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By Jacquin Sanders
(Newsweek Feature Service)
For the past year or so, sociologists, psychiatrists,
Women's Lib activists and others who ought to know
better have been predicting the demise of the
American family. But somehow, family people don't
seem to be getting the message.
Stubbornly unaware of their supposed plight,
more than 92 per cent of all Americans continue to
live in families. In fact, there has been a 10 per cent
rise in the number of familes since 1960.
And despite the sobering 1-in-every4 couples
divorce rate, more than three times as many people
got married last year as got divorced. And a good
many of the marriages included previously divorced
persons.
Yet the pessimism seems almost pervasive. Church
groups, governmental task forces and prominent
foundations issue report after report on the
"dissolution" of family life. Scarcely a major
magazine has failed to weigh in with a foreboding
article oh the same glum subject. Even the White
House has been used to trumpet warnings of doom
for the family.
"America's families are in trouble-trouble so deep
and pervasive as to threaten the future of our
nation," declared the final report of last year's White
House Conference on Children.
Yet there they all are, some 170 million strong,
family men, women and children, in their split-levels
and elevator apartments and farmhouses, their estates
and their tenements and their two-family homes.
They divorce more, and the women are out of the
home working, and some of the children are in
day-care centers, or ought to be. But whatever the
condition-rich or poor, urban or rural-the family
way, with all its tensions and imperfections, remains
for the vast majority of Americans "the only game in
town."
The main reason, of course, is children, and if
anybody yet has come up with a better way of raising
children than in a family situation, he hasn't been
able to sell it to the country's parents, or, more
importantly, to those who want to become parents.
"No society anywhere has ever sanctioned
illegitmacy," says Margaret Mead, a sociologist who
nevertheless finds many flaws in the modern family.
But rather than abolish it entirely, she
recommends strengthening the institution by what
she calls a "two-step marriage," with official licenses
for both steps.
In the first, the young couple would, after a
"wedding" ceremony, live together but agree not to
have children. If the arrangement works well for a
substantial period of time and the couple decide they
want children, they would move on to step two, with
a second license and a second wedding ceremony.
These days, to be sure, many young couples don't
bother with Miss MeadVceremonies. They simply
move in together and, at least in their own generation
and in the large cities and univeristy areas they
inhabit, nobody much minds. These unmarried
couples are frequently pointed to as harbingers of the
trend against marriage.
More likely, they represent the sexual
revolution-win ich is not at all the same thing as a
revolution against marriage--and the security of the
Pill. It has also been noted that very few of them
produce babies and that when they do they almost
invariably marry in the old legal way.
The spread of communes also alarms many who
think these more or less self-sufficient clusters of
young people represent a wave of the future. Perhaps
they do, but it will be a small wave, judging by most
of those already in existence.
There are an estimated 3,000 communes in rural
and uban areas in the U.S., with membership varying
from half a dozen or so to as many as a hundred.
These communes are a Western world phenomenon.
But except in Israel, where they are thoroughly
integrated into the political system, communes have
yet to prove their durability.
"I joined a commune to get away from the hassle,
the senseless disciplines I didn't believe in," says one
dropout from a New Mexico commune. "But we
found that we couldn't make the thing work without
our own kind of law and order. As it turned out, 1
didn't appreciate taking orders from my elected
leaders much more than 1 did from those on the
outside. So 1 came home for a while."
Coming home seems to be a feature of both the
commune people and the unmarried couples. "I've
watched these people, and this is not maturity," says
a professor at Hunter College in New York. 'They're
really not much different from their age group in
other years-just freer sexually and sassier. Their
life-style is superficially! new but it's impermanent.
Ultimately, they'll all be back in the fold."
The declining birth rate is also frequently cited as
a symptom of the dissolution of the family. But this
is clearly a matter of choice end convenience in a
crowded world. For instance, a Gallup poll taken
earlier this year showed a dramatic decline in the
percentage of Americans who favor having four or
more children. As recently as 1967, 40 per cent
wanted big families; now only 23 per cent do.
But they stHI want families. Indeed, the most
intense criticism of families comes from a small, but
very articulate secion of the public: upper-income,
sociologically or psychologically oriented people
whose needs-and frustrations-are quite different
from those of the bulk of the population.
Tell a Detroit auto salesman that Ferdinand
Lundberg says in "The Coming World
Transformation" that the family is "'near the point of
complete extinction," and he will merely look
bemused. Tell a Los Angeles steam-fitter that
psychoanalyst William Wolf contends that ""the
family is dead, except for the first year or two of
child-raising" and he will acept it as he would a
pronouncement from Bozo the Clown.
That family structure has changed, no one can
doubt. That it could stand a lot of improving, no one
can question. Families are smaller, they badly miss
the influence-and services-of elderly relatives, and
they may be doing something wrong somewhere
because there's so much anger in the nation's youth.
But despite its tribulations, it seems highly likely
that the family will survive. The alternatives are too
dim--or grim.
II
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WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 17, 1971
THE DAILY NEBRASKAN
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