Settling down after two decades of tumultuous change, families are painfully caught between their own needs and an indifferent culture. What could help everyone is a dose of reality---a new marriage of family values and public policy.
Whoever said that death and taxes are the only inevitable things in life was overlooking an obvious third one: family. No other social institution surrounds us more intimately from cradle to grave, so shapes our bodies and minds, remains such an emotional presence wherever we go and gives us such generous measures of joy and frustration. Pretending that family is not important in our lives is like trying to cheat death: it doesn't work and you end up feeling foolish for trying.
Because the family is so central to human life, no one can be neutral about its future prospects. In fact, Americans have been wringing their hands about the state of the family for well over 100 years--with remarkably little change in the tenor of the worries. In the late 19th century, Americans began to focus on the changes wrought by urbanization and industrialization: smaller families, increased divorce rate, less connection to traditional kin and community networks, more child abuse and neglect, and squalid living conditions in urban slums. Sound familiar?
Faced with such changes in the American family, 19th-century professionals and community leaders divided into two groups, whose descendants are with us still. The "pessimists" believe that the American family is declining alarmingly in its ability to carry out its functions of child rearing and providing stability for adult life. The pessimists see the divorce rate--nine times higher than a century ago--as a key indicator of the deterioration of family bonds and the fragmentation of American society. They call for a return to the traditional values of commitment and responsibility, and are appalled by the proliferation of family types and forms in the late 20th century--never-married mothers, single-parent families, step-families, cohabiting couples, and gay and lesbian families.
The "optimists," on the other hand, view the family as an institution that is not declining, but rather showing its flexibility and resilience. The optimists believe that traditional family structures are no longer appropriate for the modern age, and that these structures were too male-dominated and conformity-oriented to begin with. Contemporary families may be less stable in the traditional sense, but most people are still committed to being in a family. It's just that they need a larger menu of family arrangements to choose from. The world is now more oriented to individual options, particularly for women, and the family has changed accordingly. From this point of view, the main problems faced by contemporary families can be traced to the failure of society to accept that the "Leave It to Beaver" family is a dinosaur, and to provide adequate support for the variety of post-Beaver families that now dominate the landscape.
Depending on whether you are in the optimist or pessimist camp, the next decade or two of family life will bring either: a) more deterioration, unless a shift in values occurs; or b) continued creative change, troublesome only if other social institutions keep facing backwards instead of forwards. There is, however, a third orientation emerging, a both/and approach, and I believe it will become more influential in our national discourse about family life in the next decade. This orientation agrees with the pessimists that the family is in trouble and that a transformation of values is needed. It also agrees with the optimists that changes in family structures are inevitable and here to stay, and that both old and new family forms should receive more community support.
We are at the threshold of a new dialogue about family life in the United States, one that transcends the tired debates of the past and that might lead to a workable consensus for the first time in our history. To understand this emerging consensus on the American family, let's take a quick tour of the revolution in family forms in the 20th century.
FROM RESPONSIBILITY TO SATISFACTION
In a breathtaking period of change, the 20th century has witnessed the demise of one standard of family life, the birth of a second, its subsequent decline, and the emergence of a third standard--one that we are still learning to live with. The first two decades of the century were dominated by the Institutional Family as the ideal. The Institutional Family represented the age old-tradition of a family organized around economic production, kinship network, community connections, the father's authority, and marriage as a functional partnership rather than a romantic relationship. Family tradition, loyalty, and solidarity were more important than individual goals and romantic interest. For the Institutional Family, the chief value was RESPONSIBILITY.
The Institutional Family was doomed by the spirit of individualism that developed gradually in the Western world since the Renaissance, and that was given a definitive boost by the breakup of rural communities in the 19th century and the emergence of the modern state. The modem world is based more on individual responsibility and achievement than on traditional family land holdings and kinship connections. In the culture of individualism, as Robert Bellah and his colleagues observed in their book, Habits of the Heart (University of California Press; 1985), relationships are based on "contracts"--what people can do for each other, rather than on traditional "covenants"--virtually unbreakable commitments based on loyalty and responsibility.
In the 1970 movie Lovers and Other Strangers, a young man, Tony, tells his traditional Italian father than he and his wife are divorcing because "we don't love each other any more." The befuddled father asks, "Tony, what's the story?" For the next several minutes, Tony keeps repeating his explanation, and his father keeps asking, "But, Tony, what's the story'?" To a man from an Institutional Family, Tony's explanation did not compute as a reason to break up a family. The scene captured the generational shift from one type of family standard to another.
During the first half of this century, the Institutional Family gave way to the Psychological Family. In the 1920s, family sociologists began to write about the shift from "institutional marriage" to "component marriage." The Psychological Family was a more private affair than its predecessor--more nuclear, more mobile, less tied to extended-kin networks and the broader community. It aspired to something unprecedented in human history: a family based on the personal satisfaction and fulfillment of its individual members in a nuclear, two-parent arrangement.
Marriage was to be based on continued friendship, love, and attraction, not on economic necessity or the requirements of child rearing. Parents were to nurture their children's personalities, not just socialize them as good citizens. The Psychological Family arose during the time when the media and consumerism provided strong competition for traditional family values. If the chief value of the Institutional Family was RESPONSIBILITY, the chief value of the Psychological Family was SATISFACTION.
NIMBLE FOR THE 90'S
Within the Psychological Family lay the seeds of its own demise, as Judith Stacey points out in Brave New Families (Basic Books; 1990). Although the ideal Psychological Family was a mutually satisfying, intact, nuclear family, the underlying gender and generational politics were still traditional: male prerogatives were assumed, and the younger generation was to respect the authority of the older.
When the social changes in the 1960s challenged the Psychological Family under the banners of gender equality and personal freedom, the Psychological Family began to give way as a normative ideal in American society. Women began to achieve more independence through paid employment, the sexual revolution made marriage less necessary for sexual fulfillment, adolescents and young adults saw themselves as deserving more and owing less to their families, and men and women alike began opting out of their unhappy marriages in unprecedented numbers. By the late 1980s, the Psychological Family, itself a radical shift from the Institutional Family, had given way to its successor, the Pluralistic Family.
The Pluralistic Family (sometimes called the Postmodern Family) has not broadly accepted an ideal family form. No new single family arrangement has replaced the Psychological nuclear family; instead, a plethora of family types has emerged, including dual-career families, never-married families, post-divorce families, step-families, and gay and lesbian families. Legislative bodies and courts are beginning to codify the Pluralistic Family by redefining the term to include arrangements considered deviant, non-family forms in the past. Tolerance and diversity, rather than a single family ideal, characterize the Pluralistic Family.
The chaotic proliferation of family types brought about by the disintegration of the Psychological Family has stabilized now around a variety of forms that individuals move in and out of during their lives. In the Pluralistic Family of the immediate future, an average child can expect to grow up in some combination of: a one-parent family, a two-parent family, or a step-family, and will go on in adulthood to cohabitate, marry, divorce, remarry, and perhaps redivorce.
The Pluralistic Family by definition will have room for some lingering Institutional Families, and a larger number of nuclear families representing the Psychological Family. Family forms do not arrive and evaporate overnight; they just become more or less nominative over time. In the late 20th century, the Psychological Family hasn't died; it has just become one family type among others. The chief value--satisfaction continues to be prominent in the Pluralistic Family, but it is now supplemented by a new family value for the postmodem age--FLEXIBILITY.
LIVING WITH AMBIVALENCE
The near future of the American family lies with the Pluralistic Family. At its best, this completes a century-long trek toward liberation of the individual, particularly women and children, from the oppressive features of the traditional family. The Pluralistic Family offers individuals freedom to create the family forms that fit their changing needs over life's course, with little stigma about failing to conform to a single family structure and value system. And it fits the free-form American social life of the late 20th century, where the pace of life requires quick adjustments and where respect for diversity is a paramount civic virtue.
At its worst, however, the Pluralistic Family is filled with more intemal contradictions and ambivalence than were the Institutional Family and the Psychological Family in their heyday. Surveys indicate that most Americans still believe in the traditional family values of responsibility and commitment, and most believe that the stable, two-parent family is the best environment for raising children.
Family sociologist Dennis Orthner makes a distinction between family "values" and family "norms." He notes that the traditional family values, or ideals, have not changed much, according to national surveys, but that norms, or expectations, for actual behavior have changed remarkably. The discrepancy between ideals for stability and permanent commitment, and the reality of instability and provisional commitment, is one of two Achilles heels of the Pluralistic Family. Most Americans simply do not believe that the Pluralistic Family is stable and secure enough, especially for meeting the needs of children; they feel that divorce and other changes that liberate adults do not benefit their children.
The other Achilles heel of the Pluralistic Family is the lack of support from social institutions. The powerful decision makers in America tend to be men who were raised during the transition from the Institutional Family to the Psychological Family and who have lived their adult lives in gender- stereotyped, conformity-oriented Psychological Families. They believe in a "natural" split between the private world of the family and the public world of society--although such a split did not exist until the Institutional Family began to break down in the late 19th century.
When the umbilical cord connecting the family and the community is severed, both the family and the community become malnourished. Struggling families are left to their own devices. Family violence is seen as a personal failure, not a social and political problem. And the community loses its sense of moral obligation to promote and protect the welfare of children and other vulnerable citizens.
ACCEPTING THE CHANGE
Many business and political leaders are suspicious of the Pluralistic Family, and fear that offering it economic and legal support is tantamount to undermining the American family as they know it-- which, of course, is true. On the other hand, as they go through their own divorces and remarriages, and as they see the diversity of their children's families, these men are showing signs of accepting the reality of the Pluralistic Family.
In one sense, the next two decades for the American family are relatively easy to forecast: The Pluralistic Family will be the prevailing norm--and practically nobody will be happy about it. Conservatives will lament the decline of the nuclear Psychological Family, and liberals will decry the lack of community support for alternative family forms. And families will struggle to catch their collective breath following the tumultuous changes of the 1970s and '80s.
As they do so, there is palpable reappraisal about what the family revolution has wrought. The divorce rate has stabilized, and there is evidence that the divorce rate after remarriage is declining. There is growing alarm that the sexual revolution has brought unacceptably high levels of sexual activity among teenagers with an increasing rate of teenage childbirth and a surge of single-parent families. A spate of books, including Michele Weiner-Davis's Divorce Busters (Simon & Schuster; 1992), reflect a popular sentiment that marriage bonds need strengthening--in contrast to books on "creative divorce" of 35 years ago. And best-sellers such as Judith Wallerstein's Second Chances (Tichnor & Fields; 1989) tap many Americans' fears that divorce is ruining the lives of our children.
If most Americans are fearful about the family of the future, how have our political leaders responded? They generally don the century-old roles of pessimists and optimists. Pessimistic conservatives decry the lack of traditional family values and call for a values revolution. Optimistic liberals endorse flexibility in family arrangements and call for new government programs. As Daniel Patrick Moynihan noted in his book, Family and Nation (Harvard University Press; 1985), conservatives, fearing government interference, like to talk about family values, but not public policies. Liberals, fearing "blaming the victim," like to talk about public policies, but not family values. When it comes to family issues, then, conservatives talk and liberals tinker.
There are signs that we are beginning to transcend this split, accepting the need for change in both private values and public policy. Donald Fraser, the liberal major of Minneapolis, an innovator in family support policies, told President Bush this year that family breakdown is the leading cause of juvenile crime in our cities, a view that Bush repeated in his State of the Union speech. Black columnist William Raspberry regularly decries the deterioration of the African-American family in America, particularly the absence of black fathers from their children's lives, and says that this condition cannot be blamed completely on racism and economic conditions. Jesse Jackson has begun calling for a moral revolution in the African-American community and in the wider society, in addition to more family support from community institutions. Liberals, then, are beginning to talk about values, although conservatives still seem to be slower to talk about policies.
Critics of this recent trend toward emphasizing family values view it as part of a conservative backlash against women's newfound freedoms and acceptance of alternative family lifestyles. For them, the battlefront for families lies only in the public arena, and the emergence of the "V" word (values) is a rear-guard action that threatens needed social change under the camouflage of conservative rhetoric.
Regardless of the merits of these criticisms, family values will clearly be on the national agenda in the next decade or two, as will family-policy issues such as parental leave, child care, divorce, and child-support laws, and support for families to provide health care for frail members. I predict that the two will become inextricably linked in the future. Family policies will make sense to most Americans only when they are couched in terms of family values such as commitment and care. And espousing values without addressing the policy agenda for families will be seen as posturing rather than helping. What we are approaching, for the first time in our history, is a public discussion about a family ethic to go hand in hand with a family policy.
EMERGING FAMILY ETHICS
The outline of this new family ethic underlying family policy is beginning to emerge. A new family ethic for the next decade, I believe, will embrace several timeless values of the Institutional Family and the Psychological Family--but go beyond these to incorporate the newer values of the Pluralistic Family. Here are the elements in such an old and new family ethic that I see emerging in the next decade or two:
o Commitment--the sense of "covenant" that binds spouses to each other, parents to children and children to parents, and extended family members to one another. Without turning the clock back to an Institutional Family-era when marriage until death was sometimes psychologically deadly to trapped spouses, there will be a renewed emphasis on finding ways to renew troubled marriages rather than end them, especially when children are involved. After a divorce, there will be stronger expectations that both parents remain faithful to the unbreakable covenant that binds parents to their children.
o Care--the physical and emotional support of spouses and family members for one another. As philosopher Nel Noddings writes in her book, Caring: A Feminine Approach to Ethics and Moral Education (University of California Press; 1984), care builds on the sense of commitment and requires the ability to empathetically understand one another. To the Institutional Family's emphasis on physical and moral care of children, the Psychological Family added the idea that parents should understand and foster the emotional lives of their children, and that spouses should nurture each other emotionally. These values are relatively new in human history and will require support from larger efforts for family-life education in the coming decades.
o Community--the importance of the family's ties with its neighborhood, local community, state, nation, and world, with responsibilities going both ways--the family to the community and the community to the family. This value reflects efforts to mend the split between the private world of the family and the public world of the community and its institutions. I believe that community leaders will increasingly see that the family can be no healthier than its community--and that communities can be no healthier than their families.
o Equality--the belief that women and men should have equal say in family matters and should stand as equals in the larger community, and that children should be given influence commensurate with their age and developmental abilities. This is tile litmus test for the use of the new emphasis on family values. Will they become part of an effort to reverse women's gains towards equality with men, or will they instead become a vehicle for creating something entirely new in human history--namely, a family arrangement that provides commitment, care, and community support within the context of full personhood for men and women. Ultimately, such equality can be achieved only if it is embraced at both family and community levels at the same time.
o Diversity--the support for all family forms that embrace the values stated above and provide for the well-being of their members. This is the chief new value underlying the Pluralistic Family, and I see no way to build a new consensus on family values without incorporating the value of diversity. Such family forms as the never-married mother with children and gay and lesbian families are here to stay in a world that accepts the rights of citizens to form nontraditional family arrangements. This does not mean, however, that anything goes; all family forms should be judged by how well they provide commitment, care, and community for their members. Family arrangements that pass this test deserve greater measures of community support in the future.
This emerging family ethic is not a recipe for making complex decisions, such as whether to divorce one's spouse. But it does offer guidelines for responsible, caring, and fair actions when individuals are experiencing a problem such as severe marital distress. It also points the way for communities to support these family values with programs and policies.
Here's how this new family ethic could be applied: It could be considered irresponsible to get a divorce without consulting a marital therapist, especially when there are children involved, just as it is considered irresponsible to let someone die without consulting a physician. Communities, for their part, would ensure that marital-therapy services are available and affordable for couples, and just as important, provide funds for community-based family-life education so that more couples will be equipped to handle the rigors of contemporary marriage.
For families going through the divorce process, the new family ethic would expect parents to put their children's interests and needs first, to treat their ex-spouse fairly, and to support each other as parents. Adults would be expected to act maturely and responsibly for the welfare of their children after a divorce, including providing ongoing financial and emotional support. And the community would back these values by offering mediation services, family therapy, support groups, and a non-adversarial legal process.
In the new family ethic, these "shoulds" about post-divorce families would not be seen just as matters of private values and morality--or as nosegays spouted by public officials. They would be matters of major importance to the community. Fathers who abandon their children financially or emotionally after divorce would be subjected to the same social stigma as drunk drivers. The same would go for mothers who try to break their children's bonds with their fathers. And appropriate laws and policies would provide sanctions against these abuses of family values.
At the level of broad government policies, the best way for the government to support the new family ethic is to ensure adequate living standards for families. Almost all serious family problems are more common when income is lacking. In the lowest-income groups in our cities, marriage itself is threatened as an institution, since the majority of births are to single mothers, and the great majority of couples who do marry eventually divorce. In the face of decades of poverty and terrible living conditions, the values of commitment, care, community, and equality are nearly impossible to sustain. That is why calling for a transformation in family values without an accompanying transformation in public policies is like criticizing people for stumbling in the dark instead of offering them candles.
To echo the line from Death of a Salesrnan, most people agree that if the family is to be viable in the coming decades, "attention must be paid." There is little new about the concerns for families, but there are promising signs that we might be able to move beyond the stalemate between liberals and conservatives, that we might transcend the split between the private world of the family and the public world of the community.
This is a perfect time for discussion about a new family ethic, because the wave of changes in the family has subsided for the present. During the years of turbulence, we gained a lot of knowledge from research on families. We now know what factors contribute to better (and worse) adjustment for children after divorce. We now know much more about how to provide educational, therapeutic, and mediation services to families. Marriage and family therapy, for example, has matured in the past two decades as a mental-health service and professional specialty. We have learned that value-free public policies do not achieve a broad national consensus. We have learned that both the pessimists and the optimists make good points, but that the tedious terms of the century-long debate about the American family must be set aside.
The Pluralistic Family is here to stay for an indefinite future. The forces of gender equality, diversity, and personal freedom may never again permit a single ideal family structure like the Institutional Family or the Psychological Family. The quality of the Pluralistic Family of the future depends, however, on whether we can create a new kind of family ethic that will help establish and maintain healthy bonds between family members in different living arrangements, and between families and their communities. Like death and taxes, some kind of family may be inevitable in human life, but the responsible, satisfying, and flexible family required for the next century--that is far from inevitable.
