Roanoke Times Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc. DATE: SUNDAY, March 28, 1993 TAG: 9303290415 SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: B-2 EDITION: METRO SOURCE: DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
During this same period, there has been a 560 percent increase in violent crime - much of it committed by juveniles. There's been a 200 percent increase in the teen-age suicide rate.
There have been staggering increases in illegitimate births and teen-pregnancy rates. (One of every 4 children is now born to an unmarried mother.)
The number of children living in poverty has soared. Children's educational achievement (as measured by SAT scores) has declined.
It doesn't take a rocket scientist to conclude, as a headline in April's Atlantic Monthly blares, that "Dan Quayle Was Right."
Of course the former vice president was right when he tried last year to call attention to the erosion of families and the disastrous social consequences.
Quayle seemed to be blaming single mothers for their situation, and he trivialized the issue by couching it in terms of the TV sit-com character, Murphy Brown. But it is nonetheless urgently important to examine family breakdown as a core source of America's ailments.
Thankfully, some thoughtful voices are being raised in an effort to do just that.
At the moment, much of the debate centers on what, if anything, government can do to reverse the trends.
Few would argue that children who are raised in intact, two-parent families do not face better chances of success in America than those raised in single-parent households. That's not to say that single mothers (or fathers, for that matter) can't do a good job raising children. Plenty of them do.
Still, the evidence is overwhelming:
Children whose parents have split up or who have never married are more likely to live in poverty, to do poorly in school, to get in trouble with the law. Girls in single-parent families are more likely to get pregnant in their teen years.
Government can do some things. (The family-leave bill that President Clinton signed was a modest start.) To strengthen families, government can help improve child care for working parents, expand health care for children, and enforce collection of child-support payments from absentee parents.
And how about a true overhaul of a welfare system that penalizes marriages? Aid to Families with Dependent Children, the nation's principal welfare program, provides direct payments to people on the sole condition that they have children out of marriage.
Government should also consider making those "no-fault" divorces not so easy to get, in cases where young children are involved.
Any policies that stimulate job creation, or that increase incentives to stay on the job, will help strengthen families in communities where government assistance too often has replaced wage-earning fathers.
Even so, government cannot solve everyone's problems. Writing in The Wall Street Journal on March 15, William Bennett, former secretary of education, said this:
"Our social and civic institutions - families, churches, schools, neighborhoods and civic associations - have traditionally taken on the responsibility of providing our children with love, order and discipline - of teaching self-control, compassion, tolerance, civility, honesty and respect for authority. Government, even at its best, can never be more than an auxiliary in the development of character."
He is right, of course. So is Barbara Dafoe Whitehead, a researcher at the Manhattan-based Institute for American Values, who wrote the "Dan Quayle Was Right" article.
Whitehead blames many of our problems on an unreasonable but emotionally appealing shift of thinking in the '70s. The well-being of adults, she says, replaced the well-being of children as the yardstick for measuring social behavior.
As a result, Americans came to accept spiraling divorce rates, out-of-wedlock childbearing and other "family disruptions." Such disruptions, it was rationalized, were even positive on the whole, if they seemed to serve the happiness of adults.
But they weren't positive, we now know. The grim numbers cited above, and the damaged lives they represent, have to be turned around.
Dan Quayle, Murphy Brown, wherever you are - it's time to gather around the nation's kitchen tables for a serious discussion of family values.