FAMILIES : A World of Pressures on Parents, Children

As a senior civil servant, wife to a successful professional and a mother of two preteen daughters, Caroline Fleetwood has little free time in her life.

She’s up at 6:30, runs through the day, then drops around 11. Recently remarried, she is also a stepmother to a third daughter and has to juggle schedules both for her stepchild’s visits and “Dad time” for her own kids.

The demands are tough, the planning complicated, and it’s a life all too typical for women in her position.

Her husband, Hans Soederstroem, who teaches at Stockholm University and doubles as head of a private business center, leaves the house later, but also gets home later.

“We work like hell,” she said.

Welcome to the modern family; this could be just about everywhere.

Whether in Stockholm, San Francisco, Bombay, Mexico City or Nairobi, the story is remarkably similar: Pressures of life in the last years of the 20th Century are placing new strains on the family, weakening its stability, altering its size, changing its shape and raising questions about its role both as civilization’s fundamental building block and the bridge between the individual and society.

Consider:

* In the United States, four of every 10 children no longer live with both biological parents. The number of single-parent families has doubled since 1970, the number of children born outside marriage has jumped by 500% in the past generation and a leading social scientist says American parents spend about 40% less time with their children than did parents of a generation ago.

* In Western Europe, the number of marriages has decreased by 40% during the past generation, while the birthrate has fallen by 25%--a figure that means there is in Europe today, on average, one less child per family than there was in 1960.

* In Eastern Europe, communism has been replaced by a mixture of economic uncertainty and social confusion, producing what some analysts call a “values vacuum” that frequently leaves parents incapable of addressing their children’s questions on what to do with their lives. Marriage and birthrates have also plunged in several Eastern European countries.

* In Asia, family life in the world’s two most populous countries is undergoing major change. In India’s Kerala state, where a high percentage of men spend extended periods working overseas, the divorce rate has jumped by 350% in the past decade, while in China, two generations of attempting to reduce the family’s size and power in society has taken a toll. At least on the mainland, the Chinese family is not the force it once was.

* In Africa, ancient cultures such as that of the Samburu of northern Kenya may survive untouched, but a broad decline of the extended family has left many members of the new generation of young adults with inadequate health education and little social direction. The results are disturbing: In western Kenya, for instance, a recent survey found a quarter of pregnant women tested HIV-positive.

Many of these global developments have occurred against a backdrop of shifting economic conditions, which have brought millions more women into the labor force and generated a competition for jobs that frequently sends potential breadwinners thousands of miles from home.

“People who respond to the fundamental instincts to share and have a family today are very much challenged by the environment in which we live,” said Cynthia Lloyd, co-author of a global study on the parent-child relationship published last spring by the Population Council in New York.

But not all has been negative. The post-World War II era has also witnessed a major democratization of family life, in which the unquestioned rule of a remote, authoritarian father has increasingly given way to a more open discussion among equals in reaching important decisions.

“There are still extremes, but families today are run more as teams than as top-down organizations,” noted Ceridwen Roberts, director of the Family Policy Studies Center in London. “The change has freed countless women and children from the grips of their own private domestic tyrannies.”

As these developments unfold, a dramatic shift in values in the direction of individual freedom and self-fulfillment and away from duty and social responsibility has altered the most fundamental precepts upon which couples start families.

“The very basis of the family has changed,” concluded a demographic report on the 15 European Union countries issued last year. “The family, in the past an institution and means of social integration, has become a pact between two individuals looking for personal fulfillment.” When that fulfillment is achieved, the family unit often disintegrates.

“People want happiness now; it’s an individual thing,” explained Francois Begeot, a social scientist at Eurostat, the European Union’s statistical office in Luxembourg. Begeot recently completed an extensive report on the family in Europe. “They now are much less willing to sacrifice for larger obligations or duties.”

The picture is similar in urban areas of Latin America, Africa and Asia.

Ashish Nandy, a resident professor at the Center for the Study of Developing Societies in New Delhi, says he worries as much about the rise of these new values as he does about the growth of divorce rates and one-parent families now increasingly visible in urban areas of his country.

“There’s an onslaught on the ideology of the family,” said Nandy. “You talk about family values today and you are branded a fundamentalist and a reactionary. It is not in fashion to take care of the family.”

In almost no other area of society are there so few counter-currents to a major global trend as there are to those forces that threaten the family unit.

Preferred Ideal

Nevertheless, despite the enormity of these changes, the family unit--however defined--remains both the form in which the majority of human beings continue to exist and the preferred ideal for those now reaching maturity. In its research, the Population Council found that, in all but a few countries, more than 90% of all women still marry, while a range of data indicates the vast majority of young people everywhere still want to start a family.

Despite some alarming evidence, experts tend to avoid dramatic words such as “crisis” or “disintegration” that surface in the public debate. As times change, so has the family, these scientists claim.

“Is the family sick? We can’t say,” said Begeot. “In another hundred years, people may look back and applaud at what horrifies us today.”

In an era where divorce and remarriage often generate a tangle of stepchildren and stepparents, where same-sex couples adopt children and more single women are opting for children without taking a man into the household, the very definition of a family triggers political debate.

Some facts, however, are undisputed.

With different priorities and goals, young people nearly everywhere today are more hesitant about marriage than their parents were, and more cautious about starting a family. They tend to delay their first child and have smaller families. These changes have come even in countries where doting on children is a national pastime. Italy, for example, has the world’s lowest birthrate.

“The cultural model of the family has changed,” said Claudio Iocchi, an official in Italy’s Ministry for the Family and Social Solidarity.

Especially in the West, marriage as an institution has also waned. Today more than a quarter of all children born in the United States, a third of those in France and half of those in Sweden and Denmark are born outside marriage.

In many countries, policy-makers no longer seem to care. “Being married or not isn’t important,” commented Sweden’s Minister of Social Security Anna Hedborg.

Still, this caution among today’s young people appears to have done little to boost family stability. Virtually everywhere, family separation is on the rise, single parenthood is growing, more children are being born out of wedlock and spending less time with their biological parents.

As women move in growing numbers into the work force and their mates fail to compensate for their absence, the family’s traditional role, both in preparing children for adulthood and in caring for elderly family members, is diminishing.

A survey conducted this year by a British charity, Care for the Family, found that more than half the fathers questioned said they managed less than five minutes with their children on a one-on-one basis during an average working day.

“That result didn’t surprise me at all,” said the charity’s executive director, Rob Parsons, whose new book, “The Sixty Minute Father,” is a bestseller in Britain. “These aren’t bad fathers. They are men trapped by a macho image that says you can’t leave the office at 6 o’clock.”

In Sweden, where parents have had the right since the mid-1970s to divide a paid, 18-month parental leave as they wish during the first eight years of their child’s life, the government this year felt it necessary to pass a law compelling fathers to take at least one of the 18 months.

As fathers toil outside the home, more women than ever have moved into the work force, driven either by material need, the quest for their own self-fulfillment or both.

In some European countries, such as Sweden and Denmark, the percentage of women and men in the work force has become roughly equal. In other countries, the women’s share of the work force is growing fast, rising by about 20% in the past five years in Spain, Belgium and the Netherlands. Virtually by definition, women who are mothers have less family time.

“The family . . . is under siege, and that from both sexes,” declared Council of Europe Secretary General Daniel Tarschys in a recent speech.

In its recent report, the Population Council in New York found that in only one of 10 diverse nations listed--Indonesia--did both parents devote more than a combined average of 7.5 hours a week in direct child care.

Still, there are exceptions.

Sweden’s Minister of Culture Margot Wallstroem accepted her Cabinet post last year on the condition that she could do much of the work from her home, 200 miles south of the seat of national government in Stockholm. Today she runs her ministry through video conferences and telephone calls from Thursday evening through Tuesday morning, then travels to the capital for three days each week.

“My youngest son [16 months] doesn’t care what job I do. All he cares about is whether I’m there to put him to bed,” she told a European newspaper this year.

In a growing number of cases, the problem is not that parents are spending too much time at the office. It is that one parent is simply no longer there. They go either because the relationship has collapsed or, as now happens with increased frequency in the Third World, because they must travel to find suitable work.

Working Overseas

In the Philippines, for example, roughly 10% of the female population works overseas, mainly as maids in the Middle East and the richer Asian countries.

The Population Council study also found that between the early 1970s and mid-1980s, the number of single-parent households rose worldwide as a percentage of all households. In the United States, the figure rose from 13% to 23.9%

In Japan, where the three-generation household remains strong and divorce is still relatively rare, social scientists point to an upward trend in family separations and warn of a greater instability. “It’s almost like we are entering a period of the 1970s America--the time of ‘Kramer vs. Kramer,’ ” said Shigeo Tatsuki, a family counselor and sociologist at Kwansei Gakuin University in western Japan.

There is an economic impact. Evidence shows a direct link between single-parent households and poverty. In the United States, Australia and Canada, more than half of all one-parent families are considered poor, while in Britain and Germany, it is about one-third.

In the industrialized world, only the Nordic countries, with high female employment, a large network of day care centers and other welfare benefits, is the poverty rate below 10% for one-parent families. But even there, the single-parent poverty rate is double the national average. Many social scientists level criticism at professional women who decide to launch single-parent families.

“Even if women don’t always feel that they need men, men do need women and children need fathers . . . “ said Tarschys, of the Council of Europe in Strasbourg, which has done extensive research on problems of the family. “Society as a whole is not going to function effectively over time if these trends are accepted.”

As parents disengage, other factors--schools, peers, the so-called youth cult and the media--move to fill the vacuum in the child’s life. Although there is debate about what this portends, there is little doubt that these external factors carry a new importance.

A United Nations report on families in the Asia-Pacific region issued two years ago singled out the media as a major new influence in the lives of young children. The report said that has come “as a result of the decline of the family as the main locus of socialization.”

“Even in intact families, influence has been ceded,” said Ceridwen Roberts, director of the Family Policy Studies Center in London. “The demise of the authoritarian family brought not just the rise of women, but also kids, who have their own TV in their own room.”

Last week , President Clinton backed legislation that would restore at least a degree of parental control over the box by forcing TV manufacturers to install a device that would enable parents to block violent programming.

For many, it is this impact on children that is the most troubling dimension of family instability. The majority of Americans appear ready to see links between less stable families and appalling statistics that show a tripling of teen suicide and homicide rates, a doubling of overall juvenile crime and sharp drops in college entrance exam scores over the past generation.

For the majority of Americans, family stress lies at the heart of the country’s troubled younger generation, the opinion polls indicate.

The Americans are not alone:

* In Japan, sociologist Tatsuki links stress in the home with a growing problem of children refusing to go to school. He claims the kids are victims of their disorganized family lives, where everyone is so busy they have no time for each other.

* In Africa, policy-makers fret about the decline of the continent’s traditional teacher--the extended family.

“The old kinship system had its problems, but it provided the young with a large number of agents to socialize them on matters of marriage, fertility and inheritance,” said Pamela Onduso, an executive with a Nairobi-based family planning project. “But because of the social changes of urbanization and modernization--what we call Westernization--this kinship influence is weakening. As a result, there is no one to teach the young these things.”

* A European Union demographic study issued last year concluded: “The instability of some families, combined with economic problems, may make young people feel rejected by society. They become independent increasingly late in life, their fixed reference points are being blurred and their parents are in increasingly frail economic situations.”

Issue of Aging

The family’s new instability also carries serious consequences for old-age care. In countries as diverse as Germany and India, where the family has traditionally accepted the burden of geriatric care, departure of the daughter-in-law, either to the workplace or via family separation, raises problems that carry potential economic as well as social costs.

“Who’s going to look after old men in Europe when the daughter-in-law isn’t there?” asked Anna Gillet, a senior official at the Council of Europe. “These are questions for which no one observing the scene has any real answers.”

In many parts of the world, supporting family stability has become a major goal of government policy, as much on cost grounds as to maintain the underlying health of society.

In Germany, for example, roughly 80% of old-age care still takes place within the family and the idea of transferring that to government institutions makes official eyes roll.

But as the Council of Europe’s Tarschys points out, government assistance has its limits. “The state can provide financial support, but not the look in the eye and the physical presence of fathers that is so important for children and adolescents,” he said.

Times researchers Isabelle Maelcamp in Brussels, Beth Knobel in Moscow and Hilary E. MacGregor in Tokyo contributed to this report.

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Courting Divorce

More and more couples in developed nations are ending their marriages.

Divorce rates per 100 marriages:

Country 1970 1990 Canada 18.6 38.3 Czechoslovakia 21.8 32.0 Denmark 25.1 44.0 England and Wales 16.2 41.7 France 12.0 31.5 Greece 5.0 12.0 Hungary 25.0 31.0 Italy 5.0 8.0 Netherlands 11.0 28.1 Sweden 23.4 44.1 United States 42.3 54.8 (former) West Germany 12.2 29.2

Source: “Families in Focus” by the Population Council.