What Families Really Value : BELEN ELLER : ‘I Feel If I Went Back to Work, Something Would Go Wrong’

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.

*

Belen Eller, 43, and her husband William Eller, 45, are the parents of three daughters, 8, 12 and 15. The family lives in the Mt. Washington-Cypress Park area. William is a shop manager for an automobile carrier company ; Belen is a homemaker.

*

For the past several years Belen Eller has wanted to return to work. But her motherly instincts keep telling her “it’s not time yet.”

“I still think it is more ideal for one parent to stay at home and for one parent to work only because the children need that contact with one of the parents,” she says. “They need that closeness. I’m not putting down two people working. But you’ve got to draw the line somewhere.

“Before we had children I had a full-time job. I’m always saying to myself, ‘I’m going back to work’ because I miss that role. It kind of provides a social life. But I feel if I went back to work, something would go wrong with my kids.”

Eller says she respects mothers who work, single-parent mothers and unwed parents. Still, she believes it is best if children are raised by a husband and stay-at-home wife. “It may sound like the ‘Ozzie and Harriet’ show, but I think that’s better than raising a kid by yourself. Two parents can bring a calmness to the family unit.

“In the case of Murphy Brown, she is a successful, independent woman who can afford to be a single-parent mom. The only drawback is that the child doesn’t know who the father is. But you wouldn’t condemn the child for what the mother decided. You would hope that the mother will raise the child with a moral code.”