, and some families seem to grow stronger with each passing year...

...This means, right now, that we organize politically, to combat Reaganomics and the legacy of human suffering, bitterness, and abandonment it will bring in its wake...

...For all practical purposes, she concludes, these are "motherless babies...

...Whatever remained of the old way was shattered by the war and its aftermath...

...But there is a problem with it as well: This approach, which prevails in contemporary social science treatments of these issues, cannot help us to understand the inner realities of family life, the nuances and textures of those human relations that make up the heart of the family's existence...

...We frequently think of such matters as social or psychological because we construe the economic narrowly to mean simply money and prices, salaries, labor costs, and profits...

...The family is a universal social institution...

...After the war, people neither returned to old patterns nor to their traditional communities...

...We have passed a genuine watershed...

...This bleak picture can be laid directly at the doorstep of a society that, in addition to its failure to provide a living family wage, a decent income, and full employment, has refused any minimum income supplement policy or supplementary child support...

...Family imagery figures importantly in our social and political symbols and slogans, permeates our most deeply rooted aspirations, fears, resentments, and hopes, and runs like a rich current in and through American fiction...

...The Carnegie Council called for a new "principle of entitlement" that would provide access "for every family to the resources that all families today need...

...The countryside was fragmented into subdivisions...

...There are no easy measurements for emotional impoverishment and spiritual decay, for the human wasteland amidst all the tree-lined deserted streets in affluent neighborhoods, for the mothers with young children isolated from parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles, sisters, brothers, and neighbors, and with husbands off to work in cities thirty or forty miles away...

...More than 90 per cent of all children in the United States live with one or both of their own parents...

...The family was imbedded in the community, yet extended itself out into the wider social network...

...more mobile classes the reality of affluence had a dark underside: a nightmare of unending pressure to perform better, to move up, to move from one's "good" neighborhood to a "better" one in which the houses were bigger and even farther apart and success seemed to be measured by the capacity of the family to live in splendid isolation from other families and outside any wider community, in any meaningful sense, at all...

...It was the particular nature of the American political economy, geared up first for war, then for that stalemate between wars, then for Vietnam, now being cranked up for another war or war-like foreign policy, that revolutionized demographic patterns, altered human expectations, shunted the old out of sight and out of mind, required, given the absence of traditional structures of support, that the handicapped and "deviant" be institutionalized, with "deviance" being more and more widely construed to include those who couldn't or wouldn't "make it" on the society's terms...

...We focus on individual and social problems...

...Inflation and unemployment are invading even their most personal moments, how they sleep and eat and feel, what they say around the dinner table—and what they don't...

...We can only hope our social relations are resilient and firm enough to hold out despite the forces of fragmentation at work on them from the outside...

...Communities and families were composed of inter-generational groupings...

...What I seek is a context within which families may flourish without government meddling in their internal affairs...

...Instead of throwing roadblocks in the way of parents' abilities to do their job, programs must be undertaken to ensure that parents need no longer be frustrated and demeaned, rendered helpless in work life and citizenship...

...It would be romantic to call for a dramatic turning around of the political economy in more egalitarian directions all at once...

...I have mentioned the emotional burdens of a driven, consumerist ethos...

...This context affects people's view of themselves, their human hopes and dreams, their expectations and betrayals if expectations aren't met...

...Even then, despite the absorption of women in the labor force, the Council estimates that a quarter to a third of all American children are born into families with financial strains so great that children suffer basic deprivation, with 12 to 15 per cent falling below the official poverty line...

...They claim that moves toward a national family policy must await some kind of consensus on what families are, or ought to be...

...The war sped a process of economic and government centralization...

...HARD TIMES for the American family JEAN BETHKE ELSHTAIN Devoted as our society is to an idealized picture of the family, we have made it more and more difficult for families to survive as intact, intimate units...

...These include"—she says— "the baby storage home provided by 'somebody' in the neighborhood (and sometimes a different 'somebody' several times a week) or a baby bank (it could be a child-care center subsidized by the government) in which a procession of indifferent caregivers of doubtful qualifications ministered to twenty babies for ten hours of a baby's day...

...These stresses brought on by economic binds are of several sorts: sheer economic want and desperation, particularly the horror of being laid off and having to swallow one's pride and violate one's sense of self to get aid, including welfare, and being witness to the slipping away of the American dream that life would get better and that one could make it better for one's children...

...I reject the either-or options with which we are usually presented...

...More than fourteen million men and women were incorporated into the armed forces...

...But although these changes cannot be rejected, their implementation, at least initially, increases strains on the family and tensions among family members...

...We got the beginning of that awesome edifice of mega-deaths called "the military-industrial complex...

...Whole industries sprang up around new technologies and specializations, many to serve the burgeoning military establishment...

...If, to the picture already sketched, we add the proliferation of governmental policies that directly or indirectly impinge on families, we have a sense of an institution— the family—hedged in, under surveillance, taken over, its tasks pared down, its dignity impaired, its sense of integrity eroded...

...Men, women, and whole families moved into urban centers for jobs in munitions plants, shipyards, and airplane factories...

...We have sought to strengthen family life without providing the basic institutional supports essential to enable the family to perform its basic functions...

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

...Some L of these changes are potentially for the better—the changes of heart, mind, and social arrangements brought about by the women's movement...

...Human beings saw themselves more and more as objects that consumed things, and they embodied, in their gadgets, their clothes, their makeup, what the new affluence was all about...

...This seems to be a hopeless enterprise and one government had best stay out of...

...The family, stripped of its prior cen-trality in all aspects of community life, became an embattled enclave...

...In this period of retrenchment and rising fear, it is more important than ever to fight the pressures at work which threaten to erode and impoverish our most basic human relationships...

...Our desperate clinging to familial ideals has become a kind of talisman— a defense against our forebodings that almost total disintegration of the fabric of human ties and intimate relationships may be the final outcome of those pressures that fragment, split, and divide communities, that send family members in all directions, mostly in search of jobs and security or simple survival, that project family members into emotional tailspins which threaten to implode families from within like so many Chinese firecrackers going off one after the other...

...War industries called millions into the cities...

...Jean Bethke Elshtain is associate professor of political science at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst...

...The single factor that accounts for the dramatic rise in the numbers of working women is inflation—the fact that real wages haven't kept up with the inflation rate...

...But, finally, the evidence of the great difficulties placed in the human path by economic strains and fears, the evidence of human sorrow and confusion and tragedy created by the combined forces of the social world, is too ominous to ignore...

...Life got gadgetized...

...Family members, for the most part, were born into, grew up, lived, worked, and died within their communities...

...American families have borne the brunt of social change...

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

...We are only now able to see the effects of this transformation, and just beginning to evaluate it with any clarity...

...Old neighborhood businesses lost out...

...But those middle-class families are in trouble too...

...Those women who do work because of economic exigency find inadequate day care, or none, for their children...

...If there are stresses and strains within the family, the therapeutic establishment exists to deal with those...

...According to The Times, fear and insecurity have led to a sharp increase in family tensions...

...This could be done without government defining what counts as a family and including or excluding people accordingly...