We Can Turn Back the Cultural Hands of Time : Parents: Family breakup and out-of-wedlock childbirth are reality, but not immutable.

Children need both their mothers and their fathers. It’s just that simple. Don’t trust me on this, or even Dan Quayle. Simply pick up, for example, the recent report of the bipartisan National Commission on Children and read its findings on the importance of the two-parent family in determining child well-being.

Given the overwhelming evidence, it does not take a great deal of imagination to see why thoughtful people on both sides of the political aisle should be concerned about the unprecedented increase in out-of-wedlock births in our nation, or worried about a U.S. divorce rate that is the highest in the world.

So why does child well-being seem to be virtually the last thing on our mind in the Murphy Brown debate? Why is the word marriage taken as a code word for backlash even though marriage is the best social-insurance program for children that any society has ever devised?

I’ve posed this question to some smart people. Here is what they tell me: It would be nice if every child could grow up with a mother and a father, but that is not the reality today. Things have changed. We cannot turn back the clock. We cannot put the genie of family breakup and out-of-wedlock childbirth back in the bottle.

Think about that. What if we had shrugged our shoulders and said, “We cannot put the genie of communism back in the bottle”? Or, “We cannot put the genie of the nuclear arms race back in the bottle”? Or, “We cannot put the genie of global warming back in the bottle?”

But it’s different when it comes to cultural values and personal lifestyle choices, some of these smart people might reply. Communism, war and the environment are social matters, driven by politics. Sexuality and family structure are private matters, driven by individual choice.

Yet this argument ignores other recent and socially consequential reversals in cultural values. Consider the case of smoking. We put that genie back in the bottle, despite all the money and power used by the tobacco industry to defeat anti-smoking efforts. And surely safe-sex advocates believe that their message will help put away the evil genie of AIDS. In each of these cases, we have decided that private choices can have social consequences, and that society has a stake in promoting certain cultural values.

Indeed, culture can often change more rapidly than politics or economics. Anyone who grew up in postwar America and lived through the cultural revolution of the 1960s and 1970s can bear witness to the speed and power of cultural change. “Sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll” were not public policies. “Do your own thing” was not an economic trend. Yet these ideas, quite suddenly, changed how we live. Nothing says we cannot change again.

Cultural change, moreover, is not mysterious or impersonal. It is deeply influenced by human agency, including political leadership. Therefore, I, for one, am quite optimistic that we can put the genie of family breakup and unwed childbirth back in the bottle, if we keep our eyes on the prize. What is at stake is nothing less than the competence and character of our children and the fundamental well-being of our society. And surely, the prize is a new generation of American children blessed with both mothers and fathers who love and care for them.