Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, January 5, 1992 TAG: 9201010202
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Roberto Suro
DATELINE: HOUSTON LENGTH: Long
A FAMILY MATTER
For much of the last 25 years, the changing shape of the American family has been a cultural war zone. Conservatives bemoaned it. Trend-spotters sold it. Feminists celebrated it.But recently, the rate of change has slowed, the rhetoric seems to have subsided and a period of reassessment may have begun.
For most Americans the model of a father at work and a mother at home has been relegated to history. Economic reality, if nothing else, is rapidly making it an antique, rather than an icon that must be defended.
What is a family? It's still often traditional, although two working parents has become the norm. Census Bureau data show that the number of households in which a married couple lived with young children was 26 percent of the total in 1990, down from 40 percent in 1970.
A family is also single mothers, single fathers and childless couples. And sometimes a family is post-empty nest, with parents helping their adult children by taking them back in.
An increasing number of people, the single households, aren't in families at all. The nuclear family, once represented on television by the morality of "Leave It to Beaver," has gone to the burlesque of "Married . . . With Children."
"People grew up with one set of norms and values and now they are living another," said Arlene Skolnick, a research psychologist at the University of California, Berkeley. "As a result we have a tremendous amount of ambivalence. People believe in the family quite firmly, but they do not want to, or they are not able, to go back to the old patterns of family life."
But many trend lines in the data are flattening out. For example, the average family size dropped from 3.58 people in 1970 to 3.29 people in 1980, but since 1988 the figure has held at about 3.17. Most couples may have given up on big families but not on families altogether.
Even in the 1980s, while President Reagan was eulogizing the American family as a victim of moral decay, the situation was stabilizing. The number of divorced mothers increased at an average rate of 9 percent a year in the 1970s, but the Census Bureau reports that it has increased by only 1.6 percent annually since 1980.
The American family underwent profound changes as the children of the baby boom became adults, but now, for the most part, the changes seem to be in place.
"In a real sense we are beginning a post-ideological discussion of the family," said Stephen Klineberg, a professor of sociology at Rice University in Houston.
Starting with the sexual revolution of the 1960s and continuing through the exaltation of "family values" in the 1980s, change in the American household was often an underlying issue in debates over topics as varied as premarital sex and the role of women in the work force.
Now, said Klineberg, "we are no longer talking in terms of values and ideology because there is a sense that the positions on both sides were counterproductive. Increasingly we are recognizing families as they are, looking at their problems and deciding what will work. It is a more practical discussion."
In Washington this change is evident in policy discussions over items such as day care, family leave, middle-class tax cuts and income tax exemptions for dependents.
There are growing demands for programs that address differing needs of families, based on their race, class and even lifestyle, and this is reflected in the presidential campaign. Once a Republican issue, the defense of family is getting attention from the Democratic contenders.
One of them, Gov. Bill Clinton of Arkansas, offers a program that includes measures to enforce child support payments. While partisan differences still arise, they often focus on budget issues or the role of government rather than on a cultural clash over what the family should be.
In a survey designed to measure the attitudes of baby boomers, now between 26 and 45 years old, the Gallup Poll reported last April that 93 percent of the respondents said family life was "very important" to them. But, looking at the way they themselves were brought up, the boomers showed considerable ambivalence. Some 73 percent said they expected to have "a happier family life" than their parents did.
In her book on the American family, "Embattled Paradise," Skolnick argues that much of the recent debate over the family has been misguided because it uses the stereotypical white, middle-class family of the 1950s as a point of departure for either praise or criticism of subsequent changes.
Skolnick shows how the 1950s were a unique interlude of domestic stability in a century of steady evolution in sexual mores and family structures.
And, once the recent changes in the family are viewed as part of a historical continuum, the changing status of women emerges as the major ongoing dynamic from the end of the Victorian era until now.
The challenge to male dominance and the definition of new female roles were still very much works-in-progress when most Americans saw their standard of living begin to stagnate in the 1980s. Before the social and cultural adjustments could be completed, economic factors rendered the working mother a fact of life.
"People began focusing on the economy as a force that is really shaping the family, and this too has led to frustration and ambivalence," Skolnick said.
The mixed emotions were evident in a public opinion survey on family values conducted in 1991 for Massachusetts Mutual Life Insurance Co. About two-thirds of the survey respondents said they were "very" or "extremely" satisfied with their own family life, but an almost equal number said that across the country "family values have grown weaker."
Dr. Rebecca Shahmoon Shanok, a psychologist at the Child Development Center in New York City and a consultant for the study, said this phenomenon - "I'm OK, you're not" - reflected a basic tension in the American family.
"People believe in what they are doing and they are devoted to their families," she said, "but they know they are strung out to the limit.
"They have seen friends who have not been able to keep their families together, who have been broken up by the effects of isolation and economic difficulties."
Part of the ambivalence, Shanok believes, reflects "a lack of consensus over what it is that society should do to help the family."
As a practical matter, she notes that there are now many different kinds of families and that the needs of a divorced mother are far different than those of a young couple putting off childbearing.
And when both parents work, the needs of any single family will change as its children reach different ages, relying on day care at one point and on after-school programs a few years later.
"People are saying that they need options," Shanok said. "They're saying that they want to raise families but that they need to feel they can exercise choices and that society will reflect the fact that they are making those choices."