Giving Context to Issues ‘90s Families Face

As it lurches from unwed mothers to divorce to nannies, the nation’s ongoing debate over family values has sunk to the level of a “food fight” and desperately needs a grounding in solid research, according to a new group of academics.

“Every time a family issue comes up in the current climate, it’s torn out of context and people act as if there’s no historical background that helped produce these dilemmas. Then we get the simple solutions, or the ones that apportion blame,” said Stephanie Coontz, a history professor at Evergreen State College in Olympia, Wash., one of 90 members of the new Council on Contemporary Families, which is hosting its first conference starting Friday in Washington, D.C.

Other members of the council include research psychologists, sociologists and anthropologists from colleges and universities across the country. They complain that serious researchers have had neither the time nor the funding to organize and inform the debate, unlike the Institute for American Values, an influential New York think tank led by David Blankenhorn, which has promoted the return of the two-parent family through what council members call oversimplified and politicized “sound bites.” Council members include researchers, academicians and clinicians from USC and UC Berkeley to Rutgers, Georgetown and the University of Pennsylvania.

Of particular concern to council members are statistical correlations presented as causes. Just because single-parent homes are correlated with poverty, it doesn’t mean that single parents cause poverty, for instance. Because rises in the divorce rate accompanied rises in teenage drug use, it doesn’t mean that divorce causes teenagers to use drugs. Such statistics however, have been used mainly by conservatives to promote marriage as the best solution to a variety of social problems.

In the quest to solve problems correlated with changing families, the public needs to understand that not all divorces nor all single parents nor all marriages are alike, said council co-chair Constance Ahrons, a USC sociology professor.

Council members said they do not promote any particular family form since each has its strengths and weaknesses. They said that in recent years, nontraditional and ethnically diverse families have become the new mainstream. In order to help them meet their unique challenges, lawmakers, judges and the public need more realistic and nuanced information about modern marriage, divorce and parenting, they said.

The council aims to set up a network of state and regional groups whose members will speak at local hearings and write op-ed articles in response to issues as they arise.

The activists have organized at a time when many states are now tackling legislation to make divorce more difficult, or to dismantle long-term welfare for single mothers. Recently, for instance, Louisiana adopted a new “covenant marriage” that allows couples to choose more binding vows as an antidote to divorce. In California, legislators are considering similar reforms that would bring back fault-based divorce as a way to keep marriages together.

Across the country unwed mothers are facing welfare reform, while at the same time the recent case of a Massachusetts au pair convicted of killing a child in her care brought criticism of mothers who don’t stay home with their children.

“Working mothers are told to stay home. Welfare mothers are told to work. It’s insane,” Ahrons said. That kind of blaming “camouflages the major issues,” such as industries and corporations changing their work expectations for fathers, she said.

While serious scholars themselves disagree on the causes and impacts of divorce, Ahrons said the bulk of evidence indicates divorce is associated with many family behaviors both before and after a marriage ends that create problems for children. “The assumption among the general public is that marriages are good and one day people get irresponsible and divorce,” she said.

Even aside from divorce, Coontz said marriage plays a smaller role than ever before for women because they tend to marry later and live longer than men. “It’s not a question of whether it’s good or bad. This is a long-range historical trend that we have to come to grips with or we’re going to have tragedy after tragedy,” she said.

Similarly frustrated with simplistic solutions to complex problems, leaders in both the American Bar Assn. and the American Psychological Assn. last year approved a proposal to establish a university-based research center to provide more thorough and objective information on marriage and divorce. Plans to house the institute at UC Riverside have been met with enthusiasm by administrators and academics including Ross Parke, a nationally known researcher on fathers, said Susan Nauss Exon, director of law and public policy at UC Riverside extension.

“There’s a huge need for legitimate research,” said Los Angeles lawyer Ira Lurvey, former chair of the American Bar Assn.’s family law section.

Too many think tanks have become associated with the political right or left, he said. “When you see the studies, you see how skewed they are, as if they know the conclusion before they started the study and go out and advocate for it.”

The weekend’s conference will help firm up the council’s first priorities, said co-chair Marianne Walters, a Washington, D.C., family therapist. While members hold diverse political views, Walters said she hopes the council will decide to confront the “antidivorce backlash” and father-dominated-household movement as represented by the Promise Keepers. “We are in ideological warfare as well as a data- or research-based confrontation,” she said. “We are presented with this whole right-wing family values group and they’re not afraid of being ideological. You begin to be in a defensive position almost.”