What Families Really Value : MARIA ASLAN : ‘I Believe You Learn Your Ethics Through Experiences’

Has your family had its moral fiber today? And who determines the nutritional content and dosage, anyway?

Dan Quayle scolded TV’s Murphy Brown for “mocking the importance of fathers by bearing a child alone and calling it just another ‘lifestyle choice.’ ” With that condemnation, he started a national debate over family values--and the definition of the family itself.

Only about a third of U.S. families fit the traditional pattern of a working dad and a mom at home with the kids. If that structure is changing, what does that say for “traditional family values”?

Southern Californians--including a Latina great-grandmother, a Korean-American student and a black working couple--concur that family values are crucial but don’t necessarily agree on what those values are.

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Maria Aslan, 33, is a single parent to a 3-year-old daughter and a 13-year-old son. The Montebello resident is a management aide for the Los Angeles Police Department.

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“As a single parent I know I do a whole helluva lot better raising my kids than some two-parent families I’ve seen,” Aslan says.

“I think it is kind of amusing when Dan Quayle blasted Murphy Brown. I have experienced more poverty in my two marriages than I have on my own--poverty due to the lack of tax laws that benefit married couples, the inability of having your children get free lunch in school because you have a two-income family, and the lack of child-care legislation that would give parents a tax break.”

Aslan, who has always been a working mother, says “it is a lot better for a mother to work than to have a mother who doesn’t want to be at home. That is very important.” And she says being married is not a requisite for raising children.

“It is great to have the two-parent family, but I don’t think it is necessary. I would rather have one good parent than two lousy parents.”

Aslan says she tries to “set an ethical foundation for my kids” rather than have them follow a strict moral code.

“I say that,” she says, “only because sometimes morals are imposed on you and I find morals real restricting. Ethics are what make you a human being. My ethics encompass everything from raising my kids with a social conscience to environmental ethics as well as being respectful of other nationalities and beliefs.

“My mom and dad gave me morals in a real textbook kind of way. I believe you learn your ethics through experiences.”

Aslan and her children participate in regular citywide food drives and deliver meals on wheels.

“My family values include giving to the world, not just my immediate community because that would be too limiting. We don’t need to create barriers around us . . . .

“It would be very dull and boring to limit your interaction to one ethnic group. I don’t want that for my children. It is a disadvantage for them to grow up in a community that is monolithic.”