Nostalgia is one of the great enemies of clear thinking about the family. The disruption of families in the nineteenth century thr...ough death, separation, and other convulsions of an industrializing economy was much more catastrophic than we imagine.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The ideal of the self-sufficient American family is a myth, dangerous because most families, especially affluent families, do in f...act make use of a range of services to survive. Families needing one or another kind of help are not morally deficient; most families do need assistance at one time or another.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The family remains the main school in which the young learn about sex roles, for better and for worse. If a wider range of roles i...s to be available to both sexes, changes must begin within the family. The future of the family is thus bound up with the hopes for women's future liberation and for men's emancipation from the prison of male convention.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
One theme links together these new proposals for family policy--the idea that the family is exceedingly durable. Changes in struct...ure and function and individual roles are not to be confused with the collapse of the family. Families remain more important in the lives of children than other institutions. Family ties are stronger and more vital than many of us imagine in the perennial atmosphere of crisis surrounding the subject.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The country is fed up with children and their problems. For the first time in history, the differences in outlook between people r...aising children and those who are not are beginning to assume some political significance. This difference is already a part of the conflicts in local school politics. It may spread to other levels of government. Society has less time for the concerns of those who raise the young or try to teach them.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Whatever else American thinkers do, they psychologize, often brilliantly. The trouble is that psychology only takes us so far. The... new interest in families has its merits, but it will have done us all a disservice if it turns us away from public issues to private matters. A vision of things that has no room for the inner life is bankrupt, but a psychology without social analysis or politics is both powerless and very lonely.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Our conversation begins to look like the last scene in Eugene O'Neill's great family drama, Long Day's Journey Into the [sic] Nigh...t. Sitting together in a dwindling pool of light, the family talks on. Fathers, mothers, brothers, sisters are trying to explain: not understanding, but comprehending; loving one another, but hating and hurting each other; tangling and untangling like badly cast fishing lines, a group of inviolate, wounded selves. O'Neill's characters, like the rest of us, are speaking about the family in order to explain their attitudes toward life itself.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The cohort that made up the population boom is now grown up; many are in fact middle- aged. They are one reason for the enormous c...urrent interest in such topics as child rearing and families. The articulate and highly educated children of the baby boom form a huge, literate market for books on various issues in parenting and child rearing, and, as time goes on, adult development, divorce, midlife crisis, old age, and of course, death.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Families suffered badly under industrialization, but they survived, and the lives of men, women, and children improved. Children, ...once marginal and exploited figures, have moved to a position of greater protection and respect,... The historic decline in the overall death rates for children is an astonishing social fact, notwithstanding the disgraceful infant mortality figures for the poor and minorities. Like the decline in death from childbirth for women, this is a stunning achievement.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »