The most important difference between these early American families and our own is that early families constituted economic units ...in which all members, from young children on up, played important productive roles within the household. The prosperity of the whole family depended on how well husband, wife, and children could manage and cultivate the land. Children were essential to this family enterprise from age six or so until their twenties, when they left home.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The myth of the self-sufficient individual and of the self-sufficient, protected, and protective family ... tells us that those wh...o need help are ultimately inadequate. And it tells us that for a family to need help--or at least to admit it publicly--is to confess failure. Similarly, to give help, however generously, is to acknowledge the inadequacy of the recipients and indirectly to condemn them, to stigmatize them, and even to weaken what impulse they have toward self-sufficiency.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The myth of self-sufficiency blinds us to the workings of other forces in family life. For families are not now, nor were they eve...r, the self-sufficient building blocks of society, exclusively responsible, praiseworthy, and blamable for their own destiny. They are deeply influenced by broad social and economic forces over which they have little control.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
In the past the intrinsic pleasures of parenthood for most American families were increased by the extrinsic economic return that ...children brought. Today, parents have children despite their economic cost. This is a major, indeed a revolutionary, change.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Mothers work outside the home for many reasons; one of them is almost always because their families need their income to live up t...o their standards for their children.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Recognizing that family self-sufficiency is a false myth, we also need to acknowledge that all today's families need help in raisi...ng children. The problem is not so much to reeducate parents but to make available the help they need and to give them enough power so that they can be effective advocates with and coordinators of the other forces that are bringing up their children.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
In the early nineteenth century, the doctrine of self-sufficiency came to apply to families as well as individuals.... The family ...became a special protected place, the repository of tender, pure, and generous feelings (embodied by the mother) and a bulwark and bastion against the raw, competitive, aggressive, and selfish world of commerce (embodied by the father).... In performing this protective task, the good family was to be as self-sufficient as the good man.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
There is nothing to be gained by blaming ourselves and other individuals for family changes. We need to look instead to the broade...r economic and social forces that shape the experience of children and parents. Parents are not abdicating--they are being dethroned, by forces they cannot influence, much less control. Behind today's uncertainty among parents lies a trend of several centuries toward the transformation and redefinition of family life. We see no possibility--or desirability--of reversing this trend and turning the clock back to the "good old days," for the price then was high in terms of poverty and drudgery, of no education in today's sense at all, and of community interference in what we today consider private life.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
One current reaction to change in families, for example, is the proposal for more "education for parenthood," on the theory that t...his training will not only teach specific skills such as how to change diapers or how to play responsively with toddlers, but will raise parents' self-confidence at the same time. The proposed cure, in short, is to reform and educate the people with the problem.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Within forty years of their arrival in the Plymouth colony, the first white settlers were afraid their children had lost the dedic...ation and religious conviction of the founding generation. Ever since, Americans have looked to the next generation not only with love and solicitude but with a good measure of anxiety, worrying whether they themselves were good parents, fearful that their children would not turn out well.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »