For
April 9
“The
Family Crisis Reconsidered” --From Stephanie Coontz, “The Way We Never Were:
American Families and the Nostalgia Trap” (1993)
Question: How does Coontz explain and help you to understand how the
middle class focus on the family developed as a political agenda? What is her
argument about the limits of this focus?
Does any of her article help you to understand your own family’s
history? Can you understand some of the other assigned readings better in light
of her arguments? Try to raise any questions/criticisms of her argument
The period from the late 1970s until
the early 1990s was one of sharp economic setbacks in a series of regions and
industries, followed by economic and cultural "recoveries" that
excluded many Americans and left even the "winners' feeling anxious and
dissatisfied. Per capita income rose; new jobs were created; women and
minorities moved into new careers; political rivals abroad turned to America
for leadership; the gross national product grew; new technologies spawned
consumer booms in personal computers, videocassette recorders, and microwave
ovens; and Americans near retirement age were better off financially than ever
before. Yet more people fell deeper into poverty; children's life prospects
worsened by several measurements; and even those who managed to maintain or
improve their living standards felt more pressed for time and more precarious
in their achievements than they remembered feeling in the past. While Chinese
students built replicas of the Statue of Liberty, Americans thinking about
their own society were more likely to raise images of Wall Street speculators,
declining educational achievement, negative political campaigns, widespread
personal immorality, senseless violence, and cultural fragmentation.
The obvious question was, "If
America is so rich, why aren't we happy?' And the answer that made sense to
many was, "because of the collapse of the family." This explanation
also seemed to answer two related questions: "If America is so rich, why
are there more poor people than there were in the 1960s? Why do our young
people seem so
desperate and so angry?" The crisis of the family" became the key to
explaining the paradox of poverty amid plenty, alienation in the midst of
abundance.
According
to many commentators 'the root cause" of the problems Americans face as
the twentieth
century
draws to a close is an “epidemic of family breakdown”. Sarnuel Sava, head of the
National Association of Elementary School Principals, blames the decline of American education on a
"parenting deficit." "It's not better teachers, texts, or
curricula that Our children need most ... we will never see lasting school reform
until we see parent reform." Divorce and unwed motherhood are said
to be the major causes of poverty and inequality in contemporary America. In
his State of the Union ad- dress for 1992, President Bush claimed that the
crisis of the cities results from "the dissolution Of the family"
Kate O'Beirne of the Heritage Foundation asserts that
people of all political persuasions are coming to understand that
America’s troubles stem from the collapse of family stability and the work ethic."'
"Why launch new school reforms
when ... the real key to educational performance is whether a child comes from
a two-parent family? Why experiment with anti-poverty programs when ... the
most important indicator of poverty is whether there are two parents at home?
Instead, strengthened family ties and values are put forward as the Primary
solution to America's economic difficulties and cultural malaise. “It
sounds too simple to be true, but the statistics bear it out. Marriage is the
ticket out of poverty." And the key to a lasting marriage is family commitment, the
only sure answer to the increasing individualism and fragmentation of American
society.
It's a powerful argument, because so many of our
most tragic family problems revolve around children whom we might expect to be
better protected by caring parents. One in five American children- almost one
in two black American children-lives in poverty; the proportions are even
higher among children under the age of six, who comprise the fastest-growing
poverty group in America. Fewer than half of all high school seniors read at
levels considered adequate to follow even moderately complex directions. After
decreases in crime rates between 1980 and 1985, crime is on the rise again,
with younger persons and more savage violence involved. More than two million
cases of child abuse are reported to child-protection agencies each year; while
some of these reports are false or unprovable, there is evidence that actual
cases of abuse far exceed the reports. Seven million children live with an
alcoholic parent; almost 1.2 million children run away from home each year; and
suicide is the leading cause of death among American teenagers. The number of
youths living in abject poverty-below half the poverty line-has increased, but
even youths from more stable economic backgrounds exhibit many of the same
symptoms seen among the very poor: alienation, cynicism, depression,
hopelessness, lack of connection to others.'
The question, however, is how many of
these problems are caused primarily by changes in family forms and values, or
could be solved by attempts to "revive the traditional family"? The
answer is surprisingly few. Historically, Americans have tended to discover a
crisis in family structure and standards whenever they are in the midst of
major changes in socioeconomic structure and standards. Today's family crisis
follows a major economic and political restructuring going on since the late
1960s: the eclipse of traditional employment centers, destruction of formerly
high-paid union jobs, expansion of the female and minority work force, and the
mounting dilemmas of welfare capitalism. America has seen a major shift in the
organization of work and its rewards: Family values, forms, and strategies that
once coordinated personal life with older relations of production and
distribution are now out of sync with economic and political trends. In past
crises, as in this one, such imbalances caused pain and disruption in families,
and families or individuals reacted to the changes in ways that sometimes made
things worse, but neither then nor now could the larger crisis have been
averted if only families had "tried harder."
Earlier family crises, unlike today's,
took place in periods when the expansion of productivity and growth of
democratic political institutions provided a basis for long-term optimism about
social trends, in spite of short-term dislocations. If we once had long-range
optimism in the midst of short-range hardship, today we have long- term despair
in the midst of short-term benefits. This makes it tempting to focus on
something small enough to seem manageable: If we cannot strengthen America's
political and economic infrastructure, maybe we can at least shore up our
families. But focusing attention on family arrangements diverts us from the
research, programs, and hard choices necessary to bring families back into
balance with economic and political realities. Under current circumstances,
strengthening traditional family structures and values is going to be an uphill
struggle; and to the extent that such strengthening does not change the economic
and social context of modern family life, it is unlikely to solve the problems
that continually lead people to engage in personal behavior that goes
against many of their family values.
Certainly, several of the problems
Americans face in the 1990s exhibit themselves in family dysfunction; many
families engage in behaviors that trigger or exacerbate economic and social
distress for their individual members. However, blaming our ills on family breakdown
oversimplifies the issue and ultimately leads to a scapegoating mentality that
is unfair and unhelpful.
Consider the issue of
single-parent families and poverty. It is true that poverty is
disproportionately concentrated in single-parent families, especially
female-headed ones, but the bulk of poverty in America is not caused by family
type. Approximately 48 percent of all poor families are female-headed, but
female-headship does not account for 48 percent of poverty, as superficial
interpretations often claim. Conversely, while 36 percent of female-headed
families are poor, female-headed families are not synonymous with poor
families. Much growth in poor female-headed families "represents a
reshuffling of poor people into different household types rather than a change
in poverty caused by household changes."'
Economists Christine Ross, Sheldon
Danziger, and Eugene Smolensky studied poverty rates from the 1940s to the
1980s, then applied the 1980 poverty rates for each group studied to the 1940
demographic composition of the population. Their figures showed that if no
changes had occurred in the age, race, and gender of household heads since
1940, the poverty rate in 1980 would have been 23 per-cent lower than it
actually was.' But this still leaves 77 percent of poverty that is not
associated with familial transformations. It also overstates the effect of
change in family arrangements in two ways. First, it includes race and age
factors that are not caused by family dissolution. Second, it assumes that
people who moved into female-headed families in the 1970s were basically the
same as those who were married, In fact, however, marital dissolution and
illegitimacy occur disproportionately among sectors of the population who are
more vulnerable to poverty anyway.
A 1991 Census Bureau study found that
the average family who falls into poverty after the father leaves was already in
economic distress before his departure, often because the father had recently
lost his job. The University of Michigan Panel Study of Income Dynamics, which
has followed a representative sample of 5,000 families since 1968, found that
only one-seventh of childhood transitions into long-term poverty were
associated with family dissolution, while more than half were linked to changes
in labor market participation or remuneration. But poor families are twice as
likely to divorce as others.'
Furthermore, ironically, the discovery
of single-parent poverty in ,the 1980s actually coincided with a growth in
two-parent poverty. A majority of the increase in family poverty since 1979 has
occurred in families with both spouses present, with only 38 percent
concentrated in single-parent families; the percentage of the poor living in
female-headed families has declined since 1978…..
Certainly, single-parent families are
more likely to be poor than are two-parent families and much more likely to
remain poor during periods of economic recovery, but a closer analysis suggests
that this fact itself needs explaining. It is not an inevitable fact of nature.
America, for example, has not only the highest total child poverty rate among
eight industrialized Western democracies recently studied, but also the highest
poverty rate among children in single-parent families, with the sole exception
of Australia. A cross-national comparison of poverty rates within similar
household types reveals that "different family structures play at best a
small part in the higher absolute poverty of American children.”
The superior position of female-headed
families in modern Europe is primarily a result of more generous state policies
toward families with children, but even in societies where the state does not
step in, there is no necessary reason that female-headed families be poor. In
kinship-based foraging societies of the past, for instance, women and children
were entitled to resources simply by being members of the group. They were not
forced to rely for their living on maintaining a particular relationship with a
man.
Even in modern America, the divergence
between single-parent and two-parent families has not always been as wide as it
became during the 1970s and 1980s. In the 1940s and 1950s, the poverty gap
between single-parent and two-parent families was much smaller, and prior to
1969, the increase in the number of female-headed families was accompanied by a
decline in the proportion of such families that lived in poverty. It thus makes
more sense to blame family- related poverty on larger economic and political
factors that have widened the gap between one- and two-parent families than to
blame it on divorce or illegitimacy per se. One such factor is the inflation
that now makes it difficult to support a family even on the wages of a man.
Modern two-parent families have avoided poverty only to the extent that they,
too, have broken with traditional family arrangements. Without the work of
wives, the entire bottom 60 percent of the U.S. population would have had real
income losses between 1979 and 1986, and 80 percent of married-couple families
with children would have suffered such declines. More than one-third of all
two-parent families today would be poor if both parents did not work."
Another factor is discriminatory wages
paid to women. Female workers in America earn about 70 percent of what male
workers earn. While this is a gain over the 60 percent rate in the 1960s and
1970s, America's wage gap remains one of the largest in the advanced capitalist
world. The average woman worker's earnings peak at $22,000 per year somewhere
between the ages of forty and forty- four. Almost half of women's improvement
relative to men, more- over, has been due to falling real wages for men."
. . .
The Deteriorating Position
of Young Families
Single-parent families are most likely to be found in the age and educational groups that, independently of family status, have suffered the most from recent economic changes. According to Northeastern University economist Andrew Sum, 'the relative income position of the nation's youngest families has deteriorated ... sharply and continuously" since 1967. Regardless of their structure, families with adults in their twenties were much more likely to be poor in the 1980s than in the two previous decades. in 1963,60 percent of men aged twenty to twenty-four earned enough to keep a family of three out of poverty; by 1984, only 42 percent could do so."
An insight into the economic stress experienced by young
families can be gained by noting that between 1929 and 1932, during the Great
Depression, per capita income fell by 27 percent; between 1973 and 1986, the
median income of families headed by a person under age thirty fell by almost
exactly the same amount. The drop took longer than in the Depression, and it
was masked by a general rise in per capita income during the period, but that
by no means negates the magnitude of the losses suffered by young Americans. In
fact, it may simply have made the decline harder to understand, and therefore
more demoralizing."
Within the younger population, the lion's share of this loss
was borne by those least able to afford it: those with limited educational
attainment and prospects. Since 1967, the increased demand for college
graduates has been largely at the expense of high school graduates and
dropouts. Real wages for college-educated workers have risen, albeit unevenly,
but only 25 percent of the work force have college degrees…….
Modern Families and the
Collapse of the "American Dream"
The family arrangements we sometimes
mistakenly think of as traditional became standard for a majority of Americans,
and a realistic goal for others, only in the postwar era. The gender roles and
intergenerational relations that emerged in this period were shaped by the
unusual economic and political alignments [of that period-Coontz’ book details
these in an earlier section]. Poverty in the 1950s was higher than it is today
and did not drop sharply until the antipoverty initiatives of the 1960s, but
unlike the 1970s
and 1980s, the poverty rates were headed down rather than up, so that
perseverance rather than innovation seemed the route to success. Private life
was far from idyllic for either poor or affluent families, but a sense of
optimism and expanding choice was fostered by the sustained growth in real
income and by the effectiveness of government programs supporting upward
economic and residential mobility.
Life might not be perfect right now,
people could reason, but it would get better; and improvement would take place
within the culturally approved family form. Between 1949 and 1973, the average
man passing from age twenty-five to thirty-five saw his real wages rise by
about 110 percent. Job pressures and rewards slowed down after age forty, but
men could still -expect to see their earnings rise by 30 percent between the
ages of forty and fifty, while the homes that a majority of such men had bought
in their early years of marriage continued to rise in value."'
This impressive rise in real income
during the 1950s and 1960s, fed by America's privileged international economic
position, allowed the United States to look with relative equanimity on a
rather high degree of economic inequality. In 1963, the bottom 90 percent of
families had only 36 percent of total wealth, while the bottom 60 percent had
less than 10 percent. Inequality at the bottom was not much less than that of
1983, when the bottom 90 percent of families had just 32.1 percent of total
wealth, but so long as the total pie-of both income and wealth-was growing
larger and larger, people's share of wealth was not their urgent concern. And
during the 1950S and 1960s, economic growth did not increase inequality, even
if it did little to wipe it out. America thus saw no sharp struggles over the
redistribution of wealth, even during the antipoverty programs of the 1960s.
People assumed that each generation would live better than had its parents, and
even if the rich got larger portions, economic growth and government policies
eventually trickled down to everyone.”
Since 1973, however, quite a
different economic and political climate has prevailed. By 1988, "the
average hourly earnings of private, nonsupervisory workers were lower than in
any other year since 1966, after adjusting for inflation." There has been
a growing mismatch between occupation and schooling for large sectors of the
young adult population. Half the new jobs created in the 1980s paid a wage
lower than the poverty figure for a family of four. Today, only 18 [13%-2001]
percent of the nonagricultural labor force is unionized, half the percentage of
the 1950s. The fastest-growing sector of the economy has been service work,
which is only 5 percent unionized (down from 15 percent in 1970); the
fastest-growing part of this sector (in- deed of the whole economy) is
part-time work."
The number of involuntary part-time
workers grew by 121 percent between 1970 and 1990, according to the Bureau of
Labor Statistics. The hourly wages of such workers are just 60 percent of those
of full-time workers. Only 22 percent of part-timers are covered by
employer-sponsored health insurance, compared to 78 per- cent of full-time
workers. Between July 1990 and July 1991, one in five Americans experienced a
cut in take-home pay, a reduction in overtime, or an increase in their medical
insurance premiums."
This decline in job prospects, real
wages, and benefits is not just a temporary phenomenon that was caused by an
oversupply of baby- boom workers or will be solved automatically by renewed
economic growth. The smaller, post-baby-boom generation has now entered the job
market, but rather than finding themselves in a sellers' market, they have
found that their real incomes are even lower than those of their predecessors.
"Employment projections now suggest that by the year 2000 American workers
may need more education to qualify for jobs,that will pay less." Although
unemployment rates fell during the second half of the 1980s and the number of
millionaires mushroomed, economic growth was based largely on financial speculation
at the top and multiplication of low-wage jobs at the bottom. The
"recoveries" of the 1980s did little to raise living standards all
along the line. Instead, rising averages obscured polarizing incomes. In 1987,
after five years of recovery from the 1982 recession, inequality was greater
than at the height of that recession and much greater than it was in 1973. The
poverty rate-was higher than it had been a decade earlier, and the poorest 20
percent of the population were living on incomes that were lower than they were
in 1979.
One consequence of all this is that it
became more difficult for the current generation to achieve the house in the
suburbs that was an integral part of the postwar American dream. The proportion
of a young family's income required to pay the principal and interest on a
median-priced home increased from approximately 16 percent in the 1950s and
1960s to 28 percent in 1983. When this statistic is put in terms of the
traditional male breadwinner, the change becomes even more stark. In the 1950s
and 1960s, it took 15 percent to 18 percent of the average thirty-year-old
man's income to pay the principal and interest on a median-priced home. By
1973, it took 20 percent of his income, and by 1983, it took more than 40
percent. A college education lowers this percentage, but college tuition now
requires 40 per cent of family income, up from 29 percent in 1970. .
Wage stagnation has changed the life
course of men immensely. Where young men in the previous period had seen their
earnings double as they passed from twenty-five to thirty-five, men who were
twenty-five in 1973 saw their income grow by only 16 percent in the next ten
years, while older men passing from age forty to fifty saw their real earnings
decline by 14 percent. Researchers at Dartmouth College and Hofstra University
project that only 35 percent of the men who will be twenty-five to thirty-four in the
year 2000 have a chance
of attaining a better job than their fathers had.
Women’s lives have also
changed, though in more complicated ways. The average real wages of women,
unlike those of men, rose modestly over the past two decades. Even though the
bottom 75 percent of male workers saw their real wages fall between 1979 and
1985, only the bottom 25 percent of female workers were ire the same boat.
Wives' contribution to household income seems to leave given them more say in
family affairs; their growth in real wages has also made it easier for women to
leave an unsatisfactory relationship, though not without economic hardship. But
women's relative economic improvement is neither a feminist victory nor an
attack on men. Women have by no means reached parity with men at work, and they
are not replacing men on the job. Almost 50 percept Of women work in
occupations that are more than 80 percent female; 71 percent of men still work
in jobs that are more than 80 percent male. Most decreases in sex segregation
have been caused by men entering traditionally female jobs (as telephone
operators and flight attendants, for example) rather than vice versa. Women
remain much more likely than men to be forced into involuntary part-time labor:
Moonlighting, or holding multiple jobs, increased by 500 per-cent for women
between 1970 and 1989, as compared to a 20 per- cent increase for men.
Philosopher Alan Wolfe points out that
the "moral life cycle" of most families in postwar America was based
on the assumption of a common upward trajectory, tightly connected to family
status. Youths who deferred to adults would progress through the system to a
higher status in middle age, gaining a single-family home that would provide
them with security in their old age; community solidarity was achieved through
the fact that most of one's neighbors were experiencing the same rites of passage,
so that young families could share child care and school activities while older
couples could expect to be self-sufficient; gender roles were based less on any
well thought out principles than on the simple fact that both husband and wife
made gains from marriage they could not make outside it. But this mode of
organizing family, community, and gender was based on wage, work, and housing
conditions that ceased to prevail in the 1970s.11 And it turns out that the
values associated with these roles could not be sustained when the economic
incentives behind 'hem ceased to operate.
The immediate effects of the past two
decades' decline in real incomes were less catastrophic statistically than they
were personally. Throughout the 1980s, many economic indicators remained good.
Despite the decline in men's real wages, for example, the real income of most
families remained fairly stable, and per capita income within families actually
grew by 11 percent. The reason economic decline did not always show up in
economic averages was that young Americans preserved many trappings of the
postwar economic dream by sacrificing many aspects of the postwar family dream.
Increasingly, young people postponed marriage and decreased their fertility. By
the mid-1980s, more than two-thirds of all young wives were working, compared
to less than half as late as 1973. By 1989,,79.3 percent of all homebuyers came
from two-income households.
As birth rates fell and women's labor
participation soared, per capita income rose even though per-worker income
stagnated or declined. In the poorest two-fifths of American families, the gain
in women's income was less than the decline in men's earnings, so that family
income fell. For families in the middle two-fifths, women's in- creases in
earnings were enough to slightly outweigh the decline in real wages for.men, so
that these families made modest economic improvement, at the cost of greater
hours spent at work. But in the wealthiest 20 percent of families, both male
and female earnings increased significantly; these households accounted for 80
percent of the increase in family income between 1979 and 1987. Throughout the
population, moreover, two-earner families with zero to two children pulled
ahead of both single-parent families and two-parent families with larger numbers
of children. Since small, two-earner families had become the majority type, the
American economic dream seemed alive and well to many; it was the American
family dream that seemed to be in trouble."
The family adjustments required to
sustain the American economic dream put many Americans in a personal bind and
exposed the limits of postwar social solidarities. Families who chose to
postpone childbearing or hold down family size were ambivalent about their
decision; they did not necessarily feel that they were acting out some
"New Freedom" or delivering themselves from old constraints.
Two-earner couples with children were glad to be able to buy a bigger house and
some of the new consumer items designed for the convenience of busy families;
yet maintaining their living standards produced the greatest time crunch in
precisely the period of their lives when they could have used extra time away
from work. Family, school, and community relations were harder to maintain, as
more family members worked longer hours to keep living standards rising at a
more modest pace than two decades earlier.
Resentments grew between members of
different occupational and educational cohorts as well as between alternative
kinds of families. During the 1970s, many young college graduates slid down the
job ladder, but they managed to maintain themselves on a relatively high rung by
bumping less educated workers "into still lower jobs or out of the labor
force altogether."" Two-earner families yearned to simplify their
lives yet felt they were caught on a treadmill from which neither parent could
afford to step off; they criticized themselves for being too attached to their
living standards, yet they also blamed poverty and declining productivity on
people who didn't have the same family work ethic as them- selves. One-earner
families or two-earner families with more children resented their relative
impoverishment compared to those who had seemingly abandoned older family
values: 'It is difficult enough to keep up with the joneses under normal
circumstances but when both of them are working it becomes virtually
impossible."
Two-parent families were horrified by
the rise of single motherhood among the poorest of the poor, but the stress of
"balancing" paid work, housework, child care, and the rising cost of
living created new risks of dissolution in their own conjugal relations.
Researchers estimate that the pressures of maintaining a two-earner family
added roughly, three weeks of full-time work to the paid and unpaid labor of
each parent in a two-income family with two children. This increase caused both
parents to feel burdened. Men felt that they had made a lot of accommodations
to new gender roles, and so they had in comparison to their previous behavior.
At the same time, the failure of men's increase in household labor to keep pace
with women's increase in paid labor caused women to feet indignant when men
congratulated themselves on the new burdens they had shouldered: One study
found that the presence of men in a household, at least as late as 1981,
created about eight hours of additional work for women per week-almost three
weeks of unpaid work per year itself-, a more recent study found that men had
increased their share of housework, but even so, women with children still had
less free time when they were married than when they were not. A female
"rational egoist" might have been forgiven for wondering whether
marriage was more trouble than it was worth; so, however, might a male,
especially in light of the rise in living standards available to a divorced
noncustodial father willing to use the law, or lack of it, to his own
advantage."
Debates over personal costs and benefits
became moot for many Americans in the late 1970s and the 1980s. It was only the
upper half of the population that could afford to consider the
"downscaling" and "reorientation of priorities" that
provided so many movie and magazine themes in the late 1980s; many families
could not afford to balance 'extra" income against "extra" time.
. . .
Changes in economic behaviors during
the 1970s and 1980s were complemented by important shifts in community
relations and political functioning. Between 1981 and 1991, politicians shifted
the tax burden from income to more regressive payroll taxes, cut back on
politically vulnerable services, and postponed seemingly less pressing
long-term investments in productive capacity or renewal of social capital such
as housing and public transportation.
As unemployment rose in the 1970s
and 1980s, the proportion of jobless Americans covered by unemployment
insurance declined. . . By 1990, only four in ten of those officially
classified as unemployed-people actively seeking work-received benefits. The
number of Americans without either private or public health-insurance coverage
rose from 30.9 million in 1980 to 37.1 in 1987. . .
While other countries faced similar
economic reverses, they cushioned the impact with social services and support
for jobs and education programs. Among other industrial nations, the United
States has the fewest tax and transfer policies to create income security. In
addition, public and private spending on preschool, primary, and secondary
education in America is lower than that in most of the industrialized
world." . . .
. The effects of these changes on
families have been dramatic. Today, one in eight American children is hungry.
Twenty-six percent of pregnant women have no insurance coverage in the early
months of their pregnancy; 15 percent have not managed to obtain it by the time
of delivery. . .
Not all the problems in American family life are caused by economic
deprivation. Levels of callousness, anger, and selfishness in America are
higher than can be explained by poverty alone; self-centeredness, lack of
empathy, and violence are not a necessary concomitant of want, as evidenced in
the instances of solidarity and cooperation during the Great Depression and in
poor areas that do support a vi- able community life. Liberals are unconvincing
when they blame crime and violence solely on unemployment: Being poor does not
force a man to rape and stab a woman, nor even rob her. Conservatives are
equally unconvincing, though,, when they suggest that the problem lies in the
failure of parents to inculcate "middle-class values" or in the
corruption of such values by "street culture," drugs, rap music, or
whatever their current bogeyman.
Much hysteria about the
"underclass" and the spread of "alien" values is what
psychologists call projection. Instead of facing disturbing tendencies in
ourselves, we attribute them to something or someone external--drug dealers,
unwed mothers, inner-city teens, or satanist cults. But blaming the
"underclass" for drugs, violence' sexual exploitation, materialism,
or self-indulgence lets the “over
class" off the hook. It also ignores the amoral, privatistic retreat from
social engagement that has been a hallmark of middle-class response to recent
social dilemmas.
The values of Americans, for good or
for ill, cut across race and class. Most poor and unemployed people desire to
"make it', in middle-class society in much the same way that better-off
Americans do. The erosion of civic duty, declining appeal of deferred
gratification, and growth of cynicism in America are not something unique to
the poor, to minorities, or to people who reject "tradition." They
are built in to the mainstream culture's response to recent socioeconomic
trends. Our youngsters don't have to took to any so-called underclass in order
to learn that deferred gratification is for suckers. That lesson is driven home
by Wall Street speculators, HUD bandits, corporate raiders, and S&L
criminals. Any preteen knows that an American has a better chance of winning a
fortune by committing a Crime or some truly sleazy act, then selling the media,
rights to the story than by working hard at a menial job.
The exact analogs of the Crips and
Bloods, with their Gucci T- shirts and Nike Air shoes, are the "Masters of
the Universe" described by Tom Wolfe in his Bonfire of the Vanities. But
cultural critic Mike Davis also directs our attention to disturbing parallels
between the territorial clannishness of youth gangs and that of middle-class
homeowners' associations. The homeowners do not normally initiate violence, of
course, remaining defensively behind their "armed response" security
signs, yet they fight their own bitter turf battles and exhibit the same kind
of calculative self-interest in their "not in My back yard"
movements. What both groups have in common is their seeming inability to
recognize the humanity of those who don't belong to their own "gang"
or "lifestyle enclave." Lacking this larger sense of community and
connection, "kids of all classes and colours are grasping at 'undeterred gratification'-even
if they pave the way to assured self-destruction.
The pressures against commitment
exerted by traditional American individualism and consumerism were greatly
magnified in the 1970s and 1980s by the ways in which socioeconomic and
political changes exacerbated inequality and removed most of the rewards that
used to be associated, however imperfectly, with hard work, thrift, and
planning. Although most Americans worked harder and harder during the 1980s
only to stay in one place or even fall behind, some Americans did very well
indeed. Between 1979 and 1986, 82 percent of all income growth went to the top
one-fifth of the population. Measured in constant dollars, the top 5 percent of
households increased their after-tax income by 60 percent between 1977 and 1988,
and the top 1. percent increased their income by 122 percent. The failure of
tax rates to keep up with this growth cost the treasury $75 billion in
revenue." . . .
Some of this growth in inequality was
due to the increased prevalence of two-income families among the top 20 percent
of the population where real wages continued to rise. But even among the
privileged, benefits went disproportionately to the very top, and they had far
more to do with interest, dividends, tax shelters, and capital gains than with
work. Most of the new wealth did not come from studying hard, saving
diligently, inventing a better mousetrap, or working longer hours. Rather, it
represented a shuffling of paper assets and the acquisition of "instant
wealth" when fluctuating rates of return in financial markets made certain
investments suddenly pay off. Many of the new fortunes in the 1970s and 1980s
were made by athletes and entertainers; others were won by people who
essentially played the lottery, taking what economist Lester Thurow calls
"the random walk" through the stock market-though a few improved
their odds by insider trading."
The inflationary 1970s and speculative
1980s confounded older assumptions that financial gains depend on increases in
real wealth, productivity, and jobs. As business writer Peter Drucker notes,
"the real economy of goods and services and the 'symbolic' economy of
money, credit and capital are no longer bound tightly to each other."
Wealth no longer seems to have much connection with producing anything at all. . .
Politicians, meanwhile, have
assiduously avoided such issues. When they attack one another, it is always
over personal scandals or accusations. When they "take the high
road," it is by issuing meaningless reassurances that America is
"still number one." As novelist Eric Ambler once commented, in a sick
civilization "political prestige is the reward not of the shrewdest
diagnostician but of the man with the best bedside manner."""
Cynicism and
Self-centeredness: Not just a Family Affair
The increased visibility of economic and
social inequities, and the refusal of politicians to address them, cannot help
but breed cynicism and self-interested behavior. People who attribute
contemporary economic and social predicaments to deterioration of family values
cite the reluctance of poorer Americans to-make a long-term commitment to
"working their way up" through low-wage, low-status jobs. They also
shake their heads at the tendency of the baby-boom generation to borrow money
or decrease savings in order to maintain living standards. Much hand-wringing has been done, for
example, about the well-known 1986 Time magazine survey which found that baby
boomers were far less willing than their parents had been to "make
sacrifices" for the future. Less often mentioned is the fact that the
economic and political trends of the past two decades have decreased the
possibility of working one's way up the job ladder and the rationality of
making "sacrifices" for the future. Many of the low- status,
blue-collar jobs that once offered a modicum of economic mobility disappeared
in the economic restructuring since 1973; housing inflation has risen much
faster than interest rates on savings, making it seem almost silly to scrimp
and save for a home; people who bought "beyond their means" in the
1970s were rewarded when the housing market took off in the early 1980s.
But the widespread impression that
Americans were on a "spending spree" in the 1980s is not borne out by
the facts. It is true that household debt grew rapidly in relation to household
income from the mid-1970s through the early 1990s, but for families in the
lower 80 percent of the income distribution, most borrowing went to meet real
increases in living costs, especially for housing, rather than for a surge of
consumer spending. It was only those in the top 20 percent who appear to have
borrowed for financial speculation and expanded consumption. And, even here,
some of this behavior stemmed from insecurity rather than from flat-out greed.
Corporate consolidation greatly decreased the number of management jobs
available in the past fifteen years, while the combination of housing inflation
and prolonged stagnation meant that even families in the upper half of the
income distribution could "still feet that they are not living as well as
their parents did.
The real binge consumers, of course,
were the corporations that engaged in trillions of dollars' worth of buyouts,
simultaneously reducing their spending on research, development, and capital
equipment, and the government, which tripled the national debt in ten years,
even while it cut subsidies to education and other forms of so- cial capital.
If modem American families have sometimes placed personal consumption above their
children's welfare, very few have such distorted "values" as does the
national government: The burden of the federal debt had reached more than 180
percent of the GNP by the end of 1989, but federal spending on children in that
year amounted to 1.1 percent of the GNP.
Certainly, the willingness to tolerate
such inequities indicates a certain insensitivity, to say the least, toward
notions of fairness and social justice. That insensitivity shows up in personal
relations, including decreasing willingness to make sacrifices for children or
parents. But the "flight from commitment" is even more pervasive
beyond the family than within it. James Coleman points out that the
"destruction of social capital" available to youth has been greater
in the community than in the family, despite the rise in single parenthood.
People's family commitments remain exceptionally strong in comparison to their
social, economic, and political commitments. While 97 percent of Americans
consistently say that family life and family time are among their top
priorities, two-thirds of the respondents to an in-depth national poll
published in 1991 reported that they never give any time to community
activities; more than two-thirds could not even name their congressional
representative. Almost all Americans say they believe in a parent's obligations
to a child, but 62 percent of high school seniors said they did not think a
company going out of business had any moral obligation to repay its debts.
Three decades of polls have found no decline in people's faith in family, but
cynicism about political and economic elites has grown steadily since
1966." Such cynicism is derived less from people's family experiences and
beliefs than from their economic and political experiences. Public figures who
lie, steal, or ruin other people's lives often make more money from lectures
and memoirs than if their wrongdoings had never been exposed. If the lack of
"exit rules" in marriage allows fathers to run away from obligations
they contracted, what about the lack of exit rules in the economy? American
industries have closed thousands of factories, exported entire operations
abroad, and moved from region to region seeking tax advantages; they have held
towns and states for ransom, threatening to move unless given tax breaks that
effectively cripple local government.
In Tarrytown, New York, for example, GM's
successful campaign to cut its taxes by more than $1 million a year forced the
public schools to lay off workers, eliminate new orders for library books and
school supplies, and postpone repair of school buildings. At the end of 1-991,
GM announced it would close twenty-one plants, laying off 74,000 workers, but
declined to reveal which plants until it saw what concessions various groups of
workers would offer. Many companies have adopted an "accordion"
staffing policy, hiring far more workers than they need in order -to meet an
immediate demand, then firing them just as quickly. Blue-collar workers in
America receive, on average, just a single week's notice before Io-sing their
jobs---only two days when there is no union behind them. More and more
white-collar workers and middle-management employees are coming back from
vacation to find their jobs cut.”
Another source of cynicism and social alienation
ties in a growing perception that Leona Helmsley was right: "Only little
people pay taxes." The percentage of federal tax receipts from corporate
income tax revenues dropped from 32.1 percent in 1952 to 12.5 percent in 1980
to 6.2 percent in 1983. When payroll taxes are counted along with the more
progressive income tax, the "true" marginal tax rate for a couple
making $14,000 a year is now 30 percent, higher than the 28 percent rate for a
couple making $326,000 a year. Even after the tax reform of 1986, the
percentage of income paid in taxes by the richest I percent of the population
will be 20 percent lower in 1992 than it was in 1977.
The past two decades also eroded our
sense of social solidarity. Layoffs in one region or industry opened up new
windows of opportunity in others. Two-tiered union contracts increasingly
pitted retirement benefits against wage gains, new workers against old,
temporary workers against full-timers. Volatile interest rates and housing
booms meant that families with similar houses on the same block had payments
ranging from $200 to $1,000 a month. One family could put in a jacuzzi, but
another could barely afford to go to the movies at the end of the month. The
perception of arbitrary injustice that accompanies such contrasts was
heightened during the 1980s because the price of big-ticket discretionary items
"fell precipitously compared with the cost of other consumer
expenditures," allowing those who already had a housing advantage to buy
better cars, stereos, and computers."
A central enemy is hard to discern in
all this. Instead, the dominant feeling becomes "Why them?" or
"Why not me?" As families with children have fallen further and
further behind single-person households and smaller families, they resent the
"selfishness" of the two-income small families who seem to bid up the
price of housing and are the favored targets of manufacturers, advertisers, and
television programmers. Two-income families who postponed childbearing, in
turn, resist paying higher taxes to help families who failed to wait. Modern
welfare is another divisive issue: It penalizes recipients for working, though
in no state does the welfare check bring a family above the poverty level;
inadequate as it is, though, welfare does provide recipients with medical
protections and housing benefits not available to the working poor." All
these factors, added to the growing gap between rich and poor, have sown envy
and discord among neighbors, workers, and community members.
America needs more than a revival of
obligation within the family. As business writer Bob Kuttner has commented, it
"desperately needs an economy based upon notions of mutual obligation and
reciprocity." People should be able to expect "that our home, our
church, our kid's school, our bank, and the place where we work will stay put.” Without such commitments in the economy and polity,
family life will remain precarious no matter how many family values we try to
inculcate. When there is so little trust and commitment outside the family, it
is hard to maintain them inside the family. Old family strategies and values no
longer seem to fit the new rules of the game.
It's not that the old rules of the game
were fair. But the past two decades have stripped away the illusion of
fairness, as well as much hope of winning by the old rules, without leading to
construction of any new rules. The result is that some people break the old
rules even as they espouse the values behind them, others throw all values into
question, and still others try desperately to get their own families and loved
ones to play by rules that have no general support in larger institutions or
the popular press. Consequently, people feel embattled if not embittered, and,
above all, very much alone.
Only
the family, it seems, stands between individuals and the total irresponsibility
of the workplace, the market, the political arena, and the mass media. But
the family is less and less able to "just say no" to the pressures
that emanate from all these sources, or even to cushion their impact on its
members. It is no wonder, then, that many people experience recent cultural
trends as a crisis of parental authority and family obligations. It is no
wonder they hope for a renewal of family values that would soften these social
stresses. But very few people can sustain values at a personal level when they
are continually contradicted at work, at the store, in the government, and on
television. To call their failure to do, so a family crisis is much like calling
pneumonia a breathing crisis. Certainly, pneumonia affects people's ability to
breathe easily, but telling them to start breathing properly again, or even
instructing them in breathing techniques, is not going to cure the disease.
The crisis of the family in
late-twentieth-century America is in many ways a larger crisis of social
reproduction: a major upheaval in the way we produce, reproduce, and distribute
goods, services, power, economic rewards, and social roles, including those of
class and gender. The collapse of social interdependence and community
obligation in America challenges us to rethink our attitudes toward the periods
of dependence that characterize the life of every human being, young or old, in
or out of a family.
To handle social
obligations and interdependency in the twenty-first century, we must abandon
any illusion that we can or should revive some largely mythical traditional
family. We need to invent new family traditions and find ways of reviving older
community ones, not wallow in nostalgia for the past or heap contempt on people
whose family values do not live up to ours. There are good grounds for hope
that we can develop such new traditions, but only if we discard simplistic
solutions based on romanticization of the past.
In fact, given recent changes in the
occupation and income structure, work force, political climate, and cultural
milieu, some traditional family arrangements are part of the problem, not part
of the solution. The privatism that relies on nuclear, biological bonds to
ensure the well-being of children, for example, is an obstacle to
solving the problem of childhood poverty now that demographic and economic
changes have redistributed income away from families that have children or
other dependents. In the 1950s, when almost 70 percent of the adult population
had children in school, we could rely on people's private parental interests to
keep the education system going. In that period, parents' private interests
added up to a majority, creating a pro-child bloc in spite of our failure to
develop a coherent social policy for children. Today, only 28 percent of the
adult population has children in school. Maintaining the tradition of private
responsibility for children's issues ensures that education will be a minority
interest and encourages desperate parents to attack their problems ever more
individualistically, sometimes by abandoning the public schools entirely.
Along the same lines, recent research on
stepfamilies suggests that many of their predicaments stem from the fact that
traditional negative stereotypes and prejudices about "broken"
families still prevail among teachers, psychologists, and the general public,
while no new values, guidelines, or support systems have evolved to nourish the
strengths that many stepfamilies do exhibit. This is a truly astounding example
of burying our collective head in the sand of traditional expectations, given
that nearly half of all recent marriages are remarriages, approximately 40
percent of these involve children, and most of the conflicts in stepfamilies
result from inappropriate application of traditional parent-child values in new
circumstances.
An extreme example of a traditional
cluster of values that is part of problem rather than the solution is found in
cases of incest and other forms of child sexual abuse. The sexual abuse of
children is overwhelmingly a family affair, reproducing very old-fashioned
gender and power relations. Ninety-two percent of the victims of child sexual abuse
are girls; 97 percent of the abusers are male. Incest tends to occur in
families with strong patterns of paternal dominance and authoritarianism, along
with values reinforcing the submission of women and children. Incestuous
fathers often complain about loose sexual mores in the wider culture. In both
anorexia and incest, a noted psychologist has recently argued, "we find
the reduction of the whole girl or woman to her parts .... The anorexic feels
that she is nothing but her thighs and buttocks; the sexual abuser also sees
the girl as little more than that. Both anorexia and incest are supported by a
social system that makes use of female fragmentation in many ways."
Feminist researcher Judith Herman even suggests that overt incest is "only
the furthest point on a continuum-an exaggeration of patriarchal family norms,
but not a departure from them.”
In any case, incest and sexual abuse
reveal the pathological side to an overly privatistic approach to the family.
The abusive family typically has a "rigid boundary between the family and
the outside world" and a strong belief that a man's power within his
family is not subject to outside surveillance or checks. Incestuous fathers and
stepfathers "tend to be socially isolated and to have an intrafamily
orientation.
Wife and child battering provide other
examples of how traditional values can go wrong. John Demos cites studies
showing that abusive families are marked by "constant competition over who
will be taken care of." This suggests that abuse is sometimes an extension
of demands for privacy, intimacy, and individual fulfillment through the
family. Battering often occurs in the most private parts of the house; it tends
to be triggered by very traditional demands for domestic services from the man
and perpetuated by passive rather than assertive responses by the woman.
Men who institute violence against
women tend to hold "old-fashioned" views of male prerogatives.
indeed, the traditional male function of "protecting" women contains
seeds of violence against women--sometimes "for her own good”; sometimes
out of the frustration of not being able to extend expected protections;
sometimes out of rage at a woman's unwillingness to accept
"protection" in a particular instance. Female child batterers, while
violating traditional norms of maternal patience and compassion, tend to hold very
traditional values about the centrality of motherhood in womens identity: These
values often lead them to bear children they do not truly want or to harbor
unrealistic expectations of the fulfillment they will find in their
children-expectations that lead to frustration and fury when they are not met.
Like incest, rape ties along a
continuum, on one end of which is the "normal" toleration of male sexual
aggression and the traditional assumption of female responsibility for
establishing sexual limits. Unlike incest, rape is distributed on many points
along that continuum, with marital and date rape often unreported and seldom
treated very severely. No identifiable pathology or unique value sys- tem
separates the rapist from the respectable married man next door. But a recent
study of college men who raped and a control group who did not found some
intriguing differences that contradict many stereotypes about the strengths of
traditional families. The families of the rapists were far more likely than
those of the nonrapists to contain wives who were full-time homemakers. The
fathers were typically successful career men who disappointed their children by
their physical and emotional distance. Rapists were more likely to feel hostile
toward these distant fathers than toward their mothers, but when they did
express negative feelings about their mothers these tended to revolve around
fear that the mother hindered them from achieving a separate masculine
identity-a common enough problem in traditional families that make women
exclusively responsible for childrearing and emotional bonding. Cross-cultural
research suggests that such sex identity conflicts, and the male violence that
often results from them, occur much more frequently in societies that impose a
strictly gendered division of labor in childrearing and production than in
societies where there is more egalitarian sharing of responsibility between. men
and women."
In other instances, traditional family
values may work very well as long as other aspects of life are going as
expected, but be too rigid to allow people to cope effectively with stress.
Economic reverses seem to have the worst effects, for example, in families who
subscribe to traditional conjugal and gender ideologies. Ironically, the
authority of fathers who lose their jobs deteriorates most sharply in families
where their previous behavior had been coercive or authoritarian."
Many family conflicts associated with the increased involvement of
wives in the workplace stem less from adoption of new behaviors and new values
than from refusal to adjust traditional expectations to new realities. The
failure of employers or government to offer assistance with parental leaves,
child care, and flexible hours means that employed mothers work the equivalent
of two full-time jobs and employed fathers the equivalent of a job and a half.
Still, sociologist Arlie Hochschild's investigation of two-eamer families found
that couples were happier and marriages more stable when men did more housework
and child care; the most serious marital strains arose from a "stalled
revolution" where changes in women's roles were not matched by changes in
men's.
The most severe setbacks after
divorce, similarly, are experienced by women who had lived prior to their
divorce as full-time home- makers in "traditional" families. Children
suffer most from divorce in settings where the dominance of private family
values stigmatizes "nontraditional" families and prevents parental
loss from being compensated for by extrafamilial social support networks in the
wider community. It is those wider
networks, not just nuclear family ties, that stand in urgent need of reconstitution.
Nostalgia for traditional families, and myths about their strengths, prevent us
from drawing useful lessons from the past and making effective innovations for
our families future.
Epilogue:
Inventing
a New Tradition
…. the so-called "crisis of the
family" is a subset of a much larger
crisis of social obligation that requires us to look beyond private family
relations and rebuild larger social ties. Some people are very pessimistic
about the possibility of extending social reciprocities and interdependencies
beyond the family. Sociobiologists argue that altruism is genetically
determined, and therefore quite limited, directed toward those with whom we
share the most genes. From a different political stance, Freudian theorists,
such as Christopher Lasch, argue that our instinctual drives are essentially
antisocial and that we need to rely on the family to counter them.
These approaches greatly underestimate
the human potential for cooperation. The latest research on human evolution
suggests that the most critical human adaptation was a tremendous enlargement
of the capacity to share with others. Investigation of ancient hunting-and-
gathering societies is gradually replacing the stereotype of primitive warriors
with a picture of peaceful, egalitarian, cooperative cultures. I have already
discussed the traditions of gift giving and reciprocity in precapitalist
societies and noted the persistence of cooperation and community-building in
early American history.'
Even today, despite pressures fostering
competitive individualism, people are deeply dissatisfied with the-lack of
community and larger purpose in their lives. Americans "ache to do the
right thing," claim the two pollsters who have documented the most stunning
examples of cynicism in 1990s America; political researchers now believe that
outrage rather than apathy best describes people's attitudes toward the
political system. A journalist friend of mine reports that people are desperate
to get past the nightly barrage of random violence and disconnected tragedies
on the news to find something, however small, that they can do; when her
television station suggests a number to call or a concrete act to take, the
response is overwhelming. The major barrier to social involvement is not
people's commitment to a purely individualistic way of life but their feeling
of helplessness, the fear that they are the only people who feet this way, and
their pessimism about the cravings of human nature.'
Such pessimism, either about human
nature or about the possibility of constructing social institutions that bring
out our best rather than our worst qualities, is understandable but tragically
unnecessary. Human beings are social animals. This explains why, in a system
with so many pressures by special interests and so little accountability to the
public, individuals who join the elite get corrupted, over and over again,
whatever their original intentions. But it also means that collective decision
making (as opposed to periodic poll answering) does broaden people's minds and
deepen their social values, a fact almost every jury panel discovers, while
individual dissent that touches a shared framework can inspire others to act
responsibly for social change.
When I was in college, two of my
professors were fond of quoting the results of an experiment conducted by
Stanley Milgram, in which individuals who had been told that they were
participating in a learning demonstration were directed to administer an
electric shock to the ostensible "subject" for every incorrect answer
they were given. Placed in a room alone with the white-coated expert "in
charge" of the "learning experiment," who kept instructing them
to increase the voltage, 62.5 percent of the people put into this position
administered shocks they had reason to believe were in the lethal range- even
when they could hear their unseen "subjects" supposedly cry- ing in
pain. The lesson my professors drew was that Americans lacked independent moral
standards and the courage to say no.
Much less publicity was given to a later
variant of this experiment, when two confederates of the experimenter worked
along with the subjects in administering the supposed shocks. When these two
challenged the experiment, 90 percent of the subjects refused to follow the
authority figures instructions to increase the voltage. To me, this suggests
that the example of just a few individuals can inspire others to tap into their
own resources of compassion and courage.
Along similar lines, Urie Bronfenbrenner,
Alan Wolfe, and other researchers show that human beings are capable of both
nuanced decision making and extensive cooperation when they are not paralyzed
by authoritarian hierarchies, conflicting cues, or impersonal structures that
diffuse individual responsibility, or when they are involved in decision-making
processes that involve constructing preferences rather than merely registering
them. Social history also demonstrates that people are capable of changing
their minds and working through deeply held prejudices to collaborate with
people they formerly scorned.
But if people get involved in social
change, is their compassion and effort merely an exercise in futility, as has
been claimed so often during the past twenty years? Are the problems families
face so big, so overwhelming, that nothing will do much good? Not at all. In
fact, there are plenty of programs that work. Head Start is one impressive
example, even though it continually has to scrape for funding. The Eisenhower
Foundation recently identified several community-based programs that have
reduced school dropout rates, crime, drug use, teen pregnancy, and family
violence. Children's advocate Lisbeth Schorr recounts the success of such
programs as Homebuilders, Resource Mothers, local Prenatal and Early- infancy
projects, various school reform efforts, and federal Medicaid screening or
supplemental food assistance. Project SMART-School Mediators Alternative
Resolution Team-has achieved dramatic reductions in fights among youths at the
schools in which it operates. The Children's Defense Fund mobilizes its
supporters in an extremely effective way to press for better legislation for
children. Some employers have introduced innovative child-and elder-care
policies, job sharing, flexible hours, and parental leaves, making it much
easier for employees to attend to family needs. Other countries have instituted
mandated parental leave policies for all firms, universal health care programs,
and family allowances-all without going broke. There is strong evidence that
American welfare policies could be made both more effective and more humane.
Even some of our seemingly most
intractable problems can be solved. There are ways of raising the IQ scores and
social skills of crack-affected babies. Children from dysfunctional families do
not have to be written off. One long-term.study of men born in the late 1920s,
for example, found that even those who came from chronically dependent,
multiproblem, "at risk" families were not distinguishable from their
more fortunate age mates by the time they reached the age of forty-seven. They
had grown out of their difficulties and established stable lives. But, as
Schorr points out, "these men belonged to a historical cohort that entered
the work force in the late 1940s, when high employment levels, a steady demand
and good pay for unskilled workers, and outside support of higher education
through the G.I. Bill offered escape routes unavailable to those who came of
age in the next generation.”
For the most recent generations, such
economic, political, and educational aid has been more rare, yet many high-risk
children do surmount their difficulties. In one long-term study of such
children in Hawaii, two factors stood out in the life histories of those who
showed positive change. One was the presence of even one caring adult, often a
mentor or surrogate parent from outside the family. The other was access to a
"second chance"--some opportunity, such as education, vocational
training, or involvement in a community group, that allowed individuals to
achieve gains they had been un- able to make in their early years .
Today, there are approximately 350,000
poor youths between the ages of sixteen and twenty-four in the poorest
neighborhoods of America's cities. With adequate economic, interpersonal, and
educational help, most could probably achieve significant gains; without it, we
know for sure that most will not. As the William T. Grant Foundation puts it:
“They are too numerous to ignore-yet few enough that a determined society can
vastly improve their life chances."
Can we afford such programs? Well, we
could deliver a year's worth of prenatal care, immunizations, diet supplements,
Head Start programs, and housing allowances to every mother and child who needs
them for less than what it cost to finance three weeks of Desert Storm. We
could provide jobs for, all of America's unemployed teenagers for much less
than Congress voted for the S&L bailout. Redistributing just I percent of
the income of America's richest 5 percent would lift one million people above
the poverty line. A 1 percent tax on the net wealth of the richest 2 percent of
American families would allow us to double federal spending on education and
still have almost $20 billion left to spend somewhere else. One commission has
recently suggested that it would be possible to restructure the military to
transfer $125 billion a year to other uses over the next ten years. A mere 1
percent cut in military expenditures would free up enough money to fund the ABC
child-care bill, double the AIDS research budget, and triple the budget for the
homeless. And diverting money from the military to the schools would have other
benefits, since $1 billion of spending on missiles creates only 9,000 jobs, and
the same amount spent on education creates 63,000 jobs.
Perhaps even more to the point, can we
afford not to spend this money? Each class of high school dropouts costs
taxpayers $242 mil- lion. A year of Head Start or a summer job costs $3,000 per
child or teen; a year of prison costs $20,000 per inmate. Yet America keeps a
higher proportion of its population in prison than any other country in the
world, while Head Start serves just 20 percent of eligible children. It costs
$600 to provide an expectant mother with prenatal care, but for every case of
low-birth-weight babies thereby averted, the health care system saves $14,000
to $30,000. It costs $47 for a full set of immunizations for a child, but it
costs $25,000 a year to institutionalize a child mentally or physically damaged
by a preventable childhood disease. 10
What Does This Mean for My
Family?
At first glance, it may seem depressing to think of our current family problems as part of a much larger socioeconomic crisis. But surely it is even more depressing to think that the problem is caused by people's rotten values or irredeemable selfishness. That kind of analysis leads people to give up in despair. When I go out to lecture on family history, I sometimes feet that half the people I talk to are torturing themselves trying to figure out what they did wrong in their families and the other half are torturing themselves trying to figure out what their parents did wrong. Seeing our family pains as part of a larger social predicament means that we can let ourselves--or our parent-,-- off the hook. Maybe our personal difficulties are not all our family's fault; maybe our family's difficulties are not all our personal fault.
Most people who come to this conclusion do not use it as an
excuse for complacency; instead, they find that it frees valuable time and
energy for figuring out what they can actually do to help solve the problem.
There are a lot of places to start-in the local schools, in the programs
described by Schorr, in the advocacy groups cited in some of my notes. Wherever
a person starts, he or she will make a difference in the lives of others. And
that person will probably find an unexpected side benefit. For, despite all the
difficulty of making generalizations about past families, the historical
evidence does suggest that families have been most successful whenever they
have built meaningful, solid networks and commitments beyond their own
boundaries. We may discover that the best thing we will ever do for our own
families, however we define them, is to get involved in community or political
action to help others.