THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, May 12, 1996 TAG: 9605090530
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J2 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Interview
LENGTH: Long : 128 lines
Mary Pipher, a therapist from Lincoln, Neb., has gained fame for ``Reviving Ophelia,'' her best-selling book on teenage girls.
Pipher's newest book, ``The Shelter of Each Other,'' is about families. Pipher argues that the dangers of the culture have been underestimated, and that too many families have become isolated.
On April 25 she spoke to a packed house at Chrysler Hall. Staff writer Tony Wharton interviewed Pipher after her visit.
In your new book you talk about the importance of communities to families and vice versa. Tell me how you see that relationship working.
Well, I think one of the big problems right now parents are having is that they can't raise their children alone. . . .
For parents to do a good job parenting, they need to have a couple things going for them that many parents don't have. One is, they need to have other parents they can talk to, about their guidelines, about what the other parents' kids are doing, so they can put their own children's behavior in a context. . .
If their kids are smoking dope in seventh grade, they realize that's something happening in their community which needs some community response, as opposed to each family going into therapists' offices one at a time. . . .
So I think parents need that kind of support. What I argue in the book is that they've had it, for the most part, in this country. Up until the last 20 or 30 years, when the sense of community for most people has been so eroded, parents have had the support of teachers and neighbors and Little League coaches and ministers and Girl Scout leaders and so on. . .
You know, the expectations for children are generally pretty agreed upon by adults, whether they're Republican or Democrat or whatever . . . . At one time, adults helped other people's children act that way, and that's totally changed.
In interviews with people in many different communities, one thing we hear over and over is, ``I remember when I was young, if I did something wrong, anybody in the neighborhood would tell me so and would tell my parents so.''
Oh, yes. I hear those stories all the time. People know I'm interested if they've read my writing.
For example, just last week, a woman was telling me that as a young girl she had stolen a tube of lipstick from the little drugstore in her town, and the guy had caught her, and had called her dad, and said, ``I thought you'd want to know that your daughter stole something. I'm not going to press charges or anything, but I thought you ought to know it.'' And that was great for her, because her parents found out, so that they could talk to her. She was embarrassed by someone her parents knew, and it probably ended her career as a thief, just like that.
Given all of that, do you regret that Americans have moved away from extended families? Do you think it's possible to return to that?
Yes, I do. I think people are already doing it. I think one of the really odd things that happened in this culture, and this is where I hold some therapists accountable, is I think in the last 20 years particularly, a lot of people got the idea that if your family was troubled, you were probably better off without them. And that if it was somewhat difficult to deal with Aunt Matilda or answer your father-in-law's questions, maybe you ought to just stay away from Sunday dinners or Thanksgiving dinners or whatever.
And what happens, when people do that, is they end up not only isolated from their neighbors, but they have no family base either. They have nobody to turn to when they need help and they have nobody to help them put their lives and their children's lives in any kind of context. . . .
See, when psychologists were working with families in the '60s, and families were all living very close together for the most part, and there were six occasions a week you could be with your family, then it made sense that therapists were telling people, oh, you ought to take some time for yourself and so on.
But now it's the opposite. It isn't that people have too much extended family and have to worry about spending every Sunday at Aunt Bertha's, it's that there's no Aunt Bertha around.
In the things that you say about the media and culture and so on, you come down pretty hard on capitalism in general as being dangerous to families. Do you prefer something else? What do you suggest we do?
No. I want to be real careful with that. First of all, businessmen, people in advertising, are just like you and me. They're decent people and I don't want to demonize corporate America or anybody else. What I really mean to say and what I really believe is that a culture in which almost all decisions are organized around money instead of meeting human needs isn't a very good culture eventually for families.
I think what's happened is the efficiency with which this culture is organized around money has gotten greater. . . .
What I'm thinking about is, for example, in this country the medical system is much more about money now than it was 20 years ago. Education has to be much more financially accountable than it did 20 years ago. The way children's programming is set up, essentially a lot of children's programs are long commercials for products. There's just been an increasingly money-driven system sort of coming into control.
I think what happens with that is that some people get very rich, but that all of us experience a sort of degradation of our public life.
The Gross National Product is about money, and goods and services. What's really hard to measure in this country is things like, do people feel safe walking? Do they have neighbors that they know and like? Do they have somebody nearby that they can have a cup of coffee and laugh with every day?
If you think about it, how can you say that a country is getting more prosperous when parents have less time with their children?
A number of people, such as Robert Putnam, have come out very strongly against television. He declared television the No. 1 enemy of public life.
I think probably the biggest thing that happened in the '60s to change this country was TV. There was just a tremendous change in how many people were watching TV and how much TV in that particular decade.
I've noticed that people like me, who learned to get information from reading, by the time I had a TV available, I was a big reader. I had all sorts of other things happening in my life besides TV, so it had a lot to compete with, in terms of my interests, and it really never got entrenched as a deep-seated habit. But what happens now with children is it comes first, and that's the way they learn to look at the world, and relax, and entertain themselves. So what happens now is children don't learn the joy of going out and sitting under a tree and reading for three hours.
How has your traveling and talking to people affected your thinking? Are you optimistic?
I am. Partly it's because, if you read the newspapers, you hear the sad stories about this country. You hear the Unabomber and the Tasmanian (massacre) story and the Oklahoma City story and the O.J. story. But my vantage point's really different right now. And I am going from town to town where I meet people like the people I met in Virginia Beach. And those kinds of folks are telling me really interesting stories about what's happening in their lives. ILLUSTRATION: Color photo
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