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Re-valuing
the Family, Part Six: The Crisis That Exists for Families Today
by Richard
and Linda Eyre
(www.valuesparenting.com)
crisis
(kri'ses) n. 1. an exceedingly serious situation; 2. a critical
or decisive point or situation, a turning point, as in a story where
a conflict reaches its highest tension and must be resolved.
Note: In
this sixteen-part column, Richard and Linda Eyre explore the recent
revolution of the family from the honored centerpiece of society
to a disrespected and seemingly redundant appendage to the larger
corporate and cultural institutions of our new world. Re-valu-ing
the family, the Eyres believe, is the only alternative to America's
demise. The sequence of the column is: A. Re-valu-ing the family
(part one); B. The "crux" (parts 2 and 3 -- why family is the foundation
for everything, including happiness); C. The "curse" (parts 4 and
5 -- the social problems that plague our society today); D. The
"crisis" (parts 6 and 7 -- the breakdown and breakup of families
that allows and leads to the social problems); E. The "cause" (parts
8 and 9 -- the reasons our families are failing); F. The "culprits"
(parts 10 and 11 -- how our new, large institutions are destroying
the small, most basic institution of family); G. The "cure" (parts
12, 13, and 14 -- what you as a parent can do about it); and H.
The "case" (parts 15 and 16 -- a case for government and big corporations
to pay more positive attention).
The symptoms
are the social problems. . . .
The illness
is the breakdown of the family.
We've called
the first the curse, we call the second the crisis.
Recognizing
Crisis
Once Americans
recognize crisis, we seem to be able to do something about it.
When war and
tyranny twice engulfed Europe, we changed from a militarily weak
nation to the most powerful force on earth and ended two world wars.
When polio
and other diseases reached epidemic proportions, we discovered safeguards,
preventions, and cures.
When our auto
or electronics industries were ravaged by superior, more efficient
foreign competition, we re-invented, redesigned.
When our education
and test scores dipped to their lowest levels, we recognized that
we were a "nation at risk" and began a slow turn around and an educational
resurgence.
America has
a legacy of comebacks. We sometimes don't get it until
we are into or on the verge of crisis. But once we see it clearly
-- once we understand the causes and effects of what is happening
to us, we rally, we attack the problem at its roots, we rebound
and recover.
Sometimes we're
a little slow to recognize the scope of a problem, to separate causes
from effects and to get a stronghold on the roots. It took us a
while to get past European diplomacy and the theories of isolation
and focus on the real evil of Hitler; to get past leg braces and
focus on the polio virus; to get past tail fins and chrome and focus
on efficiency and competitiveness, to get past trying to justify
our inferior schools and start really fixing them. But once we get
it, once we wake up, once we see and understand the crisis, there
has been no one better than Americans.
The Real
Crisis
The biggest crisis,
the one that has taken the longest to develop, the "cause" of the
most far-reaching an devastating "effects," and the one we are finally
on the verge of understanding, is the decline and breakdown of the
American family and the accompanying deterioration of our basic
personal values.
There has been
no shortage of comment and speculation about "family decline" and
"values deterioration" in recent years, but two things have been
wrong (or at least inadequate) in most of what has been written
and spoken.
First, most
of the dialogue is too theoretical and academic. The statistics
about divorce, latchkey children, decreasing parent-child communication
and time spent together are academic parts of sociology courses.
Increases in violence, gangs, substance abuse, teen promiscuity
and pregnancy, crime, teen suicide, gang violence, school dropout
rate, and AIDS (all worse in America than in any other developed
country) are daily headlines, nightly news, and the subjects of
all kinds of popular discussion and the targets of all kinds of
proposed "solutions" . . . but are rarely connected clearly
to their real cause -- the breakdown of the families and values.
Common sense tells us of the connection, of the cause and effect,
yet we keep talking about, worrying about, and working on the symptoms
and the effects and pretty much ignoring the cause.
Second, when
we do hear someone say, in essence, "Families and values
breakdown is the direct root cause of all this country's serious
social problems," that someone is often a member of the extreme
religious or political right whose tone is so shrill and strident
and self-righteous that most mainstream Americans have a hard time
identifying with or accepting that spokesperson as credible. At
the same time, advocates and the "spokes-vehicles" for family indifference
and anything-goes morality are smooth as silk and use the manipulation
of movies, media, and music to masquerade as the majority.
This column
is neither a scream of frustration nor another shrill and strident
call to repentance. It is being written at a time when America's
true values and family-driven majority is beginning to reassert
itself and resist the masquerade -- at a time when "old" terms like
values and virtues are becoming buzzwords (and
names of national best-sellers) -- at a time when the self-gratification
and greed of the late twentieth century is giving way to a longing
for commitments, for quality relationships and stricter personal
standards which may become the hallmark of the early twenty-first
century.
The
Crisis that Curses Us
Social problems
like guns and violence, irresponsible sex and teen pregnancy, depression
and suicide, declining education, substance abuse, gangs and crime
are clearly not starting points -- nor are they simply the results
of economic conditions. These "curses" are results . .
. tragic results. But what, exactly, are they the results of?
Because we
are so oriented to money and economics, it's natural to look for
an economic scapegoat -- to say "poverty is the cause." Violence
happens more in the poor inner city -- as does educational decline,
as do drugs and gangs and teen pregnancy. So the next question is
what causes the poverty, and then we debate government policies
or urban design and we get back into expensive band aids and the
treating of symptoms. The prescriptions don't work because we've
misdiagnosed the cause. We've mis-reasoned ourselves away from the
real source and ended up at a dead end. We try to get out of the
maze by saying, "Maybe we've got it backwards, maybe it's the drugs
or the crime or the teen pregnancy that causes the poverty." We
go into analysis paralysis, we're debating whether the stress causes
the pain or the pain causes the stress. We still haven't addressed
the real cause. Where and what is the root?
It's only recently
that sophisticated academic statistical analysis has begun to take
us toward where common sense has pointed all along: The cause
of our social problems is the breakdown of our most basis social
institution -- the family.
Proof of this
premise requires only two things: 1. Evidence showing how much and
in what ways American families have declined; 2. Evidence showing
clear causal connections between that decline of families and the
rise of social (and economic) problems. With census and other recent
(and vast) increases of available data, there are more than enough
reliable statistics to serve as evidence on both points.
Family Facts
Family breakup
By age 16, nearly
one-half of U. S. children will have seen their parents divorce.
(1)
One half of
white children who see their parent remarry will see that second
marriage dissolve by their adolescence (higher in nonwhite families).
(2)
Only five percent
of U. S. kids see a grandparent regularly. (3)
More than one-third
U. S. households with children are single parent families -- far
higher than ever before. (4)
The U. S. divorce
rate is the highest in the Western world. (5)
More than one-fourth
of U. S. births are to unwed mothers. Births to unwed mothers have
increased by more than 200 percent in the last twenty years. (6)
In the '50s
over 80 percent of children grew up in households with both biological
parents. By 1990 only 50 percent of children spent their entire
childhood with both parents and projections of current trends indicate
that by the year 2000, 60 percent of U. S. kids will spend all or
part of their childhood in a single parent home. (7)
Family, function,
fears, finances, and fathers
Parents
spend 40 percent less time interacting with their children than
in the 1950s. (8)
This generation
of parents spends ten to twelve less hours per week with their children.
(9) The average worker is at work 163 more hours per year than thirty
years ago.)
U. S. adolescents
spend an average of three minutes a day alone with their fathers
and 50 percent of that time is watching T. V. (10)
Only 16 percent
of kids whose fathers don't live with them see their fathers on
a weekly basis -- and 50 percent have not seen their father in a
year or more. (11)
The original
$600.00 tax exemption per child would be $7,000.00 today if it had
kept pace with inflation. (12)
In 1950 the
average family paid 3 percent of its income for taxes -- today it
is over 15 percent. (13)
Twenty-eight
percent of school-age kids have at least one parents at home on
a full-time basis -- down from 57 percent in 1970. (14)
Seventy percent
of women report that they are afraid to tell their bosses they are
pregnant. (15)
Cause and
effect connections between family decline and social and economic
decline
Seventy percent
of teen suicides occur with children from fragmented homes.*(16)
Eighty percent
of kids in patient mental health units are from broken homes. (17)
The single
most correlating factor in drug/alcohol problems is the absence
of one parent. (18)
Children from
broken homes are 30 percent more likely to become physically ill
and three times as likely to have serious emotional problems. (19)
Twenty-two
percent of kids in single parent families will live below the poverty
line for seven years of their childhood. (20)
Fifty percent
of single mothers live below the poverty line. (21)
Kids from fragmented
families are six times as likely to be poor. (22)
The closer
kids are connected to their parents, the less likely they are to
feel suicidal, to become violent or use drugs. (23)
The more hours
children are left by themselves after school, the greater their
risk of substance abuse. Home-alone kids are twice as likely to
abuse alcohol or drugs
than children
who are supervised by a parent or another adult family member after
school. (24)
*"Fragmented"
or "broken" refers to families that have undergone divorce, separation,
death, or other circumstances that have resulted in a single parent
situation. While many single parents do an exceptional job of parenting,
statistics show that the likelihood of adolescent problems is much
higher.
The peak hours
for juvenile crime are now 3 p.m. to 8 p.m. (the hours kids are
alone after school. (25)
Seven million
latchkey kids go home to an empty house after school. A third of
all twelve-year-olds are regularly left to fend for themselves while
their parents are at work. (26)
Experts estimate
that the parent is twice as powerful as the school in determining
the educational achievement levels of adolescents in literature,
science, reading, and other subject areas. (27)
Next week in
part seven: The "crisis" continues -- How Social Problems Stem from
Family Problems.
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© 2001 Meridian
Magazine. All Rights Reserved.
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