Family Ways

Nick Gillespie from the October 1997 issue

(Page 2 of 3)

While it is true that children of divorce often run higher risks for problems, that doesn't mean that problems are in any way a foregone conclusion. Hence, one national study found that 25 percent of marriages of women who had lived with only one parent at age 14 had been disrupted. The figure for those living with both parents at age 14 was 14 percent. Similarly, white children living with single parents may have a high-school dropout rate as high as 22 percent, compared to 11 percent for those from two-parent households. The single-parent figures are sharply higher, but they also suggest a wide range of response to parental breakup. While there is no question that divorce causes pain, suffering, and difficult adjustments for children (and parents), it's far from clear that it constitutes a "blight."

Whitehead's analysis of the roots of contemporary divorce rates is similarly overstated. "The deeper logic of expressive divorce was the logic of capitalism," she writes. "Just as...the market called upon the owner of capital to maximize resources, so the expressive ideology of divorce urged the proprietor of psychological capital to do the same." This line of thought degenerates at various points into a clichéd and unsupported broad-side against contemporary society: "The entire ethos of the American workplace has shifted toward a short-term, performance-based, limited-benefits, ten-career-changes-in-a-lifetime model," she writes. "Increasingly...the workplace rewards individuals who are mobile, unattached, unrestricted by family commitments."

Beyond wildly exaggerating the "ethos" of the contemporary workplace--and ignoring the fact that the workplace has always rewarded people who put their jobs first--such an interpretation fails to engage a much more complicated relationship between marriage and large social and economic shifts over the past century. As Ludwig von Mises wrote 75 years ago, the modern marriage that "takes place at the desire of the husband and wife" and in which "the rights of the husband and wife are essentially the same" is the result of granting both men and women the right to contract, itself based on notions of self-ownership embedded in "the logic of capitalism." Marriage as a mutual agreement heightens the possibility of divorce.

So does the shift toward an industrial (and service) economy in which women's work opportunities outside the home tend to increase dramatically. Most economists and sociologists agree that increased female participation in the paid work force is one of the--if not the--major factor in the rise in divorce rates. In 1940, about one in seven married women were working or looking for work. Fifty years later, the figure was closer to 70 percent. Perhaps the most dramatic increase occurred among women with children under 6: While less than 10 percent of such women worked in 1940, about 60 percent were on the job in 1990. As Richard Posner suggests in Sex and Reason (1992), a wife's "improved job opportunities" and "increased economic independence" help to make divorce a possibility, even as they mitigate the impact of divorce, abandonment, or widowhood.

Our society's relative wealth and its emphasis on mutually fulfilling marriages make it likely that divorce will remain a prevalent phenomenon. The "logic of capitalism" turns out to be a tough little conundrum: It gives us the opportunity to get what we want and the opportunity to walk away from it, too.

That puzzle may explain why Whitehead's policy proposals are so modest. Refreshingly, rather than some large-scale governmental intervention, she calls for changing "the way we think about...
divorce, especially divorces involving children." Whitehead espouses "divorce prevention" plans enacted by therapists, lawyers, scholars, and clergy that would highlight the costs--especially to children--of divorce. Her book, of course, can be seen as one voice in this conversation, which it seems to me is already well under way. Indeed, her claim that "we are still reluctant to speak about the moral obligations involved in divorces with children" is belied by widespread discussion of "deadbeat dads" and irresponsible parenting. Such cultural debate is particularly meaningful when it comes to marriage, where folkways generally precede laws. For instance, contrary to the blame heaped on no-fault divorce laws, the surge in divorce began before no-fault statutes were on the books. Whatever The Divorce Culture's failings, it doesn't compound them by unveiling a federally mandated 12-step plan to succor a particular version of the family.

The same cannot be said for Dana Mack's The Assault on Parenthood. If Whitehead proposes solutions largely rooted in civil society, Mack wants to bring in the Marines to enforce her version of marital law. Mack, who is affiliated with the Institute for American Values, is no fan of "rampant divorce," but she issues a broader indictment than Whitehead. Citing juvenile crime rates, declining SAT scores, and feelings of parental impotence, Mack stresses "the sudden and rapid decay of those stable social values that once fostered a protective culture of childhood." That most indicators of children's well-being suggest things are getting better for most kids does not trouble her analysis. (See "Child-Proofing the World," June.)

For Mack, the family is being undermined simultaneously by marketplace values and government intervention. Indeed, government at all levels is the main villain in Mack's analysis, a Kafkaesque overlord who has made it virtually impossible to raise kids who don't bring guns to schools, engage in early sex, or talk back to their elders. For Mack, the failure of government is twofold: When it is not actively infringing on "parental rights" by forcing condoms on students or prosecuting parents who dare to spank their wards, the government is turning a blind eye to the "gratuitous vulgarity" of pop culture or allowing "childless working people" to pay less than what she says is their fair share of taxes.

On one level, Mack's book is a compilation of scare stories illustrating how government policies are bad to begin with or have horrific unintended consequences. Few of these stories are original with Mack: She repeats, for instance, part of Hannah Lapp's February 1994 REASON story, "Child Abuse," which details how child-protective services can run amok. That Mack adds little to these tales does not mitigate their seriousness or outrageousness, but on those counts, her book offers little new to readers.

The Assault on Parenthood is more interesting--though less convincing--when Mack shifts to public policy proposals. After discussing at length just how incompetent--if not downright evil--government is when it comes to domestic matters, she hauls out a savior to rescue the dying family: the government. In her final chapter, she lays out "exactly what government can and should do for families." As with most such interventions, Mack's plans are designed to foster not competition but a particular outcome--in this case, a two-parent household in which the wife stays home with the kids (children in particular do not seem to be optional).

First on Mack's wish list is tax relief. "Family-friendly" tax reform would include higher per-child deductions and "significant reductions" in payroll taxes for parents. Mack's brave new IRS would countenance little opposition from "free-riders" such as retirees and childless workers. "If childless working people resent a larger tax burden, they should consider who will be working to pay their Social Security...and medical bills in the coming decades," she writes. Curious logic in a book that touts personal responsibility as a virtue: Why exactly should someone who chooses not to have children be forced to pay for someone else's family? (And, while we're at it, why should the government, rather than families, take care of people in their old age?) Mack ignores the school taxes childless couples and retirees pay and has no comment on the marriage penalty on two-income households.

"Work relief" also looms large in Mack's proposals, and represents another way of pushing the cost of children onto others. She favors affirmative action for parents and a law that would give mothers three months' paid leave and hold their jobs for up to a year. "Why should parents be required to do it all at once--that is, work and rear children at the same time--while most senior citizens have neither work nor child-rearing responsibilities?" she asks rhetorically at one point. Why indeed? For starters, parents are not required to do anything--especially become parents in the first place. And most senior citizens (many of whom undoubtedly spend time with grandchildren) have already been there and done that.

Her policy prescriptions--such as allowing the government to "penalize" broadcasters if more than half of their output fails to meet her idea of "PG standards of quality and decency"--are predicated upon vague yet doctrinaire notions of consensus and the common good ("Children are our most important investment in the future"). They culminate in a call for a "Parental Rights Amendment," preferably one that reads, "The right of parents to direct the upbringing and education of their children shall not be infringed." Certainly not by childless couples or retirees who will finally be paying their fair share of taxes. Or, one assumes, by children themselves, whose position under such a regime is left unclear. Mack grants in passing theoretical limits to parental rights, but those limits are of the utmost importance: Would, say, exposure to competing ideas about child rearing be considered an infringement on parental rights? Given Mack's obvious preference for one type of family, it's clear that any such law would be a blunt instrument used to club dissenters into line.

Like The Divorce Culture and The Assault on Parenthood, She Works/He Works, by Rosalind C. Barnett, a psychotherapist affiliated with Radcliffe College, and Caryl Rivers, a journalism professor at Boston University, stumps for a particular vision of "the family." Hence the subtitle: How Two-Income Families Are Happier, Healthier, and Better Off. Better off than whom? Single-income families, especially those with a stay-at-home mother. The authors are convinced that their family model is self-evidently superior to any other, and they marshal an array of data to support their titular claims. (Just as conservatives cannot bring themselves to believe some women enjoy working, liberals seem incapable of believing some women want to stay at home.)

Unlike either Whitehead or Mack, though, Barnett and Rivers have revealed preference on their side: By 1990, the authors note, 40 percent of families had full-time working husbands and wives (up from 32 percent in 1980); about 60 percent of all married couples have two-earner incomes. "Traditional" families with a "breadwinner" father and a stay-at-home mother comprise less than 3 percent of American families.

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