What Families Really Value : LESLIE RASHEED : ‘I Certainly Don’t Believe You Have to Be Married to Raise Children’

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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Leslie Rasheed, 38, lives in Inglewood. A widow who remarried and then divorced, Rasheed raised her son, 22, by herself.

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Rasheed is up front about what she thinks of the vice president’s recent comments on family values.

“Dan Quayle’s statement about Murphy Brown was horrible. I have nine sisters and brothers, and we’re all very close,” she explains. “We look at our mother as the matriarch. She raised all nine children by herself, and she did an excellent job. We do OK in life; we’re all homeowners.

“Family values are important,” Rasheed says. “It means having the support of sisters and brothers and nieces and nephews who are there for me no matter what. Everybody knows that I am Auntie Leslie, and it feels very good being Auntie Leslie in a family like this.”

Rasheed says she raised her son “with a real stiff hand.”

“He had to be in the house before the street lights went on. I told him no car at 16 and no car at all, ‘unless you get good grades.’ Getting him out of high school was the main thing, the big thing. He did it, and he’s gone on to do very well.

“So I certainly don’t believe you have to be married to raise children. I’m a living example, as is my mother and several of my friends.”