Can Family Decline Be Turned Around?

by Morton Kondracke                                                                                          Vol. VI, No. 4, May 1993

[Morton Kondracke is a senior editor for Roll Call and a nationally syndicated columnist. This column is reprinted from the Washington Times, 3 April 1993.]

A right-left-center consensus now exists that America's children have been victimized by the social and economic trends of the past 30 years. President Clinton can go down in history if he begins turning things around.

Evidence for the consensus is everywhere – in publications of the liberal Children's Defense Fund, conservative Bill Bennett's new Index of Leading Cultural Indicators, the Atlantic Monthly's current cover story by Barbara Defoe Whitehead provocatively titled "Dan Quayle Was Right," and the just-published "Kids Count" data book of the Center for the Study of Social Policy.

Obviously the Clintons have been absorbed in other work – economics, Russia, and health care – but the fashioning of a strategy for families and children ought to be the next major task for the administration. What's obvious from all the studies is that the sexual and personal liberation movements that were launched in the 1960s, while great for adults, have been devastating for children and the social well-being of the country.

As Mr. Bennett summarizes, while the population has increased 41 percent since 1960, violent crime has increased 560 per cent, illegitimate births have increased 400 percent, divorce rates have quadrupled, the percentage of children living in single-parent homes has tripled, teen-age suicide has more than doubled, and Scholastic Aptitude Test scores have fallen nearly 80 points. In her Atlantic article, Mrs. Whitehead begins, "Divorce and out-of-wedlock childbirth are transforming the lives of American children. In the postwar generation, more than 80 percent of children grew up in a family with two biological parents married to each other. By 1980, only 50 percent could expect to spend their entire childhood in an intact family." In 1960, 5 percent of U.S. children were born out of wedlock. In 1990 the figure was 27 percent – 57 percent among blacks, 17 percent among whites. Children in single-parent families are 6 times more likely to be poor than those in intact families, 2 to 3 times more likely to have emotional or behavioral problems, and are more likely to drop out of school and become teen-age parents. Seventy percent of juveniles in jail in the United States come from broken homes, giving family makeup a closer correlation to crime than either race or income.

Mrs. Whitehead observes that popular culture – movies, TV, books, even greeting cards – has represented sex and divorce in terms of self-fulfillment, but children get run through a string of "disruptive events: separation, divorce, life in a single-parent family, life with a parent and live-in lover, the remarriage of one or both parents, life in one stepparent family, the breakup of one or both stepparent families. And soon."

According to a study cited by University of California at Los Angeles Professor James Q. Wilson in the current Commentary, 51 percent of Americans in 1951 agreed that couples in a bad marriage ought not stay together for the sake of their children. In 1985, 86 percent felt this way. Mrs. Whitehead observes that, after divorce, parents often do not become more attentive to their children, but more self-absorbed and anxious to develop a new romantic attachment.

What screams out from this evidence is that, sometime in the 1960s, Americans became supremely self-indulgent-and society has been going to hell ever since.

It gets worse. Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, New York Democrat, the man who first discovered the link between family decomposition and poverty, now notes that there is a tendency in the country to "normalize" what was formerly regarded as "deviant" behavior, treating single parenthood – despite all the evidence of its deleterious consequences – as equally acceptable as the two-parent arrangement.

Even if Dan Quayle was right about his facts, political blame-casting is an arid endeavor. Analysis of Mr. Bennett's data indicates that, in general, social decline got launched and was steepest in many categories between 1960 and 1970, when Democrats were mainly in charge, but it continued during the 1970s and – despite Republican claims to represent better "family values" – slowed but did not reverse itself in the 1980s.

Violent crime, for instance, went up 126 percent in the 1960s, 64 percent in the 1970s, and 23 percent in the 1980s. Births to unwed mothers went up 102 percent in the 1960s, 72 percent in the 1970s, and 52 percent in the 1980s. Child poverty actually fell by 43 percent in the 1960s, but rose 21 percent in the 1970s, and 13 percent in the 1980s. Teen suicides rose 64 percent in the 1960s, 44 percent in the 1970s, and 33 percent in the 1980s.

For the past decade – culminating in the 1992 election – conservatives and liberals have been warring over whether "values" or money is the basic cause of social decline. Mr. Bennett notes that the decline took place while social spending by all levels of government went up by more than 5 times in real dollars, and means-tested welfare spending went up more than 6 times.

The Children's Defense Fund, on the other hand, argues that social spending hardly increased at all during the 1980s and that the dollar value of Aid to Families with Dependent Children lagged far behind inflation, pushing poor children deeper into poverty.

The Clintons are in the perfect position to fashion a fusion policy on children and families, representing as they do a troubled marriage that survived and both the CDF view of social policy (with Hillary Clinton as a former board member) and the "personal responsibility" school (with the president an advocate of welfare reform).

A good place for a Clinton task force to begin would be Chapter 7 of the Progressive Policy Institute's book, Mandate for Change, written by Elaine Kamarck, now domestic policy aide to Vice President Al Gore, and Bill Galston, Mr. Clinton's domestic policy adviser.

They recommend an "all-out campaign against teen-age pregnancy," led by the president and focused through schools and the media, with help from sports stars and other celebrities (including, perhaps, Murphy Brown). They call for a children's tax credit to correct for deterioration of the value of the $600 personal exemption, plus divorce reform and federalizing of the child-support system.

"No fault" divorce would no longer be allowed for spouses with children, who would be required to go through a nine-month period making arrangements for their children. Property would be distributed not on an equal basis between the spouses, but primarily to benefit the children.

Miss Kamarck and Mr. Galston want the Internal Revenue Service to collect child support payments from missing parents, a third of whom now escape payments entirely.

Miss Kamarck and Mr. Galston also recommend restoring TV advertising and programming standards through the Federal Communications Commission, arguing there is a middle ground to be found between "moral laissez-faire and tyrannical censorship."

Tipper Gore, the vice president's wife, once courageously led a charge against sexually explicit and violent records and got pilloried for it. Hillary Rodham Clinton, with friends and power in Hollywood, ought to take up the cause.

[Editorial Comment: The purpose of reprinting this column is not to endorse any particular policy change nor to raise hopes of progress in this area from the current administration. Indeed, my expectation is that family problems will get much worse during the next four years. The intent is to demonstrate to the discerning Christian reader the direct connection between God's plan for the first human institution He established, the family, and success and failure of both individuals and society as a whole.

I take issue with Mr. Kondracke where he writes that, "the sexual and personal liberation movements that were launched in the 1960s, while great for adults..." How the kind of family disasters which Kondracke catalogues rather exhaustively can be considered "great for adults" is beyond reason. Probably the most generous interpretation is that Kondracke got so intense about making his point regarding the need to do something for children that this non sequitur slipped by him.

As should be obvious, family turmoil is devastating to adults as well as to children. Happy, rewarding, meaningful lives are not to be found in seeking self-fulfillment, but in sacrificial service to a spouse who reciprocates in kind and for children who are taught to seek the Lord above all things. There is no better guide for family life than: "Husbands, love your wives," "Wives, honor your husbands," "Children, obey your parents."]