Fighting to Fill the Values Gap

“Values? Values???” asks 37-year-old Lila Robinson, her pitch rising as she warms to her subject. “I’ve been waiting for someone to ask me about this for years! Hold on a sec, let me get my soapbox!”

For Robinson, proof of the nation’s moral slide is everywhere. She is irked by the kids who tromp down the grass as they cut across the lawn of her family’s new home in Brunswick, Ohio. She gets even more steamed when she dares not chastise the teenage trespassers for fear trouble might ensue.

She fumes over a kid punching loaves of bread in the supermarket and over his mother spewing expletives when a stranger suggests he stop. She smolders over a sister’s divorce and the fact that the parents play their children off one another.

Yet she has little use for politicians and activists who patter on about family values and seek to legislate common virtues, such as civility, compassion, respect and responsibility. She suspects that they would like to curtail some of the freedoms she cherishes.

Robinson, a “bleeding-heart liberal who realizes the government can’t do it all,” prefers to take matters into her own hands. Acknowledging candidly that “some of the things I did when I was single and crazed were wrong,” she is determined to teach her children to avoid her mistakes--without denying that she made them.

Robinson’s worries--as well as her response--put her on the front lines of a social movement that has millions of foot soldiers but few, if any, field marshals. Convinced that the nation is suffering from a values decline of crisis proportions, more and more Americans are fighting back.

Some have embraced legislative remedies ranging from tightening up divorce laws to restricting welfare benefits. Others, like Robinson, are wary of government intervention and believe that the answer lies within communities, families and individuals--including themselves.

At home, she and others are making more time for their children by returning to family meals or turning off the TV. Others are reaching out to neighbors to organize fathers’ groups or plan new school curricula designed to teach good character.

While many still tend to blame others for society’s ills, a sizable minority says it is willing to change its behavior and accept some limits on civil liberties for the common good. Thus, moved by concern for plunging social standards, they agree to make their kids wear uniforms to public school, or they embrace technologies that would black out unwanted TV programs at home.

“There’s a growing sense that we stand at a cultural crossroads,” said Thomas Lickona, an education professor at the State University of New York, Cortland, and a leader of the character education movement. “Either we reverse the current trends or continue the slide and go down the tubes.”

For many Americans, particularly baby boomers now entering middle age, the values movement is an attempt to synthesize the best elements of the “do-your-own-thing” philosophy of the 1960s and ‘70s with the social stability of an earlier era.

“We’re having a debate now we simply couldn’t have 15 years ago,” said William Galston, 50, a public administration professor at the University of Maryland and a former domestic policy advisor to President Clinton. “I don’t think we’re going to end up back in the 1950s, but I don’t think we’re going to remain tied to the kind of revolt against the 1950s. We are looking for a new balance.”

Amitai Etzioni, a George Washington University professor, leads the “communitarian” movement that helped launch the current debate. He asserts that when Americans limit their behavior for the good of the community, they do not feel as if they have made sacrifices or forfeited freedoms. They feel as if their personal choices have helped build a more cohesive, supportive community.

“Today, everybody’s free to do anything, but it’s not what they want,” Etzioni said. “It’s not liberating; it’s not freedom.” The debate over values and what to do about them, he adds, “is a clear indication we’re groping for new ways to come together and, yes, impose some requirements on ourselves.”

Lack of Morals

Mention the V-word across the country and you will hear the hiss and bubble of a thousand stories boiling over the top. Some come from the TV news or the headlines, but most originate in their tellers’ backyards, schools and workplaces. Stories of friends on welfare getting pregnant again, of whole college classes conspiring to cheat on a test. Stories of parents worried sick that nice clothes may mark their children for violence.

The stories reflect a powerful feeling among Americans that the nation’s sense of right and wrong--its moral compass--is dangerously out of kilter. “It just seems like not many people have morals,” said Myorka Cummings, a 24-year-old homemaker in Marshalltown, Iowa. “They don’t seem to care about their neighbor. They’d just as soon rob him as come over and say hi.”

Americans, notes pollster Peter Hart, “look at all the basics of our society and see them going in a direction they’re uncomfortable with. They look at schools and they see violence. That scares them. They look at the media and they see [TV] programs they find unacceptable and that go beyond bounds of public decency. They look at athletic fields and see behavior they do not consider good sportsmanship. They look at the institution of family and marriage and they see breakups.”

In a Los Angeles Times Poll conducted nationwide April 13-16, 78% of respondents said they were dissatisfied with today’s moral values. Of that group, 47% identified family issues such as divorce, working parents and undisciplined children as the main causes. Another 34% blamed a breakdown in personal responsibility and community involvement.

The anxieties cross lines of race, age, gender, income and region. They spread well beyond the political bounds of religious conservatives, who have dominated debate on family values for much of the past decade.

Forum on Character

Charles Dewane, a 27-year-old unmarried father in Detroit, says he “is trying to go the right way--the straight and narrow.” He is engaged to the mother of his child, he says, and he takes an active role in his care.

As he sees it, the trouble with society is “punk parents raising kids, not giving their kids any values or morals.” A self-described member of “a lost education generation,” he has decided to do better by 8-month-old Charles Dewane Jr.

Although Dewane, who installs heating and cooling systems, has not attended church in years, he plans to send his son to parochial school because “people who send their kids to Catholic schools give a damn.”

Marsha “Pat” Maliszewski, 49, is a mother of two and until recently a marketing representative for a small computer firm. She quit her job this spring to devote herself full time to organizing a communitywide forum on “character” in Battle Creek, Mich. The wife of a police officer, she hears a daily litany of stories attesting to a moral slide in her city of 35,000.

Maybe, she concluded, if she could bring together liberals and conservatives, teachers and church people, artists and bank tellers and corporate leaders from the town’s largest employer, Kellogg Co., they could talk about common values. Maybe they could even forge a consensus on how those values could be reinforced in everyday life.

As a result, Battle Creek will have its first countywide community meeting on character and ethics June 18-21. The planned sessions, at which almost three dozen community leaders will be trained in ethical decision-making, have drawn an enthusiastic crowd of all stripes. “We’re on fire out here,” said Maliszewski, who hopes the forum will result in programs in schools, churches, workplaces and athletic fields.

The seed was planted when she attended a lecture on teaching children good character. It prompted her to examine the daily compromises and white lies that had chipped away at her own sense of right and wrong. Now, she says, “it is time to walk the walk,” and she is determined to take her ethics mission statewide.

Damage to Society

For the nearly 63 million Americans with children at home, the values debate is both especially urgent and difficult. The bulk of those parents grew up in the 1960s, ‘70s or ‘80s, when younger Americans embraced freedom of expression and self-actualization with near-religious fervor.

Today, divorce rates have doubled since 1960, crime rates are soaring, educational standards are slipping and civic debate is increasingly uncivil. And these children of a rebellious age are asking themselves if perhaps too many people have chosen to do their own thing. They suspect that their rebellion, while rooting out some of the 1950s’ ugliest prejudices and loosening some of its most constricting mores, also might have damaged some of society’s basic institutions and erected little to replace them.

“Basically I feel I’m very open-minded, very liberal,” says Emalie Mobarekeh, 45, a mother of two and part-time middle-school teacher in Sarasota, Fla. But groups that she has supported, like the American Civil Liberties Union, “keep wanting to push the norms of society further and further.

“I think, how much more are people going to take and say OK to? And I’m not a right-winger! They say you’ve got to accept this--say, gay girls and homosexuals adopting kids. All this deviation from the norm? I don’t know. It bothers me after a while.”

Now with children at home, parents like her are painfully aware of their responsibility to impart a sense not only of what is wrong with society but of what is right and wrong for individuals. And for children of the nonjudgmental 1960s and 1970s, that often is a wrenching adjustment.

“We’ve engaged in a generation-long experiment, testing the limits of individual freedom and its social consequences,” said Galston, the University of Maryland professor. “My sense is that a lot of people about my age are reassessing the balance that our generation struck in its youth and are looking for a new balance. . . . They’ve discovered that the values and practices and ways of thinking they embraced when young turned out to be a double-edged sword and that raising children calls upon us to reconsider lots of things.”

As a result, polls today indicate a surprising willingness among Americans to disapprove of other people’s personal decisions that they believe have hurt society. Half of Americans, for instance, say they believe that it is always or almost always wrong for a woman to have a child out of wedlock, and 46% say they believe that it is always or almost always wrong to have sex outside of marriage.

The conflicting themes of freedom and order are one of democracy’s perennial tensions, and demographers argue that surging tides of social conservatism recur at regular intervals in the American body politic. Making the latest outbreak of soul-searching noteworthy are the extreme demographic and societal spikes that have prompted it--a rise in violent crime, a surge in divorce and single-parent families, a stubborn drug problem.

Stephen Carter, 41, who teaches law and ethics at Yale University, says there is another factor that makes the current round of moral fretting unique:

“This is the first era in our public’s history where people feel queasy about discussing publicly notions of right and wrong.” In the wake of the 1960s and ‘70s, he adds, “some people feel incorrectly that public discussion of right and wrong is a threat to individual freedom. It’s not. They fear that because they think that if most people are against something, they want to make it illegal. But that’s not the point of moral conversation. Only in America do we think that talking about right and wrong means we want to legislate it.”

Public’s Ambivalence

While the impulse to legislate morality is a powerful theme in American society, it is counterbalanced by an equally powerful mistrust of the government and of politicians as arbiters of the nation’s values. The result, a deep ambivalence about the values debate, helps explain Americans’ fitful efforts to effect legislative changes that address the problems they see.

The Times Poll dramatically illustrates the conflicts and contradictions that shade Americans’ views about public values.

A 57% majority, for instance, says that “too many people have lifestyles and beliefs which are harmful to themselves and society,” and that those are a greater danger than intolerance for other people’s lifestyles and beliefs.

Cast the question in terms of government intervention, however, and majority support quickly evaporates.

The poll asked people to identify which annoyed them more: government intrusion into citizens’ private lives or government’s protecting activities that flout traditional family values. A slim majority of 52% found government intrusion the greater irritant, while 36% said they are more annoyed by government protection of activities that run counter to “family values.”

Part of the public’s ambivalence about legislative remedies appears to reflect the fact that few Americans blame themselves for having contributed to the social ills they bemoan. As a result, say pollsters, they are reluctant to embrace government interventions that could crimp their own freedoms along with those of the people they blame for the values breakdown.

The Times Poll suggested that only 11% of respondents say they believe that their own behavior has contributed to the moral problems the nation faces. Similarly, 96% say they believe that they are doing an excellent or good job teaching their children about morals and values. But those numbers don’t square with their perception of how others are behaving: 93% say that parents are not taking enough responsibility for teaching their children moral values.

Role for Government

For all of Americans’ qualms about government intrusion, an overwhelming majority expect government to do something to support families.

In a January poll conducted as part of the University of Texas’ National Issues Convention, 92% said they would like government to strengthen families and family values with benefits such as child care and preschool. Increasingly, Americans are looking to their public schools to teach and reinforce civic and personal virtues with character education. And large majorities have supported legislation that would give parents the V-chip to limit their children’s TV and computer exposure to sex and violence.

American parents, says Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman (D-Conn.), “want help” from the government. At a minimum, he adds, “they want to feel that we [politicians] get it, that we understand what they’re going through--that there’s a values problem in this country, and that we’re going to do what we can to put ourselves on their side.”

Americans such as Agnes Shelton, 32, a homemaker from Greeneville, Tenn., echo that sense:

“It’s hard to say where the government should start at. If they would even honor families being together instead of separate” it would be an improvement.

But how much help Americans want, Lieberman adds, “is not yet clear.” Inside Congress, he says, “we’re hesitant to go too far.”

Nevertheless, the perceived values crisis has become a potent electoral issue for politicians across the spectrum. Four years ago, Republican Vice President Dan Quayle ignited acrimonious debate when he criticized television’s Murphy Brown, an unmarried woman, for having a child.

These days, Clinton regularly makes the same point, decrying out-of-wedlock births and popular entertainment that glamorizes sex and single parenthood. He exhorts Americans to teach virtue in public schools, to stay together as families, to be better parents and to “overcome the notion that self-gratification is more important than our obligation to others.”

And Clinton appears to have met with some success in laying claim to issues that traditionally have belonged to Republicans. The Times Poll found that 39% of respondents say they believe that Democrats have the best ideas for handling family values and morality, while 37% favor Republicans’ views.

Many Americans appear willing to let politicians take the debate much further than it has gone in decades. They are urging state and national legislators to pass laws addressing what most see as the cause of declining values today--the breakdown of the family:

* In several states, legislatures are debating restrictions on the rights of couples with children to divorce.

* Congress has proposed to cut off welfare payments to women who bear additional children out of wedlock, and many states are proceeding with experimental programs to do so.

* States have adopted aggressive programs to track down divorced spouses who do not pay child support.

* Many politicians say they are determined to get rid of the marriage penalty that is a byproduct of the federal income tax system. Some propose offering stay-at-home spouses tax breaks.

Personal Decisions

On the home front, the debate over the nation’s moral standards is less public and less clamorous. But when parents take steps to act on their convictions at home, their actions may well have the greatest impact, for it is here that most Americans agree that children learn their values.

While Americans remain reluctant to subject their own behavior to criticism or limitations, many are wrestling with personal decisions that they know have broader social consequences. And many, moved by the conviction that public virtue must begin in private, are making decisions they might not have made in the prevailing climate of a decade ago.

Thus when parents stay together for the sake of their children, when they attend school meetings about curriculum changes, when an unmarried woman decides not to have a baby on her own, or a man decides that an office assignment should not take precedence over his daughter’s soccer tournament, each--wittingly or not--has taken a stand in a debate over personal and public values.

Americans have always made personal choices with powerful public consequences. In the current ferment over values, however, many are explicitly considering broader social concerns as factors in their personal decisions.

That is the kind of decision Mike Rademacher, a farmer in Longmont, Colo., and his wife, Vicki, made some years ago. Parents of children who are now 14 and 7, the Rademachers decided that Vicki should quit her job as a secretary, sacrificing an income that in many years outstripped her husband’s, so that the children would have a parent available at any time.

“Parental involvement is the backbone of our society, and that’s been lost” in an economy in which a second income is often necessary to “afford the basics or buy the extras,” said Mike Rademacher, one of several Times Poll respondents who discussed his views with a reporter. “It was our decision that raising our family was more important than the monetary value” of Vicki’s income.

It is a choice, he says, that he would like to see more parents make, although he sees no role for government in prodding such decisions. “It’d be good for everybody,” he said, “especially the kids.”

To many experts, the public policy debates that swirl around the values issues are bellwethers of a larger movement: Americans, they say, appear ready to forfeit some measure of their cherished freedoms in the interest of restoring a lost sense of community.

The search for that new balance point may be hinted at in the Times Poll. Asked if they would be willing to abridge civil liberties--such as censoring television--to improve the nation’s moral climate, 17% said they would not and more than twice as many--35%--said they would.

As Americans experiment with new ways to restore their sense of lost community and family values, some see a corner turned.

Brenda Clark, principal of Azalea Elementary School in St. Petersburg, Fla., has struggled to improve the quality of teaching and to restore a sense of accountability among students and teachers. Her latest bid to improve the learning environment involves mandatory uniforms for kids starting in September. She has been heartened by the reaction.

“I think people are saying, ‘Enough! We’ve had enough of this! Let’s get back to what is right and good,’ ” she said. “I think we’ve hit bottom and are heading back.”

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Verdicts on Values

An overwhelming majority of Americans say they are dissatisfied with the nation’s moral values these days. They cite the breakdown of the family unit as one of the top reasons for their discontent. Therefore, it is not surprising that many agree that it is better to raise children in a home where there are two parents and that divorce should be made more difficult to obtain.

Satisfied or dissatisfied?

Would you say you are satisfied or dissatisfied with moral values these days?

Neutral/Don’t know: 2%

Satisfied: 20%

Dissatisfied: 78%

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Why they’re dissatisfied

Why are you dissatisfied with the nation’s moral values? (among respondents who say they are dissatisfied; two answers accepted; net answers shown)

Breakdown in family: 47%

Lack of community involvement: 34%

Crime: 12%

Too much sex/violence in movies/TV: 11%

Lack of religion: 5%

Schools not strict enough/should teach civics: 5%

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Parents’ role

Do you agree or disagree with the following statement: “Parents today are not talking enough responsibility for teaching their kids moral values?”

Agree: 93%

Disagree: 5%

Don’t know: 2%

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Two-parent families

Do you agree or disagree with the following statement: “It’s always best for children to be raised in a home where a married man and woman are living together as father and mother?”

Agree: 71%

Disagree: 28%

Don’t know: 1%

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Poll also found . . .

42% believe divorce should be more difficult to obtain (9% say easier).

83% believe the way TV shows depict sex tends to encourage immorality.

91% of parents have rules limiting what the children can watch or listen to.*

Source: Los Angeles Times Poll of 1,734 adults nationwide, taken April 13-16. The margin of error is plus or minus 3 percentage points.

Note: Numbers may not add up to 100% where more than one response was accepted or not all answer categories are shown.

* Parents with children under 18 responded to this question.