At no other time in our national history has the critical nature of the relationship between family and society been so evident, yet so confusing.
On the one hand, the American public is acutely aware of the role of families in providing individuals with a nurturing and secure environment in an unstable society. Yet, on the other hand, economic, social and cultural stressors have created a profound ambivalence with regard to how we even define family.
Drifting somewhere between our nostalgic notions of the 1950s nuclear family and today`s hard realities of single working parents raising several children in near poverty conditions, we yearn for the ”ideal” while struggling with the ”real.”
The prevailing sociological bias is to decry the decline of American families. Our print and broadcast media supply the negative statistics on a daily basis. But more dangerous and frightening than the alarming family statistics is our tendency to give up, to equate statistics with moral truth, current problems and cultural trends with future inevitabilities. In so doing, we empower and ”value” the very statistics that we bemoan. Yes, the American family is besieged with problems; yes, its forms and structures are changing. But what can we do? What is being done?
If families truly are the building blocks of society, our primary challenge today is to find ways to narrow this gap between our ideals and our realities. At the individual level, we can start simply by putting flesh and blood on data and thus envision the real struggles of real people against societal adversities. And once we are able to picture, say, a single mother with three children working 40 hours a week but still unable to lift her family out of poverty, we can applaud her efforts and ask ourselves what we can do to make her situation better. From donations to a food pantry to writing our elected representatives in support of legislation that strengthens and preserves families, action, no matter how small, has the potential of snowballing into hope.
At the workplace level, we can recognize and encourage the growing trend of the business community to provide support for employees and their families. Flextime, child and elder care, employee assistance programs, prenatal health care, parental leave policies are becoming increasingly prevalent as corporations recognize that their existence and profitability depend on their establishing innovative programs that provide physical, mental and emotional supports for employees and their families.
At the federal government level, liberals and conservatives continue to use the family to inflict damage on each other. In a recent Tribune commentary, Steven Bayme, director of communal affairs at the American Jewish Committee and co-editor of ”Rebuilding the Nest: A New Commitment to the American Family,” states: ”Liberals dismiss conservative advocates as nostalgic for a mythical family of the 1950s and . . . as moral absolutists in mandating a particular form of family for all Americans. Conversely, conservatives dismiss liberals as social permissivists and cultural relativists in celebrating all lifestyles as morally equivalent, irrespective of family structure and content.”
The arguments are endlessly self-serving and, if families weren`t suffering in the meantime, ultimately ludicrous. It`s up to us to force our political representatives to raise the level of the family debate by supporting politicians who recognize the need for a bipartisan family agenda. In thinking about social problems, we often become overwhelmed by their complexities, thus neglecting possible solutions that lie on our front doorstep. Our national social policies attack social problems by categorizing them into programs and services that compete for legislative attention and funding. This piecemeal approach tends to provide services to targeted groups of individuals. For example, one of the goals of the Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act of 1990 is to gradually expand Medicaid to cover all children in poverty, which sounds promising except for the fact that this legislation does not cover adult caregivers of these children.
Much needs to be done and can be done. But before we can resolve our social problems, we must focus on the societal institution that, when dysfunctional, is the breeding ground of these problems. We must accept statistics and facts as objective markers of a work in progess, not as commandments that describe our collective fate. We must ask ourselves what a family-friendly society might look like, then develop policies and programs that will support this vision. We must consider how society can nourish families, not just how families can nourish society.
