American Families and the Nostalgia Trap

American Families and the Nostalgia Trap" (1993)

The period from the late 1970s until the early 1990s was one of sharp economic setbacks in a series of regions and industries, followed by economic and cultural "recoveries" that excluded many Americans and left even the "winners' feeling anxious and dissatisfied. Per capita income rose; new jobs were created; women and minorities moved into new careers; political rivals abroad turned to America for leadership; the gross national product grew; new technologies spawned consumer booms in personal computers, videocassette recorders, and microwave ovens; and Americans near retirement age were better off financially than ever before. Yet more people fell deeper into poverty; children's life prospects worsened by several measurements; and even those who managed to maintain or improve their living standards felt more pressed for time and more precarious in their achievements than they remembered feeling in the past. While Chinese students built replicas of the Statue of Liberty, Americans thinking about their own society were more likely to raise images of Wall Street speculators, declining educational achievement, negative political campaigns, widespread personal immorality, senseless violence, and cultural fragmentation.

The obvious question was, "If America is so rich, why aren't we happy?' And the answer that made sense to many was, "because of the collapse of the family." This explanation also seemed to answer two related questions: "If America is so rich, why are there more poor people than there were in the 1960s? Why do our young people seem so desperate and so angry?" The crisis of the family" became the key to explaining the paradox of poverty amid plenty, alienation in the midst of abundance.

century draws to a close is an "epidemic of family breakdown". Sarnuel Sava, head of the National Association of Elementary School Principals, blames the decline of American education on a "parenting deficit." "It's not better teachers, texts, or curricula that Our children need most ... we will neversee lasting school reform until we see parent reform." Divorce and unwed motherhood are said to be the major causes of poverty and inequality in contemporary America. In his State of the Union ad- dress for 1992, President Bush claimed that the crisis of the cities results from "the dissolution Of the family" Kate O'Beirne of the Heriitage Foundationasserts that people of all political persuasions are coming to understand that Arnerica's troubles stem from the collapse of family stability and the work ethic,"'

The question, however, is how many of these problems are caused primarily by changes in family forms and values, or could be solved by attempts to "revive the traditional family" The answer is surprisingly few. Historically, Americans have tended to discover a crisis in family structure and standards whenever they are in the midst of major changes in socioeconomic structure and standards. Today's family crisis follows a major economic and political restructuring going on since the late 1960s: the eclipse of traditional employment centers, destruction of formerly high-paid union jobs, expansion of the female and minority work force, and the mounting dilemmas of welfare capitalism. America has seen a major shift in the organization of work and its rewards: Family values, forms, and strategies that once coordinated personal life with older relations of production and distribution are now out of sync with economic and political trends. In past crises, as in this one, such imbalances caused pain and disruption in families, and families or individuals reacted to the changes in ways that sometimes made things worse, but neither then nor now could the larger crisis have been averted if only families had "tried harder."

Earlier family crises, unlike today's, took place in periods when the expansion of productivity and growth of democratic political institutions provided a basis for long-term optimism about social trends, in spite of short-term dislocations. If we once had long-range optimism in the midst of short-range hardship, today we have long- term despair in the midst of short-term benefits. This makes it tempting to focus on something small enough to seem manageable: If we cannot strengthen America's political and economic infrastructure, maybe we can at least shore up our families. But focusing attention on family arrangements diverts us from the research, programs, and hard choices necessary to bring families back into balance with economic and political realities. Under current circumstances, strengthening traditional family structures and values is going to be an uphill struggle; and to the extent that such strengthening