The American Family: Part 2
Taking a New Look at Myths and Realities
By Harriet Alger
(Continued)
Another major concern is about school failure and drop-outs. However, only very recently have most American teenagers finished high school. In the 1800's many never went beyond 4th or 5th grade. Early in this century, many young people dropped out between 6th grade and 8th grade. In the 50's and 60's, a higher percentage graduated but many still left high school at age 16 and were able to get good paying jobs in factories or in construction. The problem today is not more drop outs but the consequences of not having a high school degree when you try to get a job. Increasingly, a two-year college degree is becoming a necessity if you want to earn a decent living.
We also worry today about the incidence of teenage pregnancies but it is not just a problem of age. In earlier generations, people married in their teens and had children in their teens. If unwed teenagers got pregnant, they usually got married, even if the weddings were the "shot gun" variety. However, today the economic and social consequences of teen pregnancies are completely different. Whether they are married or not, today's teen parents have a tough time trying to support themselves and their children.
Child abuse has always been common, even infanticide, throughout history. Sometimes child abusive practices have been defended as necessary to raise God-fearing and good, law abiding citizens. Sometimes child abuse has been protected as a privacy issue in the family--not subject to public scrutiny. Now many forms of discipline that were acceptable in the past are considered illegal child abuse. Now a family's privacy and right to manage their affairs does not include the right to abuse or neglect their children. Child abuse is not more prevalent. It is reported more. It is not acceptable any more.
What about lack of kinship relations and extended family? Actually, American families keep in touch with family and friends more today than those mobile families in the past because of better and cheaper communication by phone and mail.
Don't parents spend less time with their children than they used to? In fact, most parents today spend more time with each child because they have shorter work hours and there is more emphasis on parent-child interaction. The total time parents spend with children, as cited in some studies, is less but only because there are less children in the average family today.
I was one of the first single working moms in my neighborhood many years ago and told one of my neighbors how guilty I felt at not having more time to spend with my children. She was amazed and said, "Harriet, you spend more time with your children than any parent that I know." And I realized that that was true.
But what about mothers working while their children are cared for by someone else? Have most mothers in the past stayed home and taken the major responsibility for the care of their own children? Mary Frances Berry is the best source for an examination of this question. Whether mothers stayed home and had the major responsibility for house and children has depended on income, period of history, and cultural and ethnic background. Wealthy families have always had others to help care for their children. It is not unusual to hear concern expressed about poor rich children who had been raised by servants, governesses, baby sitters or sent away to boarding schools.
In low income families, families in poverty, every family member who could find a job has had to work to survive. The children have been cared for in day nurseries and child care centers, by older siblings or relatives, left at home alone or in the streets to fend for themselves, and also put to work at young ages. It is interesting to note that the same people who voice concern about working mothers are often the first to demand that low income mothers get off welfare and work, even if there is no good care available for their children.
In rural areas, mothers and fathers have worked in the fields and in the houses while other members of the family or community took care of the children. Sometimes, as in the city, children were left to their own devices, or put to work when very young.
Mothers in minority groups have also worked, often caring for the children of others, not their own. From the plantations of the South to the estates and suburbs of the North, white children have been raised by African-American and Hispanic women.
So the concern about working mothers is chiefly a white middle class issue. But middle class mothers have not always had the primary responsibility for children. As Berry reports: in colonial days fathers had primary responsibility for children beyond the early nursing period. Fathers were remembered by many colonial leaders, including John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, as their primary nurturers and educators. It was economic changes when fathers began to work away from home that gradually resulted in mothers assuming more and more child rearing responsibilities. There have been other times in history and there are other cultures in which fathers have had or have now a primary or equal role in child rearing.
Also, some mothers in middle class families have always had help in caring for the children. Before the invention of many of our labor saving devices, taking care of a house was a full time job and someone else often cared for the children. I asked my grandmother one day how she had managed without a washer, dryer, vacuum cleaner and other aids that I had (and I was exhausted!) She said, "I don't know how you young mothers do what you do today! In my day, children and adults wore the same clothes all week except Sunday. I didn't have to drive children to school and other activities, or run to the store or the dry cleaner. And while I washed on Monday or Ironed on Tuesday, someone else took care of the children: older children, unmarried aunts or cousins, grandparents."
Some middle class mothers have always worked in family businesses. During the depression and during World War II many women worked and children were cared for in child care centers set up by the government.
A comparison historically, cross-culturally, and globally shows that child rearing has usually been a community concern, rather than the responsibility only of parents or mothers. Throughout history, most societies have counted on able bodied young adults, male and female, to work and their children have been cared for by older siblings or elders. An African proverb often quoted, most recently by the New York State Board of Regents, says "It takes a village to raise a child."
If all of these things are true, why do we think things are worse? For one thing, our attitudes have changed, we view things differently now. The circumstances I've discussed are more apt today to be reported by the media and/or reported to public agencies. Another reason for our concern is that we are living with the problems we see now and, regardless of what happened in the past, we want them solved now. We indulge in wishful thinking--we would like to think we could make it all go away if we only did something right. We often have simplistic views of very complex problems.
There are some things that are different but everyone does not agree about whether these differences are good or bad:
Fewer "shot gun" marriages: good or bad? Are they likely or unlikely to result in happy, stable families?
Higher incidence of divorce; is it healthy or unhealthy for people to remain in abusive or unsupportive relationships?
We have violence as entertainment, accessible to children in our homes on TV: does this cause problems? If so, how serious?
Of course, just because conditions are not necessarily worse than other periods of history does not mean that we should just accept them as inevitable, but it does put a different perspective on our efforts to make things better in the future. The historical record clearly shows that family problems and social problems have a variety of causes: economic difficulties, health problems, mental health problems, lack of education, lack of job opportunities, lack of a family support system, bias and discrimination. Instead of bemoaning the state of America's families and blaming parents, all of us should be facilitating and supporting families, whatever form each family takes. That support needs to come from a variety of sources: private and public, individual and group, community, business and government.
In trying to set up stable, sufficient support systems for families today, we encounter a number of problems. Although most mothers of young children are now working outside the home, many Americans believe strongly that mothers should stay at home with their children, especially during the early years before school. They feel that the children of working mothers are neglected and at risk and that women are working for primarily selfish reasons. Neither assumption is supported by fact.
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