The American Family: Future Uncertain

AMERICA'S families are in trouble--trouble so deep and pervasive as to threaten the future of our nation," declared a major report to last week's White House Conference on Children. "Can the family survive?" asks Anthropologist Margaret Mead rhetorically. "Students in rebellion, the young people living in communes, unmarried couples living together call into question the very meaning and structure of the stable family unit as our society has known it." The family, says California Psychologist Richard Parson, "is now often without function. It is no longer necessarily the basic unit in our society."

The data of doom--many familiar, some still startling--consistently seem to support this concern. One in every four U.S. marriages eventually ends in divorce. The rate is rising dramatically for marriages made in the past several years, and in some densely-populated West Coast communities is running as high as 70%. The birth rate has declined from 30.1 births per thousand in 1910 to 17.7 in 1969, and while this is a healthy development in many respects, it implies considerable change in family life and values. Each year, an estimated half-million teen-agers run away from home.

Enormous Crises

The crisis in the family has implications that extend far beyond the walls of the home. "No society has ever survived after its family life deteriorated," warns Dr. Paul Popenoe, founder of the American Institute of Family Relations. Harvard Professor Emeritus Carle Zimmerman has stated the most pessimistic view: "The extinction of faith in the familistic system is identical with the movements in Greece during the century following the Peloponnesian Wars, and in Rome from about A.D. 150. In each case the change in the faith and belief in family systems was associated with rapid adoption of negative reproduction rates and with enormous crises in the very civilizations themselves."

It is not necessary to share this apocalyptic decline-and-fall theory to recognize many interrelated dangers to both society and family. Each of the nation's forces of change and conflict meet within the family. The "counterculture" of the young, the effects of the war, economic stresses and the decay of the cities--all crowd in on the narrow and embattled institution. The question, of course, is not whether the family will "survive," for that is like asking whether man or biology or society will survive. The question is whether it can survive successfully in its present form. All the evidence shows that in order to do so, it needs help.

Precisely that was uppermost in the minds of 4,000 delegates from across the nation who met in Washington last week for the once-in-a-decade Conference on Children. Among the proposals they urged on President Nixon were the establishment of a National Institute for the Family; universal daycare, health and early learning services in which parents would play a major role; the creation of a Cabinet-level Department of Family and Children; and an in dependent Office of Child Advocacy. There was also a lavish list of demands--though more modest than the one ten years ago--covering everything from prevention of child injuries to reforming the judiciary system.

Weakened Supports

Yet if the demands made on the Government in behalf of the family were too vast, this was in a sense only an understandable reaction against the fact that too many vast demands are made on the family these days. Throughout most of Western history, until the 20th century, society as a whole strongly supported the family institution. It was the family's duty to instruct children in moral values, but it derived those values from church, from philosophers, from social traditions. Now most of these supports are weakened, or gone. Yet politicians and other prophets often blame the family for decline in morals and morale--as if the family could be separated from society. The forces that are weakening the U.S. family structure are at the very heart of the changes that are taking place in American civilization. Some of the most significant:

MOBILITY. The mass exodus from rural to metropolitan areas, the increasingly common and frequent corporate transfer, the convenience of the automobile and the highway system built to accommodate it--all have contributed to a basic change in the character of the family. In the less complicated, less urbanized days, the average U.S. family was an "extended" or "kinship" family. This meant simply that the parents and their children were surrounded by relatives: in-laws, brothers, sisters, aunts, uncles, grandparents, cousins. If the relatives did not live within the same household, they were next door or down the block or on the next farm. But as Americans became more mobile, the kinfolk have been gradually left behind. As a result, the typical family has evolved into an isolated "nuclear"' family. It consists simply of a father, a mother and their children, and is usually located miles away from the home of the nearest relative.

Says Dr. John Platt, associate director of the University of Michigan's Mental Health Research Institute: "All sorts of roles now have to be played by the husband and wife, whereas in the older, extended family they had all sorts of help--psychological support, financial advice, and so on. The pressures of these multiple roles are partially responsible for the high rates of divorce, alcoholism, tranquilizers, etc."

WOMEN'S CHANGING ROLE. "Put very simply," says Cornell Political Sociologist Andrew Hacker, "the major change in the family in recent years, and the problems of the future, are both summed up in one word: women. In the past and until very recently, wives were simply supplementary to their husbands, and not expected to be full human beings. Today, women are involved in much greater expectations and frustrations. For one thing, 40% of U.S. women are now employed. When a woman is working, she tends to have a new perception of herself. I see this most egregiously in those women who go to liberal arts colleges, because there the professor takes them seriously, and this gives them big ideas. The unhappiest wives are the liberal arts graduates. The trouble comes from the fact that the institution we call marriage can't hold two full human beings--it was only designed for one and a half."

It is not only woman's aspirations that have changed, Hacker adds, but society's support of her as a wife. "In the past, the role of wife and mother was reinforced by the church and the community. The whole complex descended on women and said, This is what you are; this is what you will be.' Now marriage has to be on its own, because the reinforcements are no longer there. So women are listening to all the subversive messages."

One Women's Lib theoretician, Margaret Benston, has made an economic analysis that places the blame for the "exploitation" of women directly on the family. Since women's work in the home is not paid for, she reasons, it is considered valueless by society. Moreover, at present, equal opportunity of employment simply means that a woman has two jobs: one at work and one at home. All work must therefore be taken out of the home and paid for like any other product; only such innovations as communal kitchens and universal child-care centers will "set women free," she says.

APOTHEOSIS OF CHILDHOOD. In the Middle Ages, children were considered miniature adults, according to French Sociologist Philippe Aries. At about the age of seven, they were sent to other homes to serve as apprentices and often as servants. Thus they grew up in huge households, with no dependence on their parents. In contrast, the child of today, as the center of the tiny nuclear family, has become its raison d'etre and is therefore kept psychologically, financially and emotionally bound to it.

Without realizing it, many American mothers, under the aegis of benevolent permissiveness and the pressure of civic obligations, actually neglect their children (see box). Others, imbued by Dr. Spock with the notion that every child has a unique potential and that it is her mission to create a near-perfect being, become the child's shadow, with equally damaging results, according to Brandeis Sociologist Philip Slater. The child soon recognizes that he is the center of an extraordinary effort and that his happiness is a matter of great stakes. He will seldom turn out exactly as planned, and when family dissension ensues, the mother will resent her "sacrifices." Moreover, though she may have brought up her child to be "more cultured, less moneygrubbing, more spontaneous and creative" than she herself was brought up to be, she is nevertheless upset when he then refuses to remain on the same treadmill as his parents.

That refusal takes place in adolescence, which like childhood is a modern development. Thus the family has had no long historical experience in dealing with the new rebelliousness. Unlike youths of the pre-industrial age, who simply entered some form of apprenticeship for the adult world at the age of puberty, millions of teen-agers now remain outside the labor force to go to college. It is this fact that has made possible the existence of today's separate youth culture, by which parents feel surrounded and threatened in their sense of authority. "A stage of life that barely existed a century ago is now universally accepted as an inherent part of the human condition," says Yale Psychiatrist Kenneth Keniston. Keniston, in fact, now postulates still another new stage of life, that between adolescence and adulthood: he calls it "youth." The youth of the technetronic or post-industrial age often remain out of the work force until their late 20s. "They are still questioning family tradition, family destiny, family fate, family culture and family curse." Naturally, their very existence unsettles the families from which they sprang, and delays the development of the new life-styles that they will eventually adopt.

LIMITED USEFULNESS. According to Sociologist Reuben Hill, among others, the family has traditionally performed seven functions: reproduction, protection and care of children, economic production of family goods and services, socialization of children, education of children, recreation, and affection giving. But during the past century, he says, the economic, educational, recreational and socializing functions have been lost in varying degrees to industry, schools and government.

In three areas of traditional family life there has been little erosion: reproduction, child care, affection. As a matter of fact, many experts believe that the affections! function is the only one left that justifies the continued support of the family as a social institution. As "community contacts" become more "formal and segmental," says Hill, people turn increasingly to the family "as the source of affectional security that we all crave."

But the insistent demand for affection without the traditional supporting structure has dangers of its own. The pioneering sociologist Edward Wester-marck observed that "marriage rests in the family and not the family in marriage." The corollary used to be that the family existed for many practical purposes beyond love. To base it so heavily on love--including the variable pleasures of sexual love--is to weaken its stability.

Mother's Kiss

A related danger is to romanticize and sentimentalize the family. From the Greek tragedians to the modern psychoanalysts, men have known that the family, along with being a source of immense comfort, is also a place of savage battles, rivalries, and psychological if not physical mayhem. Psychoanalyst R.D. Laing says that the "initial act of brutality against the average child is the mother's first kiss." He finds it hurtful that a child is completely at the mercy of his parents, even to having to accept affection. Laing's colleague, David Cooper, calls the nuclear family the "ultimately perfected form of nonmeeting" and, in a new book called The Death of the Family, demands its abolition. These are extreme views, but it may be better to face the fierce aspects of family life than to expect only bliss. There is something of the disillusioned lover in many people who today are trying to live outside the conventional family.

Dissatisfied with the traditional family setup, or simply unable to cope with it, Americans by the thousands are seeking alternatives. One that has most captured the imagination of youth and that has an almost religious appeal to members of the counterculture is a family structure that is as old as antiquity: the commune. Utopians from Plato onward have visualized children as not being raised in traditional families but in various communal organizations; the instinct that pulls man toward a tightly knit "nuclear" family has often been counterbalanced by the dream of escaping from it.

Only five years ago, there were perhaps a hundred "intentional communities" in the U.S., founded mostly by religious fundamentalists, Utopian socialists or conscientious objectors. Today, as an outgrowth of the hippie movement, there are about 3,000, a third of which are in rural settings. "There are farms everywhere now, and we might go in any direction on compass to find warm bread and salt," writes Raymond Mungo in Total Loss Farm. Although Vermont, Oregon, California and New Mexico are still the favored states, some new commune clusters are cropping up in what Mungo calls "the relatively inferior terrain and vibration of Massachusetts and points south and west, and the huge strain of friendless middle America."

Most of the new communards are fleeing what they regard as the constriction, loneliness, materialism and the hypocrisy in straight society and the family life on which it is based. Yet some of the same old problems reappear--for example, the tug of war between individualism and submission to the group. One contributor to the Whole Earth Catalog summed up his own experience. "If the intentional community hopes to survive, it must be authoritarian, and if it is authoritarian, it offers no more free dom than conventional society. Those communes based on freedom inevitably fail, usually within a year."

But when they fail, their members often go on to join other tribes, now that there is a network of communes available to them. Benjamin Zablocki. a Berkeley sociologist who has visited more than 100 communes in the past six years, insists: "The children are incredibly fine. It's natural for children to be raised in extended families, where there are many adults." Yet in spite of the talk of extended families, the extension in the new communes does not reach to a third generation. Indeed, the "families" have a narrow age span, and it is possible that the children have never seen an adult over 30.

Deformed Monstrosity

Writes Brandeis' Sociologist Philip Slater, in The Pursuit of Loneliness: "It is ironic that young people who try to form communes almost always create the same narrow, age-graded, class-homogeneous society in which they were formed. A community that does not have old people and children, white-collar and blue-collar, eccentric and conventional, and so on, is not a community at all, but the same kind of truncated and deformed monstrosity that most people inhabit today."

Some communes actually form compromises with the nuclear family. Nowhere is this point better made than at Lama, a contemporary commune 18 miles north of Taos, N. Mex., which was re-revisited last week by Correspondent David DeVoss after an absence of 19 months.

"We work together--we collectively grow and distribute the crops, but we go back to our individual nests at night," explains Satya De La Manitov, 28, who has now moved from a tepee into a still unfinished A-frame house that took him $1.500 and twelve months to build. Most couples are in their upper 20s. are married, have children, own their own homes, have a deep respect for property rights and believe in the value of honest toil. Although the concept of complete sexual freedom retains its followers, it plays only a minor role in Lama society today. Indeed, reports DeVoss. ' were it not for their long hair, predilection for grass and rejection of the American political system. Lama residents could pass for solid, middle-class citizens."

Most of today's communes are in the cities, and they indeed do have appeal for many middle-class citizens. To Ethel Herring, 30, married to a Los Angeles lawyer and active in Women's Lib. a city commune seemed the answer to growing frustrations, which culminated when she realized that she was spending $60 to $70 a week for baby sitters; the Herrings had no live-in grandparents or nearby relatives to care for their three children while Ethel was attending her frequent feminist meetings. In effect, she says, "we were suffering from the nuclear family setup."

With six other sympathetic couples in similar circumstances, the Herrings scouted around and finally found a U-shaped, six-unit apartment building in southern Los Angeles. They purchased it last September, and converted it into a successful, middle-class (most of the men are lawyers) city commune. Knocking out walls and doors, they built interjoining apartments and a communal nursery, TV room and library. "The apartments open up so that the kids' rooms can run into each other," Ethel explains, "and yet there is still plenty of privacy for adults."

The families share their services, following a schedule that calls for each couple to do all of the cooking and housework for one week. "That's KP once every six weeks per couple, which keeps everybody happy," says Ethel. Her husband, for instance, has curtailed his practice so that he can spend one day a week at home on child-care and cooking duty. Says Ethel, "The truth is that most men are deprived of a close relationship with their children, and our men are finding out what they've been missing. It's groovy."

Disillusionment with the traditional family has led to other alternative lifestyles. In Boston, David, 36, a divorced architect, and Sarah, 29, a researcher for a consulting firm, have an "arrangement"; like an increasing number of other American couples, they live together in David's Cambridge walkup apartment in a "marriage" that has endured solidly for two years without benefit of legal sanction. They sometimes join David's ex-wife and his son, Jonathan, 5, for dinner. Bubbly, attractive Sarah still maintains her own apartment and sometimes spends a few days there.

Both Sarah and David are convinced that their relationship is superior to a conventional marriage. It is the legal tie, they believe, that is the subtle influence in making a marriage go sour. "On the small scale," says David, "there's no difference, except that you know you could call it off when you want to. That makes you more careful and considerate. You don't say subconsciously, 'Oh, she's always going to be there.' So you make that little extra effort." Only under one circumstance would Sarah and David consider a legal marriage: if they decided to have children.

Doubts about conventional family life have also led to the growth of another phenomenon: the "single-parent family." No longer fearful about complete ostracism from society, many single girls who become pregnant now choose to carry rather than abort their babies and to support them after birth without rushing pell-mell into what might be a disastrous marriage.

Population Explosion

Judy Montgomery, 21, is a major in political science at the University of Cincinnati. She lives in the exclusive suburban area of Indian Hill with her parents and her son Nicky, 16 months. She became pregnant at 19 but did not want to get married. "I think having a mother and a father are important for a child, but Nicky can be raised so he isn't scarred. There are now substitutes in society that will allow him to grow up fatherless. I have no feeling of guilt. My only real hassle is with guys I meet who are interested in me, and I say, 'Oh, I have to go home and take care of my kid.' "

Liberalized adoption laws are also making it possible for single and divorced women to have children and to set up housekeeping without the necessity of a father. Ruth Taylor, a secretary at a hospital in suburban Warrensville township, near Cleveland, was divorced shortly after her daughter, Kelley, was born three years ago. Because she did not want the girl to grow up as an only child, she adopted a little boy who was listed as a "slow learner" by the agency (there was a three-year waiting list for normal Caucasian children). But in the year that she has had Corey, 2, the boy's personality and intelligence have blossomed. To Ruth, adopting a child is the answer for both single and married people who have decided to forgo children because of their concern about the population explosion. "Form a family with what has already been provided," she suggests. "That way you will be helping to solve the problem."

The re-examination of the traditional family and the desire to try other forms have also produced some bizarre experiments. In La Jolla, Calif., Michael, an oceanographer, and his artist wife, Karen, both 27, had been married for four years when Michael met Janis, who was studying at the Scripps Institute of Oceanography. Janis often came to study at Michael and Karen's apartment, and a strong attachment developed. When Michael took off on a field trip to Antarctica, the two women became good friends and decided that because they both liked Michael, all three ought to live together. Last May the trio formalized it all with an improvised wedding ceremony attended, incidentally, by other trios.

As the three were leaving for a summer session at the University of Oregon, they were delighted to learn that Karen was pregnant. "We'll all take turns caring for it," says Janis, "just as we share all the household chores. That way each of us has time for things we like to do best."

There are other far-out experiments. One group, living at Sandstone, a handsome complex of houses near Los Angeles, has varied in size from three to twelve adults, and currently consists of only five: three men and two women. Says Barbara Williamson, a member of what she calls the "intentional" family: "It's a smorgasbord. It's so much more exciting to have nine different dishes than just one." The group has had no children yet because it wants to stabilize its "marriage" first.

Such eccentric arrangements obviously have no meaning for the vast majority of people, except perhaps as symptoms of an underlying malaise. Thus, while some sociologists and anthropologists make their plans for the reordering of the social structure, most are more immediately concerned with removing--or at least alleviating--the stresses of the nuclear family.

Emancipated Women

Psychologist Richard Parson, for one, believes that the increased emphasis on the role of the family "as an agent for human development and personal growth" will again make the family important in the field of education. "Parents will not necessarily teach the children," he says. "That is probably quite unlikely." But the family itself may become a learning unit, stimulated by new programs and new processes (like cartridge TV) that are even now being introduced into the home by industry. This, he feels, will help strengthen the nuclear family "by involving people in all kinds of interesting mutual experiences of learning."

While some fear that Women's Lib is a threat to the family, many experts believe that its more sensible goals could strengthen it. As women become increasingly emancipated--by child-care centers and equal-employment practices--they could have more time for intellectual and emotional fulfillment. Thus although their housekeeping role may diminish, they could become less frustrated and better wives. Though the idea is still shocking to many, some experts feel that certain women are better mothers if they are not with their children all day.

The Pill and abortion are obviously part of a loosening of morals that undermines the family in some ways; but these developments, too, can have their positive effects by reducing the number of pregnancies that lead to hasty and ill-considered marriages, and by allowing couples to put off having children until they are older and have had time to enjoy themselves, to travel and to grow up themselves. The reduction in unwanted pregnancies will also lessen the number of children who are rejected even before they are born and the financial hardship brought on by unplanned large families.

Adds Psychoanalyst Rollo May: "Even the growing frequency of divorce, no matter how sobering the problems it raises, has the positive psychological effect of making it harder for couples to rationalize a bad marriage by the dogma that they are 'stuck' with each other. The possibility of finding a new lover makes it more necessary for us to accept the responsibility of choosing the one we do have if we stay with him or her."

If the experts have their way, the nuclear family can be further strengthened in the future. Margaret Mead, for example, believes that many bad starts can be avoided if marriages can be postponed. She proposes a kind of universal national service that will take adolescents out of the nuclear home (where they apparently do not fit in), train them and keep them occupied until they are more mature. "We need something to allow those people who don't go to college to grow up without committing themselves to a marriage."

Instead of traditional marriages, Mead would also encourage a "two-step marriage" for young people. During the first phase, which would, in effect, be a trial marriage, the young couple would be required to agree not to have children. If a stable relationship developed and the couple decided to have children, a second license would be obtained and another ceremony performed.

Business, too, has a responsibility to relieve some of the stress on the contemporary family, according to Psychologist Urie Bronfenbrenner. In a report to last week's White House Conference on Children, he urged business to create flexible work schedules, cut back on travel, on transfers and on social obligations that keep parents away from their children. Bronfenbrenner also feels that large corporations should concern themselves with "where and how their families live," and with more part-time positions, better maternity leave, day-care centers and family recreation plans.

Another suggestion of the report, which urges that businesses "adopt" groups of young people to give them the opportunity to see adults at work, has already been tried by a few firms.

At the White House conference, delegates saw a film about a highly successful program set up by Bronfenbrenner's colleague, David Goslin, of the Russell Sage Foundation. It showed children from the Detroit public-school system spending three days at the Detroit Free Press, learning to relate to the newspapermen and what they were doing, and saying things like "You know, in school you learn a subject, but here you meet people."

In Bronfenbrenner's view, meeting people--especially people of different ages--is all-important to the preservation of the family. Parents now spend their time with other parents, he suggests, children with children, the young with the young and the old with the old. To end this segregation, which is particularly acute in suburban living, Bronfenbrenner and others recommend planning by architects for community clusters where children, their parents and the elderly can intermingle, each group bringing its experience, knowledge and support to the other. University of Michigan's John Platt visualizes clusters he calls "childcare communities" which resemble communes: in addition to enlarged recreational and shopping facil ities, they would include centralized schoolrooms, dining rooms (for both adults and children) and kitchens.

Gypsy Caravan

For all of the family's ills, the U.S. is still probably the most marriage-and-home oriented nation in the modern world. In the 1960s the number of U.S. families grew at a greater rate than the population; 87% of Americans live in families that include both parents. While the divorce rate is rising, so is the rate of remarriage among divorced people. Thus, the nuclear model will undoubtedly remain the basic family structure in the U.S. But that does not mean that it will function as a healthy institution unless ways are found to strengthen its concept and spirit.

A man's family used to be his fate; he could scarcely change it. In the modern U.S., people think easily of changing their family, like their occupation or their home. The result is psychologically unsettling and yet this change ability has obviously become a part of American life and the family will have to adjust to it. Theologian Sam Keen (Apology for Wonder) suggests that one should boldly take the notion of the family as a center for mobility: "It should be thought of like a gypsy caravan. You have that point of stability in the caravan, but it is continually moving and each member of it goes out to forage for food and then catches up with it."

That vision will probably never replace the image--and the dream-- of the snug, permanent hearth, even suitably expanded by "clusters." But it may be closer to the reality of American life.

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