American Families
American FamiliesChanging American Families
The children are leaving for school just as father grabs his briefcase and is off to work. Meanwhile, mother finishes clearing the breakfast dishes and embarks on her day filled with PTA responsibilities, household chores, and preparation of a well-balanced dinner to be enjoyed by all when father arrives home promptly at 6:00. This would have to be a scene from "Father Knows Best", "Leave It to Beaver" or that of a family during or before the sixties. Only a small minority of contemporary families fit this mold of being a "nuclear" family today. Until the 1960's most Americans shared a common set of beliefs about family life; a family should consist of a husband and a wife living together with their children. The father being the head of the family, earns the family's income, and gives his name to his wife and children. Today, the United States exhibits a pattern of attachments and disruptions in marriages and family structure, including single-parent families and such high rates of divorce that are certainly stressful for nation's developing children and adolescents, leading the American family and the nation's future to a state of crisis.
It is starling that whether through their parents' divorce or never having been married, every other American child spends part of his or her childhood in a single-parent family. The increase in the proportion of children living with just one parent has strongly affected large number of children. By the time they reach age sixteen, close to half the children of married parents will have seen their parents divorce. For nearly half of these, it will be five years more before their mothers remarry. Close to half of all white children whose parents remarry will see the second marriage dissolve during their adolescence. (Hamburg, 1996) With all of this, family matters get complicated very fast. Let's take the instance of Paul, a high-school student. Paul's parents, Mary and John get a divorce. John moves in with Sally who already has two boys. Mary meets Jack, who is divorced and has three girls. When Mary and Jack get married, Paul has a mother, a father, a stepmother, a stepfather, five stepbrothers and stepsisters, and four sets of grandparents, both biological and step. Demographers from the Institute of for American Values point out that one-third of all children in America will probably live with a step-family before the age of eighteen. They also point out that one of every four children today is being raised by a single parent. The size of the average family decreased from more than four people (2 parents and 2 children) in the 1940's to a little over two in the 1980s.
A recent long-term study conducted by Princeton University found that elementary school children from divorced families, especially boys, on average scored lower on reading and math tests, were absent more often, were more anxious, hostile, withdrawn, and were less popular with their peers than their classmates from healthy family environments. In later life, adults who grew up in divorced homes are more likely than others to tell investigators that they are unhappy, in poor health, and dissatisfied with their lives. Men from divorced families are 35% more likely--and women fully 60% more likely--than their intact-family counterparts to get divorced or separated (Brokaw, 1998).
From my research, an example, in which children inquire from their father every couple of months or so, ' "Are you and mommy getting a divorce?" ' shows the extent of worry in the child. (Brokaw,1998) Also just seeing the distress of friends whose parents are splitting apart makes the child scared of the humiliating situation. "The complexity of families has reached astounding proportions," says Frank Furstenberg, University of Pennsylvania sociologist. A child who lives in such circumstances finds it very difficult to reckon who are his "kin-folk" and whether or not the people that he or she counts as kin can be counted upon in times of need. (Kantrowitz, 1992) An example of this can be presented by looking at Julie, another adolescent in her late teens. Julie lives with her grandmother because she was abused by her mother. There is enormous emotional strain between Julie's mother and her grandmother, and Julie blames herself for the problem. She also worries that if her grandmother dies, she will have no one else to turn to.
Divorces men and women with executive or professional careers putting in 40-hours, work, travel and work and home worries don't have enough time for family. And so children are not left with "quality time," which means little time, from parents, and with what sociologist Amitai Etzioni of George Washington University calls "quality phone calls such as "Honey, I won't be home. I love you." Though the intent is not to neglect the child, this can turn out to be neglect in effect. The worry is, what does this do to the children? It of course means that children can feel unvalued and insecure. It's easy to neglect things that mean a lot to the children, and it shows when they ask, "Why didn't you come to my school play? Oh, you had a client? Do we really need that much money?" It means that the parents are not around to participate in the thousands of daily interactions that make up a child's intellectual, moral, and emotional education, and so, unless the child is a latchkey kid, babysitters are left to do it, as well or ill as they are able and willing.
Socializing children, restraining their impulses, awakening their faculties, encouraging their talents, forming their values -- all take time. And parents who don't do so run the risk that their kids will not achieve all they can, and are twice as likely to drop out of high school as kids who get to spend quality time with their parents. What's more, Harvard law professor Mary Ann Glendon says, "Middle-and upper-income people who don't spend a lot of time with their kids are not teaching how members of a community live together and respect each other's rights. When parents put personal goals ahead of family, how will kids learn the opposite?" Families are the institution in which character is formed, and what kinds of characters are being forged, what kinds of citizens are being molded to carry on our society, when our principal socializing institution has had so much parental time withdrawn from it.
Several studies have also found disquieting character distortions in children from well-educated, middle-class divorced families. Many are withdrawn and lonely; many others, while gregarious and popular, choose their friends for the status they confer, manipulate them, and can't keep them for long. It is worrisome, too, to wonder about the ultimate consequences of fatherhood's decline. Says Glendon: "Will a man who hasn't had a father know how to be a father?" And it is disturbing that the family life of so many otherwise privileged children is so thin and unnourishing a medium for the cultivation of sturdy souls. A vast National Center for Health Statistics study found that children from single-parent homes were 100% to 200% more likely than children from two-parent families to have emotional and behavioral problems and about 50% more likely to have learning disabilities. In the nation's hospitals, over 80% of adolescents admitted for psychiatric reasons come from single-parent families. (Smith, 1995)
No scale can measure the deepest wounds of divorce for children, and impressive recent research suggests they are wounds that never heal. Psychologist Judith Wallerstein, who for 15 years has intimately followed 130 children of divorce, was shocked by the extent of the harm she found, not just right after the divorce but years later. Wallerstein, co-author of Second Chances: Men, Women, & Children a Decade after Divorce, had at first assumed that an unhappy marriage must be unhappy for children too: While they would feel pain at the divorce, they would also feel relief and would be just fine as time passed and their parents grew happier. Not at all. She was taken aback by the intensity of the pain and fear that engulfed these kids when their parents split up. "The first reaction is one of pure terror," says Wallerstein. Though most were middle-class children of executives and professionals, they worried who was going to feed and care for them. Preschool children feared that now that one parent had abandoned the other, both would abandon the child, leaving him unprotected in a scary world.
But it is reasonable to ask - are the bad consequences of divorce really caused by divorce itself or by the family disharmony that precipitated the split? Even though most were bright, after their parents' divorce, many of the boys in Wallerstein's study started having learning and behavior trouble in school; in adolescence and young adulthood a significant number began to drift. By young adulthood, both boys and girls from divorced families were having equal difficulty forming intimate, loving relations. According to the National Center for Health Statistics, they has been a steady increase in the number of children from single-parent families resulting from divorce having learning disabilities and emotional and behavioral problems, since 1990 (Congressman).
Over the past several decades, the tragedy of flagrant parental neglect of children due to divorce is reflective of the plagues in our society where young adults are highly involved: Teenage pregnancy, criminality, youth-violence, and drug abuse, to name only a few. Furthermore, day by day they are rising to a wider portion of the society. They lack constructive social support that should promote their education and health. They have very few models of competence. They are bereft of visible economic opportunity. As a result of their parents' inability to preserve their marriage, the result of the epidemic revolution of divorce, remarriage and divorce again had deeply affected the hearts and minds of American children. The fate of these young people is not merely a tragedy for them; it affects the entire nation. A growing fraction of our potential work force consists of seriously disadvantaged people who will have little if any prospect of acquiring the skills necessary to revitalize the economy (Wallerstein). If we cannot bring ourselves to feel compassion for these young people on a personal level, we must at least recognize that our economy and our society will suffer along with them.
CITING:
Brokaw, Tom. "New Realities of Changing Families," Good Housekeeping, Oct 98, Vol. 221 Issue 4, p106.
Congressman William D. Ford, Annual Publication, September 1998.
Etzioni, Amitai. "The Day Care Generation," George Washington Review, Winter/ Spring 1997.
Glendon, Mary Ann. "Family in Western Law" 1987, p 117.
Hamburg, David. "The New Family" Current, Jul/Aug 1996 Issue, p59.
Kantrowitz, Barbara. "Step by Step" Newsweek, Winter/ Spring 1992.
Smith, Brain. "FAMILY: Children in Crisis" Fortune, Vol. 116, Issue 3, Aug 95, p42, p6.
Whitehead, Barbara. Institute of American Values Publication. "Changing Martial And Family Patters: A test of the post - Modern perspective." Social Perspective, 1998, Vol. 31. Issue 3, p381.
Wallerstein, Judith, "Variations in theme" newsletter, March 1998.