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Family Matters

A Manifesto In Support of Parents

Here's a Dream List Of Parents' Rights

by H.J. Cummins

Caught between pressure from business andgovernment, America's moms and dads need help, an important new bookcontends.
This country is at war with its parents, according to a new book, andthe casualties are the children. Families have to mobilize in their owndefense, the two authors declare. The book's demands are consistent withits combat metaphor: Instead of pummeling parents, this nation shouldoffer them the same support it did another group who ensured its future -- the soldiers of World War II.

The time has come for "A Parents' Bill of Rights," write Sylvia AnnHewlett and Cornel West in "The War Against Parents: What We Can Do forAmerica's Beleaguered Moms and Dads" (Houghton Mifflin, $24). Their ideais inspired by the GI Bill of Rights, the amalgam of federal supportsthat helped 2.2 million returning veterans go to college and 12 millionAmericans buy homes or businesses.

"Very centrally placed in this book is the notion that parents areindispensable. Because if you want toteach a child ethics, compassion, all those deeply important dimensionsto life, that has to be done within the family by the parents."
The authors' evidence of assault is grim and barely challenged byany commentator on the conservative-liberal continuum: Murder andsuicide rates, drug use, poverty and ill health are worse than everamong American children.

The glitch, all sides say, is getting America's 62 million parentsto agree on solutions. Parents agree they want better schools, forexample, but parent groups are fighting in Congress about whether theanswer is more money for public schools or vouchers for private schools.Instead of a unified front, parents are picking one another off in aversion of friendly fire.

Part of the problem is that parenting groups have to do so much worksimply to survive, said Suzanne Jones, the executive editor of theSingle Parent Resource Center, based in Manhattan. Funding is sporadic,said Jones, who has worked with parenting groups in East Hampton andOyster Bay, and viable services come and go.

Earlier efforts to create a unified, national parents' lobby failed,among them grassroots initiatives such as Parent Action, whose foundersincluded pediatrician and author T. Berry Brazelton and activist BerniceWeissbourd, who also founded Family Focus, a social service organizationin Chicago.

The New York organization of the Family Resource Coalition ofAmerica has joined in an initiative with parenting organizations inseven other states, including Connecticut. Gail Koser, senior programadviser for the New York group, said the family-support agenda ensuresthat parents' voices are heard at state and local levels.

Hewlett and West argue that government and the marketplace firstmake life hard for parents and then blame them for the sad shape ofAmerica's youth. Hewlett is the author of "When the Bough Breaks: TheCost of Neglecting Our Children" (Harper Perennial Library, 1992), anaccounting of childhood distresses in America. A resident of Manhattan,she also founded the National Parenting Association Manhattan. West is aprofessor of Afro-American Studies at Harvard University.

Some of their findings:

Families have been the "shock absorbers" in the hyper-competitive pushof contemporary business: Americans are working an average of 163 hoursa year more than they were 15 years ago, but middle-class wages aredropping.
Families, especially poor families, get socked by taxes. The federaltax exemption for a child, now $2,650 a year, is worth only half what itwas in the late 1940s. Also, some of the nation's most fundamental taxpolicies, including Social Security taxes and mortgage deductions, areregressive. For example: A family in the 15 percent tax bracket, paying$5,000 in mortgage interest a year, gets a $750 tax break. A family inthe top tax bracket (39.6 percent), gets a $1,980 tax break.
A "virulent strain of parent bashing" runs through pop psychologytoday. Titles like "Toxic Parents" and "How to Avoid Your Parents'Mistakes When You Raise Your Children" are demoralizing parents. Parentsare told they love too much. Then they're told they love too little.They can't win.
The entertainment industry invades and degrades families. Besideslongstanding concerns about sex and violence in mainstreamentertainment, there's also growing worry about the countless images ofinept or evil parents: "I Stole My 12-Year-Old's Boyfriend" on the JerrySpringer talk show, for example, and the movies "Home Alone" and "Honey,I Shrunk the Kids."

Welcome to my life, said Joann Ellis when she heard "The War AgainstParents" inventory of problems. "There are many ways I feel I'm in anus-them thing," said Ellis, the mother of four in St. Paul, Minn.

Among "them" are designer labels. Ellis and her husband strictlyregulate what movies and TV shows the children can watch. Still, thosecompelling ads for $150 Nikes reach them somehow.

"Them" are grocery stores. When Ellis left one recently, she was$200 poorer and had little to show for it.

"Them" is the IRS. "You get so little break for your children," shesaid. "It feels like you're penalized for being a parent."

"Them" is whoever is supposed to make health care less a burden tothe un-rich. The Ellises pay $300 a month for coverage; the Catholicschool where her husband teaches insures only him.

"Very centrally placed in this book is the notion that parents areindispensable," Hewlett said in an interview. "Because if you want toteach a child ethics, compassion, all those deeply important dimensionsto life, that has to be done within the family by the parents."

Hewlett and West propose a national movement patterned after theAmerican Association of Retired Persons, which, they say, managed topull together a huge but heterogeneous force around a common interest -- safeguarding their retirement benefits.

Family historian Stephanie Coontz takes exception to some elementsof the book. While she agrees that today's culture is harsh towardfamilies, she sees the same toll on others, including the old and theinfirm.

"We are living in an economy, and generally a culture, that iswinner take all, devil take the hindmost," said Coontz, author of "TheWay We Really Are" (Basic Books, $11) and "The Way We Never Were,"(Basic Books, $13), both studies of American families. "And in that kindof economic and cultural setting, anyone who's not stripped down toracing mode, anyone who needs a hand up, has problems."

Coontz sees the various metamorphoses of families as not all decaybut in fact a series of tradeoffs. "If you have a disabled child, therecertainly has been no better time to be around than now," she said.

She also faults the Hewlett-West book on a couple of statistics:It's true, as they write, that parents now spend considerably less timeon child-rearing, she said. But that's because people are having fewerchildren. Also, she said, parents are spending as much time as ever withtheir adolescents; the time loss is between teens and other adults.

What Coontz most liked about "The War Against Parents" is its callto turn life from a sprint to a long-distance race, "and to the extentthat West and Hewlett talk about rebuilding our social safety net andinvesting in our future, I think that's wonderful."

This article first appeared in Minneapolis-St. Paul Star Tribune

H.J. Cummins covers family and parenting issues for the Minneapolis-St. Paul Star Tribune. She is a frequent contributor to Working Moms' Internet Refuge.