Letting Go of the Traditional American Family
In a column filed four days before Donald Trump was elected President of the United States, New York Times columnist Ross Douthat offered a historically familiar argument for what ails us as a nation: the decline of the traditional American family. As a nation we’ve spent a lot of time and money nurturing the myth of this heteronormative, intact, two-parent family structure. Reading his lament, I couldn’t help but wonder if the idea of the “traditional American family” that we’ve been faithfully clinging to has finally run out of oxygen. The notion that the “traditional American family” was helicopter-parented to death by government agencies, cultural watchdogs and right-wing think tanks is ironic. Why is it that we, as a nation, keep pushing this idea of marital commitment as the path toward prosperity but have come up with few effective ways to combat decline? Rather than lament the loss of the “traditional family” as politically and morally apocalyptic as Douthat seems to, perhaps it’s time to look at things anew.
In Mr. Douthat’s post-familial America the need to elect not just a President but also a Great Protector stems from the intense loneliness we feel due to the tapering off of our family trees. Douthat memorializes his own robust family tree, rooted in a genealogical history of strong father figures: his maternal great-grandfather, his grandfather and on his paternal side, more strong men resulting in a “dense network of cousins.” I couldn’t help but notice that something–or someone-was missing” Where amongst all of that hearty, male stock were the women? They were clearly busy, but not significant enough to warrant a mention as he took us on a tour of his “white protestant” dominated family tree? In his America, men loom large and women, well woman simply loom. This is what cognitive linguist George P. Lakoff would refer to as the “Strict Father” model that “…posits a traditional nuclear family with the father having primary responsibility for supporting and protecting the family…(whereas the mother)…uphold(s) the father’s authority”. If families are thinning out, people are getting married later (if at all) and producing less offspring, it makes sense that in a “post familial” America we would need to seek a “great protector” outside the home.
So what exactly is it that Douthat blames for getting us here? What bump along the road did his Rockwellian dream hit? Again Mr. Douthat ushers in some historically familiar suspects: Divorce! Late in life marriage! Abortion! For Douthat, the 1970s was one, big party we didn’t want our “traditional American family” concept attending. In 1970 the median age of the first marriage for women remained under twenty-one. Then the party started. 1971: the first issue of Ms. Magazine hit newsstands. 1972: single women could legally purchase contraceptives (Eisenstadt v. Baird). 1973: Roe v. Wade. 1974: Congress passes the Equal Credit Act, allowing women to secure their own bank loans, credit cards and mortgages. In other words, the 1970s were the Strict Father’s worst nightmare.
Sociologist Melanie Heath wrote that for conservative Americans “family is understood as a timeless institution at the foundation of civilization.” Having such a notion of a family as “fixed in time” and as a “main source of hope in a world of sin” leaves little room for progress and growth, the other side of the American coin. In Douthat’s worldview, a nation that allows its family values to splinter is a nation that is headed toward tribalism, deep personal loneliness and drawn toward authoritarian rulers in order to get their “strict father” fix.
Every modern President up to and including Obama (and no doubt including Mr. Trump as well) has promoted, through policy, the idea of a two-parent family as ideal. But, as Eduardo Porter, economic reporter at the New York Times, points out, “the strongest case against a policy to deliver strong marriages and stable families is that the government has no clue how to do that,” pointing toward the “$600 million spent on the Healthy Marriage Initiative since 2001” during which the marriage rate continued to decline and divorce rates stayed put as one example. The other relevant policy question is around the notion of paid family leave. In a country where two parent, dual income families are common, why, according to the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), do “all (35) OECD countries, except the US, offer nationwide paid maternity leave for at least 12 weeks, and over half grant fathers paid paternity leave when a baby arrives” (OECD Policy Brief March 2016)? Perhaps because, for social conservatives, such policies would establish a balance of economic power in the household and threaten to push fathers further from their central, dominant role in the family. In the case of female-headed households, strong family leave polices make the absence of the breadwinner father less economically and socially devastating by giving them a chance to stay in careers and not fall off to the wayside in their communities. Furthermore, wouldn’t sound economic and family policy promote the idea of the “working family” vs. “the working mother”? A workforce that provides and strongly encourages paternity leave promotes economic and domestic stability by neutralizing the so-called “motherhood penalty” that women of childbearing age face when competing for work and career advancement.
Perhaps it’s time to open things up even further and radically address the issue at its very core: what is a family and what should it be? Traditionally, marriage and family in America has been an “us vs. them” proposition. The traditional American family was defined as much by who was included as who was excluded. As social scientists Alison Gash and Priscilla Yamin point out, family status was granted or denied based on “economic worth, social value ad hoc policy consideration, or personal bias” Being granted this status by the state opened up economic and social doors that were otherwise shut. Single mothers, LGBTQ couples and group home residents are all live or have lived on the fringe of society due to exclusion. To what end? If the state wishes to do, as Linda C. McClain wrote about in The Family, the State, and American Political Development as a Big Tent, what’s in the best interest of the children, then logically a broader legal definition of family would protect more children.
This takes me back to Douthat and his view that if we aren’t bound by kinship, we are destined to be adrift and lonely. The very idea that blood ties make a family real has been in decline in the past few decades, especially in cities where people are more educated, discerning and economically secure. I have friends who are single, married without kids and single with kids, all by choice. They have successful careers, loving relationships and strong bonds with people they’ve met as they’ve made their way through life. Two couples I know, both married but childless, are more than happy to play the role of Aunt and Uncle or Uncle and Uncle to our children by “pinch hitting” in emergencies, babysitting and carpooling. We’ve all settled into a comfortable, familial routine, sharing holidays, books and emotional support. We have their backs and they have ours. In some cases, our children are closer to these “family members” than they are to those who are blood related.
In other first-world countries (where marriage and divorce rates are trending the same) the focus has shifted away from a “marriage policy” and more toward family preservation efforts in whatever form that family may come. In France, Porter points out, where cohabitation of unmarried parents is more socially acceptable, the government “devotes 3 percent of its total economic activity to what the OECD calls family benefits… four times the share spent in the United States”. While the idea of the United States adapting a European Socialist model to deal with this “problem” is appalling to most conservatives, according to Porter, you can’t argue with the results: “36 percent of French children living with a nonworking, single parent are poor…. in the United States…it is 92 percent. So instead of decrying the idea of a post traditional familial America, why don’t we embrace family in all its forms, give the idea a little breathing room and see where it takes us?
