Programming on Minnesota Public Radio is supported by carousel automobiles. The audie's store in reducing the ADI Avant European sport wagons available in front track and Quattro models. Good afternoon, and welcome back to mid-day on Minnesota Public Radio. I'm Gary eichten recently the families and work Institute released to study which confirmed what millions of Americans already knew namely that it's often very difficult to do a good job as an employee at work and still do a good job as a parent at home. Stephanie coontz says that given the changing nature of the family and the changes in public policy affecting the family those survey findings should come as no surprise 70 crunches one of America's best-known and most respected social historians. She's the author of two influential books on the family the way we never were American families and then Nostalgia trap and the way we really are coming to terms with America's changing families or work has been featured in several leading Publications, and she's appeared on several National TV programs. She's currently a member of The Faculty at Evergreen State College. Washington Stephanie coontz discuss some of the challenges facing American families in a recent speech at the University Center in Rochester part of the Setters visiting Scholars series here is social historian Stephanie coontz by Floyd mckissick in which he took has his text a Otis Redding song sitting by the Dock of the Bay. It was a really impressive talk because by just going through that you began to really understand more of the African American experience and it's probably a measure though of the the new generation of political discourse in this country that as I looked around for text to work off in my talk tonight the phrase that caught my attention was not from a a song like that but from a campaign slogan of the last election campaign the phrase about building a bridge to the 21st century. It caught my attention not because I was particularly impressed with the rhetoric that accompanied the slogan but because I've always thought that working for gender equality and child well-being and family health is really a bridge building process. It's it's something that occurs because we have been living on a bank that is eroding that many people used to think was the ideal spot or if not the ideal spot at least the safest spot to build their homes and their houses in the Scituate their lives, but now it's D stabilized. It's a roading the place where a new fissures have opened up and many of the old landmarks are transformed or are showing cracks and as people struggle to understand what's happening and if they're going to have to relocate their houses, so to speak and rebuild their there. They're their communities. They are offered advice from two very different Extremes in the society at one extreme and probably loudest extreme are they The family values people who tell us the so-called family values people who tell us that we can in fact, we don't have to move. We don't have to move our homes and rebuild our communities that we can sync the foundations of our lives in the terrain of nostalgic for the past or wishful thinking and that somehow we can restable eyes if we just pull up our our socks keep a stiff upper lip or whatever they cliche of the day. Is that somehow we can just kind of suck this out of our thumbs the stability of Our Lives if we just have the right kind of values. Or who promised us that we can you know the kind of quick fix the other side of the the camp on. This is a quick fix artists the engineers and con artists to say, hey, we can build a bridge to more secure ground without sinking down any expensive support posts for families along the way. So a lot of my time and energy as a historian and a citizen is spent talking about this group and I will be coming back to them. But the other side of the Other Extreme is another kind of group that who see through the fact that we have a problem here that we cannot continue to locate our family life and Define our lives and and build our Maps but get us anywhere on the basis of this changing terrain, but who else will have no alternative plan to get the majority of Americans across the river so they end up berating people for not already being on the other side or for not immediately recognizing that the other side it is is better. What's the matter with you all they tend to ask You just see that it would be better to be on the other side A lot of times. It's always, you know, it seems to me these are people who have their own private airplanes and it's always easier to say the other side is better when you don't have to worry about it. You can just fly there by yourself other times they were these are people who just simply seemed to me out of touch with the understandable and very legitimate anxieties of American working people. Most of us find it difficult to pull up our roots and rethink where we going to situate our houses how we're going to relate to other people's how we're going to read drawn Maps. It's not an easy thing to do and there were good reasons that many Americans feel anxious about America's changing family forms and values only a fool would deny that that many families are in trouble that many parents married or unmarried seem to be having trouble meeting their obligations to their kids or sometimes even recognizing what those obligations are the unwed motherhood and divorce and stepfamilies made. Ben natural and sometimes even healthy results to toxic marriage is for some families. But in many other cases they are very very destabilizing extremely traumatic and it's wrong for people who have gotten out of marriages that were bad to deny. The fact that for other women marriage is a real protection. It's wrong for feminists. For example to deny the fact that there's been a very fundamental change in the society and that although right up to the 1960's in America. There were two standards of living in many families one very high one for the male head of household and one much lower one for the women and children that is no longer true that marriage now seems to be much more egalitarian than it used to be in at a good protection for women and children. It's unwed women who are more likely to be battered casual lovers who are more likely to abuse other girlfriends kids and divorce has hurt many women, especially those who played by the old rules and Discovered that their husbands had abandoned those old rules without adopting any new ones. So conservatives know what they're doing when they blame family change on an elite who can afford such luxuries of self-discovery and cushion the downside of social transformation. But of course the problem with their analysis is they conveniently ignore the fact that the main reason marriage does offer more protection for women in America today is precisely the other side of the coin of the reason that there are more divorces that it is more possible for women to leave an unsatisfactory marriage and to take the pressure on for egalitarian relations and that for every woman who is left behind by a divorce. There are two who initiated because I'd rather face some economic hardship rather than put up with the relationship anymore. But it's absolutely true that there have been losses as well as gains that if the pessimistic idea that bought any new change is is wrong and we should just stick to the old train is unrealistic. It's equally unrealistic to say that there are no really hard adjustments that Americans are going through and the losses them and they disruptions of our family life have been greatly magnified and accelerated by the economic and political climate in which these changes have played out over the past 25 years so that even transformations in gender roles. For example, that would have been unambiguously liberating in a different economic and political context have begun to be experienced by many as losses. The work of women for example was a tremendously important for the economic independence and equality within marriage of women. We know that most women get a tremendous amount out of being able to go to work. And would not like you would very much like very few would like to give up their options their work entirely but for many mothers in particular there is a real and understandable ambivalence and it's not answered by the notion that OG if you don't like what's on TV if you don't like what's happening to your kids just turn the TV off don't worry about the popular culture, you know parents who cannot afford a nanny or cannot afford to be home are understandably worried about what their parents are doing and what their parents want their children are doing and what their children are watching while they're away. The parent time crunch is a real bad, nearly half of workers surveyed last December said that despite the impact of the new recovery. They are working longer hours than they were five years ago. 63% of them said it goes with the job expectations or because of an expanded workload and only 37% because they choose to work longer hours. Another real issue is the question is of what feminism is doing for Working Families you no more The news stories on feminism focus on the glass ceiling and that's certainly does exist in needs to be fought while women now comprise nearly half of all entry-level and mid-level managers up from just 17% in 1972 as of 1995 just 2.4% of CEO positions in Fortune 500 companies were filled by women. So there really is a glass ceiling on the other hand for many women what their main concern is is not bumping into the glass ceiling but getting off the reception-room of the ground floor and not leaving behind especially for women of color their brothers and husbands and sons who may be stuck in the dirty basement Boiler Room. So there is a suspicion of power feminism out there that has also been utilized by conservatives and that is not answered by blythswood of assurances that all of this change is for the better. People are worrying and I think they have good right to worry about the massive value shift in our society. But the opposite side of that does not value parenting where employers and corporations and non-parents have been engaged in a massive cost shipping effort to make parents there more and more of the burdens of what should be both as social as well as an individual priority. Meanwhile personal commitments have become terribly fragile. Social solidarity Czar strain. It's not reactionary to want more civility in our society as long as you don't confuse it as some conservatives tend to do with servility. So I want to argue that is really important to understand the kind of concerned but legitimate concerns people have about the family changes that are going on but that it is wrong to give in to those concerns in a simplistic way to suggest this this simplistic notion that has been put forward by the so-called family values Crusade of the last few years that it's a breakdown of the family that's behind all of the major social ills of American society or the we could turn this country around and solve our social problems conversely. If we could just get back to a Time some golden age when kids could count on having two parents in the home and the parents didn't abuse them or take advantage of them and mothers could spend all of his quality time with kids because father's earned enough to take care of them and strong families Protected Their women and their children and their elders and never ask for help from outside the Family Circle the fact is that as soon as you look at American You realize that there has never been such a golden age for families where families have always been able to protect their members from economic reverses from social instability from racial inequities or from personal violence or distress. As I said earlier right up until the 1960s women and children bore the brunt of properties within 2 parent families just as surely as they do today in one-parent families because of these two standards of living we have budget studies and malnutrition studies that show over and over again that families that were labeled officially above the poverty line had two standards of living one above the poverty line including beer and Recreation for the men one below it where women and children did without needed medical a treatment proteins and and nutrition in order to feed the male Breadwinner. And of course, even the most totally fair-minded and generous fathers of the past were very seldom able in American history. Support their families on their own it wasn't until the 1920s but a bare majority of children came to grow up in a family where the mail was the sole wage earner the female with a full-time Homemaker instead of working beside her husband on home on the farmer and a business and the kids were in school instead of themselves having to go to work that family for and then took a step back in the 1930s with the depression, you know, we talked a lot about you know kids on the streets today. They were kids riding the rails end the Depression and then World War II and we were setting them sending them out to fight in in Europe and Asia and then in the 1950s, you got a very short Triumph of this particular Family Forum. We'll talk about what that family form was based upon in just a minute, but I want to just kind of go through a few of these other myths that stand in the way of our actually constructively dealing with the problems. We face is weary range families today another such methods the notion that families used to be To take care of their elderly. You know, this is one of my favorite method someone who like many people in the society is grappling with something that my mother and grandmother never had to deal with and that is a mother with Alzheimer's who has lived for many many years with that and I expect to live many many more the fact is that elderly it was never traditional function to take care of the elderly because there were never many elderly in most societies. We have a medical breakthrough up until recently up up in the 1920s only 4% of America's population was 65 or older and even though they were far less numerous far less likely to survive after a catastrophic stroke or illness or the kind of blood clots that my mother has that we were able to save her life from and even know they had more kids to share the burden of their care Elders with the poorest and most abused segment of the population until the Advent of Social Security one of those government. Some people tell us explodes families and tears down families, but which in fact has made it possible for families to actually be more loving and supportive of their elderly than ever before in the past that one out of every four households in America today triple. The number of just 10 years ago is giving substantial time and energy to an aging relative. It's also not true that families used to be totally harmonious and fair until modern individualism undermine their solidarity. In fact much of their solidarity used to be based on coercion and even violence not until 1897 to the American Supreme Court rule that it was not perfectly legal for a man to physically chastise his wife with a stick if need be It was where it and despite evidence chilling evidence of child abuse in the past. This is not something that just got discovered in recent years. We are country that founded Society for the prevention of cruelty to animals before we extended those same rights to children. Another myth of the past that has to be put aside is the notion that families used to be able to rely just on their own internal resources. You don't pulling themselves up by their own bootstraps refusing to ask for help from Beyond the family went when I run into this this this myth usually people give me two examples of self-reliant families of the past one is the Pioneer Family of Little House on the Prairie Fame and the other is the 1950s Suburban family of 5 and I grew up and my grandpa always used to read me his favorite thing with the Little House on the Prairie seeds to say we never asked anyone for him. His favorite chapter in The Little House on the Prairie books was the one where the family scrapes and saves to send Laura to college. But As I Grew Older I discovered something very interesting. Most people don't know this but the Little House on the Prairie books were actually not the original Memoirs of Laura Ingalls Wilder's they were Rewritten Memoirs as part of an idiot logical campaign of her daughter Rose Wilder Lane who was a very rabbit anti new dealer who lived during the 1930s and quit her job in Washington DC because she did not believe in the progressive income tax and didn't want to pay taxes to the government. So she went home and she rewrote an edited her mother's Memoirs to produce the Little House on the Prairie book when historians go back and compare the original with the published version. We find that she's systemically asked out all of the places in those Memoirs where her mother referred to the help that she got from the community or the government. For example, it was very interesting to me to read the original chapter of the one that might Father had like so much and in the original version that points out that Laura could not have gone to school if the County government had not paid for her tuition and her books. And in fact is I became a historian research more about the families of the West it became absolutely clear. This was one of the most heavily subsidized families in the history of of the world. We need the US spent spent 90 million dollars paying for the war with Mexico and millions more against the Native American societies and buying land then turned around and sell it way below the cost to the public treasury to individuals setlist and then stop there. Then of course the the government also financed the railroad companies to Telegraph companies. Most of the new jobs in the rugged West were actually produced by government spending and then of course you had the building of dance which was a federal project and finally in the New Deal the electrification programs and even today in many parts of the planes as you probably know Farmers play only a small fracture. Of the cost of the public treasury of the water that they use irrigating their fields and most of the this isn't necessarily bad. Most of the strength of pioneer families that we correctly admire are possible only because of that massive subsidization of those families, they could not do it alone their strength came because they got this kind of support the same things true of the families of the 1950s, you know, people talk about me the 1950s family and seem to forget that I understand why people feel nostalgic 1950s families. I've done a lot of research about some of the downside of of those families and I'll come back to that in a little bit but I understand why an auto worker I would feel nostalgic for a time when will rage is rosemoor in any year of the decade. You name the entire decade of the 1980s in first half of the nineties combined when they Average 30 year old man could pay for a medium-priced house have higher and 1/2 lower on just 15 to 18% of his income. It was a more stable. But why was in a more stable. Anna Moore and an easier. To form families because of this massive kind of government subsidies the most obvious one of course was the most major affirmative action program in all of American history. And that was the GI Bill sending GIF to college 40% of young men starting families in the late 40s and early 50s were eligible for veterans benefits and those veterans benefits paid up to $500 a year for tuition of that doesn't sound like much to you. I'm sure or to me who's saving for my 17 year olds College tuition, but the fact is that you can count on one hand. The number of elite private colleges that $500 did not pay their tuition for in the in the 1950s and entire generation of young men many of whom at not Never finished high school had to go back and get their geds. Most of them had not expected to go to college got this tremendous jump start in the college and I have to say in passing that incidentally the University's flipped out about this. A lot of them said, oh my goodness. This is not the class of person we're used to teaching they will not be able to adjust to our a rigorous standards and government said too bad, you know, we're going to let them in so the University's had to change the way they taught they had to have special courses. When we debate affirmative action today. It's worth bearing in mind that we do have a model of a very successful affirmative action program in our past bumped a whole generation of young men into the middle class, but that wasn't the only support the families got in the 50s VA financing government came in an organ reorganize the financing mechanisms by which homes were bought ping directly for 20% of all the new houses and for a majority indirectly of the rest of the houses that were built government also paid 90% of the cost of building the road. That opened up homes in Suburbia to these new families that were bumped into the middle class or that had union jobs in unionization rates with three times higher in the 1950s. And of course, those were also created secure. Well paying Blue Collar jobs for people who did not go on to college corporations paid three times as large a share of federal taxes and government investment in jobs and infrastructure was three times greater in the 1950s the politician to tell us, you know, we should go back to the family values of the 1950s in the economy of the 1990s when they are pushing political reforms that are more relevant to the 1850s are being a little naive or perhaps even a little hypocritical. My grandma always used to insist that I think the best of people but I'm beginning to fray around the edges on this particular one. Another miss that I would like to just very briefly mention is the notion that the family used to be the emotional and moral Center of people's lives particularly the nuclear family. Actually. This is not true at all right up through the 1940s the ties of neighborhood ethnicity religious groups class organizations political organizations, the neighborhood social clubs are as important part of people's identity as they're as their nuclear family. And and of course the extended family ties were important to the 19th century the friendships romantic friendships existed between women and men that we would look askance at and are supposedly more broad-minded age, but you were not expected to just put all of your emotional eggs in the one basket of the nuclear family when we read Diaries book sample of women, it's just fascinating because they'll go on and on and on about their friend Fanny whom they love so much and they carve their Initials in the tree in the furnace blast of my passion will blow us away when we meet again. These are direct quotes from letters and then they say accepted the marriage proposal of mr. Our last night. I fell asleep during one of these pans to put the fanny and you go flipping back to the direct Mr. R's there. He never appears again until two years later when they came to visit for a month and we made mr. Argo sleep in the Parlor and we just spent the night talking and pinching each other and kissing and why do we have these you not because I don't really a story and suddenly discovered in a National Enquirer kind of Scandal because it was so respectable that the sons and husbands of these women donated their Diaries in their letters to the to the Historical Society. So and and this is absolutely true right up to in the 19 thirties and forties. In fact, one of the new things in the 50s is a major campaign to get people to break with their peer group. Friendships and their extended kin and to commit totally to the nuclear family. I'll come back to that too. But I want to say in passing. It's also not at all traditional to see the nuclear family as the main place for exercising morality and measuring people's morality. The phrase Family Values is not at all traditional was first used in 1976 during an election campaign the 1776 traditional quite different to call somebody a family man in the early Republican with a small our era was not a compliment. It suggested that they paid more attention to their privates selfish desires and needs and concerns then to the Civic Community the words honor and virtue were originally political words referring to a person's willingness to take on Civic obligations beyond the family and the word character in the early Evangelical tradition referred to a person's willingness to stand up for social against social sins this one. Not just solitary sins as one Evangelical put it even against your family if necessary. In fact early Evangelical think or specifically rejected the idea of talking about the Christian family because it was too exclusionary and took gusev. You had to talk about a Christian household or a Christian Community. So it was not as I said until the 1950s that a majority of Americans began to retreat into the private nuclear family ideal that we now watch, you know, nostalgically at Nick at night and think that maybe since it's in black and white it might be a newsreel we what happened. There was a very interesting thing at the time everybody knew that these kinds of ideals were not prediction what all but we're a totally new way of thinking about family life and personal satisfaction and people were looking for a new approach that just came out of the Great Depression of the 1930s where divorce rates spell. Yes, but domestic desertion increased rapidly and domestic violence increase when murder rates in 1933 world's highest ever work in the 1980s something that is very seldom explain to people nowadays all of this pain and then World War II You had the boys going off to war you had all the fear. And then you had Hasty marriages that were equally hastily regretted so that by 1946 one out of every three marriages was ending in divorce. You had men coming back from the war and instead of a happy homecoming reunions that we now imagine Bill Tuttle who study that found that three out of every for gi's coming home reported very painful experiences trying to Elbow that way back into a family that did not necessarily think Father Knows Best. So then on top of that you got the fears of McCarthyism and the atomic bomb, which hung over people's heads. I don't know if any of you can remember this but I can remember as a child in the 50s being told to go under my desk and cover. My ears haven't even as a child. I had some idea that this probably wasn't going to be very effective. There was a tremendous power of these kinds of things and in that people were looking around they were looking for Something new in their personal and social lies and they found it in a kind of combination of stick and carrot approach to the nuclear family stick of course was McCarthyism the idea that political associations are suspect and the new psychiatrist who said that in fact, it's very unhealthy of you to spend time with peer groups and extended families mistranslated itself into things like a Martin Strikers a psychiatrist looks at the American Family who asked women ominous Lake are you a modern mother or an old fashioned Mom in an old fashioned? Mom was a very bad thing to be and one of the major symptoms of being an old-fashioned mom was someone who thought that they should take their aging parents into their home when their parents got sick. No a new modern mother would put her parents in a nursing home and move out to the suburbs as Lucy and Desi did and they and their sitcom from the city and separate themselves from these old-fashioned Cannon. Tangled you would associate with a nuclear family that was the message of the tragedies of the era the tragedies of if you look at the movies of the heir of the messages don't you know don't pay attention to your peer group Deere extended ties go for the nuclear family and the the the triumphs Marty that the most popular play and film was about a man who almost let us can love be ruined by his parents and and his family duties and his pure associations. But finally at that long last decided to leave with his wife and then of course the sitcoms were the kind of parrot for its combined with consumerism. They were all of these new family products to buy Christian. Remember the Nixon Khrushchev debates and Nixon says to Chris Jeff what makes America greater than Russia is the we have a ranch homes and appliances that are women can buy and use and thus it comes of course stood by and advertise those and at the same time gave people a nose. How this new family form might work. In fact, I tend to think of the sitcoms has as kind of the equivalent of beer ads of the 1990s. They were not aimed at people who were already living that way. They were aimed at people who are unhappy with the last 20 years and we're looking for a new way to live and they basically said to them, you know, just like the beer ads say Hey, you know by this kind of beer aimed at 18 to 24 year old guys for not really doing very well in college or in their careers that says, okay. If you do this, you're going to get a good snazzy job and you can be able to run 10 miles without being out of breath and maybe the Swedish bikini team will come hang out at your place. And these 1950s Whitcomb said exactly the same thing. If you will do this, if you will move away from these extended Kent eyes and you will learn from the bad lessons of how not to let your wife walk all over you and you too can live in fat and if you will wash your car in the new car with your kid, like you always see every good father-son moment. Ozzie and Harriet and Leave it to Beaver is with over the car and she moves in front of these Hotpoint appliances you too can have a family where Father Knows Best and Mom is never strung out on alcohol and the kids down to the table every night to get their dose of pyrantel wisdom and it was very attractive proposal. And you know, there were some people who were able temporarily to live like that in the 1950s a primarily though not because the family values are gender roles were so good. But because of the economic and political support systems that that I've talked about because it and the other side of it, of course is that for those who are not who didn't have families to support them or who didn't have support systems poverty was much higher in the 1950s than it is today a child with malnutrition was much higher 50% of African-American married couple of families play it by the royal families work. We're poor and violent you want to talk team violence in this country that was daily teen violence. All three incidents a day in Philadelphia in the City of Brotherly Love directed at African-Americans by teens, but didn't get written up because those were considered legitimate targets and there was a conspiracy of of Silence about it. And of course, even if you were in one of the families that was getting the support, but you happen to have alcoholism abuse or incest or battery. It was nothing you could go you do no place you could go because Society was in total denial about it. We actually have police records of instructions to police to respond to a battering call. The first thing you do is you ask the woman what she's done to provoke and the standard therapeutic line on incest in the 50s was it this didn't happen. It's an unconscious edible fantasy. So the 1950s despite the more favorable economic and political climate. It was a new idea and it was a new idea that was deeply flawed and if it's the extent to which it it lasted a tall was simply because of these tremendously generous, Economic and political support systems for families not because there was anything magical about this family forms. And if anyone really still hasn't Harbors any doubt about that, I want to ask you about one little inconvenient fact why then was it the children raised in these 1950s families engaged in the most decisive break with their parents generals and family forms, you know, if everything was so perfect. How come they turn their backs on it? Well the reasons of course very complicated. I think they're two they're too complex to go into in any depth, but I think some would probably agree we're good reasons that there was a rejection of the racism and the sexism and the hypocrisy some I think we probably all agree with bad reason that there was an acceleration of consumerism and materialism and individualism. That was pioneered though not by the 1960s student movements, but by the 1950s sitcoms themselves, which for example said in the script for Ozzy and he It would have studied over the years. I sent you must never not show the children drinking milk because we want to sell this in syndication to shows it will be sponsored by soft drink companies. Some reasons we probably disagree about but the main thing to remember is that the context in which people have made their family decisions and struggled with their family priorities in the last 25 years is one in which long-term and largely irreversible changes in the nature of marriage and family formation and demographic relations have interacted with an economic climate in which the post-war wage bargain of the 1950s has steadily eroded until in the 1980s that it reached a state of crisis. I want to I want to talk first about the things that are simply largely a reversible. You can like them. You can not like them. That's not the point, you know, if wishes were horses then Beggars would ride with one of my dad's favorite saying yes, if nobody would get divorced maybe things would be better maybe not but one set of issues comes from things that we're simply not going to change women are in the workforce to stay mothers are forced to say this is a phenomenon that's happening in every country of the world regardless of whether they have a feminist movement or not. It's been steadily building since the 19th or early 1900s. Every generation of women has participated more in the labor force and none has gone bad. Now today three-quarters of all married mothers work outside the home in an even larger percentage of course of divorced or unwed mothers have to do that in 1995 for the first time on majority of women went back to work before their kids turn one and this is not going to be reversed especially with new welfare laws pushing Evermore mothers of young children into the You can buy it that we can either go around and Limitless or we can find some way to build on the potential gains of it such as the economic and emotional resources that women bring and the greater amount of child care that men do when their wives work and try to minimize the loss of such as the parental time crunch. That's her choice. We all sit around and bring our hands or we tried to do something then struck similarly the same of divorce, you know women's economic independence combined with drip dry shirts and the decline and societies course of power over individual means that we are no longer going to be able to force people to stay together all their lives. You don't divorce has been rising in the study lines the 1890s if you grasp it from 1900 till today the place we're at today is exactly where you would extrapolate it to be from the trans from the of the first 50 years, you know before the women's movement before the Me decade before the 60s Rebellion. It has been a long time. I think we may be able to save more potentially healthy marriages than we do. But I think it will have to do that by reorganizing marriage to take a count of the modern reality that women work. But I think the other side of the fact is that we are never going to push everybody back into the lifetime marriage nor like it or not divorce is here to stay we can never again assume that all dependents young or old will be taken care of within first marriage nuclear family since that sometime in the next 15 years more kids will be being raised in stepfamilies than any other family form and we have to put our heads out of the sand about that at the same time. The age of marriage is at an all-time high for women and it's tied its previous historic high of 1890 from men. That means people live outside the institution of marriage before they even get married longer at the other end of life. If you reach 60 today, you can expect to live another 25 years part of that is probably going to be outside of marriage and in between you have more choices. The fact remains that marriage we can no longer count on marriage to the extent we ever could to be the sole institution or even the main Institution for taking care of dependencies and providing people with their primary source of Social and emotional support. Once you accept those demographic facts, it totally changes the debate because then the question is not that we've changed too much but that we haven't changed enough. We haven't adjusted our work policies and our school schedules and our emotional expectations of family life and our gender roles in marriage to the fact that working women are here to stay we haven't adjusted our sense of obligation to kids to the fact that marriage is may break up but that doesn't mean that your obligations to the kids and it's not a packaged one of the irony of the family values debate. Is it true that people with traditional gender roles are a little less likely to divorce but it's no guarantee against divorce. The other side of it is that men with traditional gender roles are much more likely to see divorce as a conflict that must be settled by the winning or disengaging and women with traditional gender roles are far more likely to see a man is only as support check and not understand the necessity of continuing to involve him after the divorce in in his kids lives so that again we get into this problem of not having changed enough. So for the most part, we need to invent a New Traditions, we need to adjust our work and school schedules and emotional expectations of family life to the reality that family diversity is here to stay Healthcare System to the needs of low-income children and the Aging of the population, which I am 30 years ago average college student could expect to spend nine years caring for an aging parent today that you can expect to spend eighteen more than you may spend raising your own child. This has got to be accounted for we've got to adjust our sex education to the fact that three. What is it? Today's 18 to 24 year old have never been married and I'm sorry to disillusion anyone but no Society in history has ever kept that age group abstinent know if you want your kids to do if you want kids to delay sex until they're old enough to handle that responsibility and I am the parent of a teenager. I want this very much you can have to recognize that the more complicated issue than chanting at the manager. Just wait until you're married. So there is we do have to make these changes the good start at side of the story is that the research is overwhelming that you can make those changes that almost any kind of family can work. Although it has to work in different ways than other families that every family's has vulnerabilities that it has to avoid including two-parent families and every family has strength that it can be helped to build upon the bad news is that these changes are taking place in an economic and political climate that has really deformed our family choices in our possibilities over the past two decades. Now, you've heard a lot. I'm sure about the economic recovery of the past 5 years and it's been very impressive but it's very interesting that it has yet to reverse the economic polarization that has plagued America for the past 20 years and the declines in the ability of young people to get a living wage in to support a family, you know between 1960 On a 1994 the number of young men who earn less than the poverty figure for family for roast. Am only one in ten to almost one-in-three. Even though real wages the real incomes Rose about 1% in 1996 and 1% in 1997. The number of low-wage jobs still proliferating to-the-point instead indeed the 63% of poor kids today up from less than 50% even five years ago. Now live in a family with at least one working parent and work does not even full even work does not draw them out of poverty. We've got to have a temporary business cycle here. We have a major rearrangement of jobs to the point that young people no longer have secure job ladders to the Future that particularly those of the blue-collar roots to employment have dried up there very few opportunities for people who do not go on in college. And at the same time we're having this the destruction of inner cities it to a point that that is probably unprecedented since the age of the Roman Empire. Of course, they used to always be poverty and cities but it used to be a harsh way of disciplining people to The rhythms of the labor market now. It seems to be a totally different role of channeling people out of the labor market or access to the labor market forever. And that's the role. We haven't seen since the the days of the last days of the Roman Empire. In the meantime, we have this extraordinary expansion of inequality conservatives often say to me look we have problems of alienation in this society and they can't just be explained by poverty. Well, a lot of them can be explained by poverty a Robert Rector of the Heritage Foundation says that it's a liberal myth that poverty hurts kids your bank account doesn't determine the kind of house. You can provide well, I'm sorry, but it very literally determines what kind of hoping you can provide for example with you can provide a home who's pipe and paint have been changed since 1979 lead poisoning. Yes is very prevalent in this country and impoverished inner-city communities 6% of of children have elevated levels of lead in their blood 20% of 4 children + 50% of impoverished African American and in love elevated levels of lead in your blood increase the chance that you would makes a child six times more likely to drop out of school and 7 times more likely to engage in violence regardless of family structure, then then the more reasonable levels above let so it has a very big effect but I have to agree that poverty is not the only thing we're facing here and where I swear I think we have not devoted enough attention is to the ordinary effect of the unprecedented increases while I'm president least since the 1920s and you know, we all know how that ended in income inequality in America, you know, I I I like to debate Multicultural issues with people because I had a very classical education. I had to read Aristotle and Greek and one of the few. I remember from Reading Aristotle was that he said that a society that has a more than five to one wealth differential between its citizens cannot survive Republic cannot survive then well by the nineteenth-century JPMorgan is hardly some Raven radical st. 20 to 1 far as we can go. No. During the 1960's. We push the envelope a little bit the average CEO made 41 times as much as the average worker that was already 10 times higher than the Gap in Germany or Japan but by 1995 the average CEO and I'm not I'm talkin average CEO not just Fortune 500 companies where it gets even higher made 145 times as much as the average worker according to a report issued by the Milton S Eisenhower Foundation the richest 1% of Americans owns more wealth than the entire bottom 90% put together making the US number one nation in the industrial World in income inequality. Meanwhile 40% of minority children attend Urban schools were more than half their fellow students are poor and where the physical plant of the schools is so run down. It looks like a permanent Monument to Hurricane Andrew. And these changes are a result. They result in tremendous amount of of social alienation tremendous amount. I think we have really underestimated the extent to which this kind of inequality produces poisons. I said earlier today. I was talking about the conditions of teenagers in America and I said that I have increasingly begun to see teenagers kind of the canaries in the mine the ones who are most sensitive to the toxins of a society and I think that you're really seeing this when you look at at 4 example Rising levels of teen violence than alienation today, they are reflecting back to us. What's happening in adults aside is is not because our kids have gone bad or even their parents have gone back actually parents spend as much time as I ever did with teenagers as far as we can tell from time Diaries, but all other adults non-related adults or extended family spend far last time there was no investment in our youth in the society and they pick up on that. It's really need to take account of that. There's a there's been a study of mortality in all the states of the country and the higher degree of inequality tolerated in any particular State the higher the mortality rate not just for poor people, but for everyone I think this is evidently because research the researchers think because it seems to undercut your ability to invest in Social Capital and in the sorts of things that are prevented kinds of medicine and I think you see this all over the place with teenagers. I've just been doing interviews with teens that I'm not ready to publish yet, but I'm finding a much higher correlation of anti-social acts not with family form, but with how fair a teenager perceives their place in the community to be and you find high I'm finding High antisocial Behavior even among kids who think it's unfair in their favor. There's something about the unfairness that that touches that kind of sensitivity to poison a month. Teenagers teenagers pic ideas to an extreme. That's why we have them fight warts, right? It's not because they're better than it better Warriors than people in their 20s or 30s are more likely to fight and die for the ideals adult Society believed them. And I think that we are increasingly seeing a situation where teenagers are fighting and dying for the ideals that our society fails to believe in and this is a tremendous problem for families and something that I think that cannot be answered at just the family level. Some of us handle. This stress is better than others some worse, but no one is immune from their effect and telling us we can solve all these issues within our families just buy cocooning better or preaching to our kids a little better at often only exacerbates. The strains does many of the problems come from outside the family from the changes. I just reviewed in our economic system the breakdown of the older limits on the free market the collapse of social trust in solidarity. I think these changes unlike the demographic ones can probably be reversed. Can only be reversed by social action not by withdrawing into our private families. And that is the only way forward to us. If we take that way for it, then it seems to me that the other problems posed by the increase in personal freedom in the society are much more manageable. It's true that that there are some new problems divorce is hard stepfamilies are volatile new cultural freedoms mean that some parents find new ways to to neglect their kids. But when you separate the economic and the lag problems from the family problems Things become more manageable, we know how to head off divorce in many cases not by passing laws against it or having Covenant marriage, but by teaching men and women how to communicate better in the early days and I have a research your friend who was just at this wonderful study says the men in his study hate to hear this but the main predictor of whether a marriage the flask is if the man changes in response to be things that a woman ask for in the first year or so of marriage, We know how to head off divorce. We know how to make couples minimize the conflict of divorce and minimize the damage the kids we end up most of it has to do with avoiding the charge of the fault in the acrimony that comes along in that kind of climates. We know that the remaining parental instead of being indulgent uncle are at is the best predictor that your kids will turn out. Well, we know how to make stepfamilies work. And actually if you can get stepfamilies over the first five volatile years, they turned out to be more stable than first marriage families, but the key is they have to reject rigid gender roles and expectations for the new stepfather will lights. I take over the discipline or a new stepmom will take over it. The nurturing and I have to also be more flexible about the fact that there are four parents we know how to do the make single parents were in the key is to recognize that actually single parent families. If you could control for maternal depression and income inequality actually more intimate with their kids in the early years, but that Trap the Trap that the mother or the father doesn't set up from generational boundaries and rules to have in place when the kid does the job description of adolescence. She says feeling least have a haven't won his doing their job description very well right now saying no, you know, I'm not reasoning things out but we know that if you train people about this these things and teach them how to have rules and generational boundaries in place. They do just fine. The question then is are we going to stop ringing our hands and pointing at scapegoats and are we going to start dealing with these challenges both economic and social and that brings me to the analogy I started with I want to end with my image of the bridge because when I heard all this talk about the rhetoric, I called my brother-in-law who is an engineer and I said, please explain to me how bridges are built. So he told me some things that I would like to leave you with to think about One thing you said is no Bridge every support system of a bridge has to be founded in Bedrock not that is in the mushy terrain of wishful thinking or Nostalgia for the past. You can't extend the span of a bridge too far without building another support post. Cuz if you do the bridge will begin to Sag you can't just say, I'm going to do for early childhood education and that should immune immunize your life will never help you again is that every bridge have to have Expansion Joints that can freely expand and contract because of Any section of the bridge is too rigid to interact with a next then that bridge is not going to make it through a major storm or seismic trimmer. The last thing you told me in the image. I'd like to leave you with tonight, which I just thought was a very compelling image. He started talking about how a suspension bridge works. So, you know, it looks like it's held up by just two cables and effects. Each of those cables is composed of thousands of tiny wires. And each of those tiny wires have to be calibrated to the Bears exactly the same share of bloat. Is that the engineering principle that it takes to build a bridge compare it to what we're being offer the blueprints in a society where the rich were increasingly withdrawn behind there gated communities and telling people that owe you quilt and we'll pass out little vouchers for you to privately owned by what should be the public right to an education where we have we have this gap between rich and poor that is growing every day where we have 93% of all reductions in entitlement programs over the past number years were born by the poor and we have a tax planet that starts out looking like it's going to benefit the middle class, but then balloons so that by the last the last 10 years has it by the end of the 10 years. It is benefiting primarily only the rich you compare that. The building principles that make a bridge stand up with the way we are currently organizing our society and discussing these kind of issues and it is this is not a recipe that's going to get family's over to the 21st century. It's a recipe for social collapse and I would like to just end today by suggesting to you that we have to stop the buck passing and the scapegoating in the finger-pointing and the guilt and we really have to start weaving together on both a personal and a social level to build the suspension cables that are communities and our families needs because no family can exist outside that entire span with those support systems. Thank you very much. Social historian Stephanie coontz the author of the way, we never were and the way we really are she spoke recently at the University Center in Rochester is part of the center's visiting scholar series. Well that does it for our mid-day program today. I can hear like to thank you for joining us today and hope you'll be able to tune in tomorrow over the noon hour tomorrow or heading off to the National Press Club for a speech by Philip Knight the CEO of Nike that's coming up tomorrow at midday again. Thanks for tuning in today. I'm Lord of Benson on the next all things considered a poem celebrating girl Minnesota and the roadside rest stop where it will be displayed. It's all things considered weekdays at 3 on Minnesota Public Radio Kano W FM 91.1 in the Twin Cities. You're listening to Minnesota Public Radio.