Dealing with diversity
"No, the family isn't going to hell in a wheelbarrow, it's simply diversifying," insists Mary Jo Bane, 38, co-author (with fellow Harvard professor George Masnick) of The Nation's Families: 1960-1990. "There will be no 'typical American household' a decade from now," she explains. "We will have fewer husband-and-wife families with children. More Americans will be living alone: young adults before marriage, the newly divorced, the elderly. There will be more working couples. One real challenge of the future is to accept the fact of this diversity and then deal with the results. For example, we no longer can count on a large pool of free labor—women at home—to help care for children and the elderly. But people are still taking families seriously and are forming them willingly. People still need one another."
Seeking a family's roots
"Each of us needs a sense of where we belong," observes Alex Haley, 59, whose solution is to apply the lessons of his best-selling Roots. In every family, he urges, "somebody should take the responsibility of becoming its historian: interview the old people, comb the attics, then write up the information and circulate it. From that moment on the family ceases to be one of the many, many families with no record of their existence. You'd be surprised how much that will mean. Families should also hold reunions. Young people today have a sense of rootlessness. Reunions say solidly to everyone: You are part of a family, one that is proud of itself, one that respects itself. And what is society other than a bunch of families together?"
Abortion: a moral dilemma
With an estimated 1.4 million abortions in the U.S. every year, "Abortion is in danger of being trivialized into a primary method of birth control," says Daniel Callahan, 50, director of the Hastings Center, an ethical study group in Hastings, N.Y. and author of Abortion: Law, Choice and Morality. "Abortion is clearly a legal right, and should be," he explains. "But because it has been such a hard fight to win, there is a reluctance sometimes to confront the moral choices involved. It is not enough simply to say that the issue ought to be left up to women. Legalization does not change the moral issue—namely, the rights of the fetus vs. the rights of the mother. What is unfortunate is that the pro-life groups concentrate almost exclusively on the right to life of the fetus and ignore the terrible social circumstances that force women to abortion; pro-choice groups concentrate on the political rights of women and ignore the moral aspect. The freedom should be there," Callahan argues, "but the freedom should not be used very much."
A partnership in child rearing
"Families should neither idealize the past nor neglect looking to it for solutions," says Clark University's Tamara Hareven, 43, editor of the Journal of Family History. "Until affluence sapped our cooperative spirit, extended families helped each other in good times and bad. We need to relearn that mutual obligation. Teenagers are demoralized today because they don't have many useful responsibilities. In the 19th century they contributed income to their families. We could be as flexible as our ancestors about sharing households. Old people especially can profit by taking in boarders. This is a time of remarkable opportunity, but we have yet to take advantage of it."
Learning from family history
"How can the career interests of women be fulfilled and the family be maintained?" asks Stanford historian Carl Degler, 60, who notes that "the traditional nuclear family has always depended on the wife subordinating her individual interests to those of her husband and children." But now, says Degler, author of At Odds: Women and the Family in America from the Revolution to the Present, "If a woman wants to work and have a family, we should be able to arrange it so she can do so." Degler is skeptical of reforms like day care and flexible working hours because "the problems of adjustment are still the woman's." Instead, he says, "Men will have to share more home and child care. Business, government and the professions must accept new work patterns for men. But men won't voluntarily give up career prerogatives; women must talk them into sharing parental responsibility, and these questions must be raised before the wedding, not after." Still, Degler concludes, "I am optimistic about the family's survival. I see no better way of bringing children into society. That's the bottom line."
Helping the new elderly
"This will be the century of old age," says psychiatrist Dr. Robert Butler, 54, director of the National Institute on Aging in Bethesda, Md., whose constituency of over-65 Americans will about double to 45 million by the year 2025. "Attending to their needs will be our greatest challenge," says Butler. "The big problem is health care. We haven't adequately prepared for geriatrics. Even Medicare is designed for the health needs of 35-year-olds." But Butler, who coined the word "ageism" in his 1975 Pulitzer Prize-winning Why Survive? Being Old in America, is encouraged by the boom in senior citizen centers, the Peace Corps' recruitment of elderly volunteers and the federal government's Foster Grandparents Project for needy children. Individual families, he says, can help by finding productive roles for their oldest members—perhaps child care—to keep them active. "The most important point," he summarizes, "is not to regard old people as some obscure 'they' or 'them.' We're talking about our future selves. If we don't lose sight of that, we'll be in good shape."
Protecting our children
"Children are the easiest people in America to ignore," argues Marian Edelman, 41, founder and president of the privately supported Children's Defense Fund in Washington, D.C. "We have kids growing up without the most basic health care, without dental care, without families, who have been left alone because there's no child care. There are 17 million mothers in the work force, 11 million children living with a single parent, and 550,000 babies born to teenagers every year. Who's minding those kids? We have to stop being judgmental about these families and start helping them. What kind of community supports are needed? Can our schools provide after-school programs? Can our churches help? Kids aren't a special interest group," Edelman observes. "They are our future."
Reconsidering permissiveness
Parents worried about how to discipline children should remember "permissiveness is a 50-year trend that grew out of the influence of psychoanalytic theory," explains Harvard psychologist Jerome Kagan, 51. The call now for greater discipline stems from fear that parental permissiveness may have led to drug abuse, delinquency and lower college admission test scores. What's important, Kagan believes, "is not the act but how it's perceived; not whether the child is spanked but what his understanding of the situation is. In discipline, the model is to be kind, be just, be consistent and compe tent. These are platitudes," he concedes. "But I believe them to be correct."
Fighting for a family's needs
"A family is a group, not just a collection of individuals; it can get pulled apart wherever that isn't recognized," says Atlanta family therapist Augustus Napier, 42, co-author (with Dr. Carl Whitaker) of The Family Crucible. "One example of disruptiveness is Aid for Dependent Children, which helps only if the father is absent. Another is corporations that move executives around heedless of consequences for spouses and kids. Families must be willing to discuss their needs and fight for themselves. We as a society must identify the family as a unit of concern. That is a change from our history of rugged individualism, but it is long overdue."
Saved by the Bell Reunion
The hookups, the meltdowns, the memoires
The case reveals what was really going on what they think of each other now!
