A new plan for the family

Public Interest, Spring, 1993 by Rchard T. Gill, T. Grandon Gill

IN 1991, the much-publicized Rockefeller Report(*) declared that "the family is and should remain society's primary institution for bringing children into the world and for supporting their growth and development throughout childhood."

Nearly everyone agrees. Unfortunately, the American family is not fulfilling this objective. It is not doing so "throughout childhood," and it is not even doing so for infants and toddlers.

If we look at intact families with children under age six, we find that in the majority of these families both parents are working. Fathers almost always work full-time, and two-thirds of working mothers do, too. Care of their children is left to others.

These are intact families. But fathers are fleeing the home in increasing numbers. Despite much talk of the new caring, nurturing father, the central fact in recent years is the growing absence of the father, whether because of illegitimacy, divorce, or desertion. In 1988, over one-third of children under eighteen were living without the presence of the biological father. By 1990, nearly 10 percent of American children (6.2 million) were living without either parent.

Adding the final touch to the picture, there are important pressures to adopt public policies that would further reduce the role of the family as the "primary institution" for raising young children. Federal legislation passed in 1990 encourages out-of-home day care. And the family-leave legislation passed earlier this year, though admirable in its intent to foster in-home care for newborns, also serves as an incentive for parents to return to their jobs within a few weeks of childbirth.

Is this, then, the end of the matter? The end of the historic link between families and young children? Is "the problem," as Isabel Sawhill put it in a recent Brookings Institution report, simply "that no one knows how to fix the family"?

In this article, we consider one important step that might be taken to strengthen families with young children. We call it a Parental Bill of Rights.

Older men and younger mothers

In recent decades, American society has created a dramatically new life sequence for the average citizen. This new life sequence is the result of two major changes: (1) the increasingly early and lengthy retirement of older men, and (2) the increasingly active labor force participation of women.

In the case of older men, official estimates are that labor force participation for males over age sixty-four has plummeted from 68 percent in 1890 to 17 percent in 1988. Actually, the change is even more dramatic. Recent research suggests virtually all of the decline in labor force participation has taken place since the 1940s.

Men between fifty-five and sixty-four are also working less. In 1948, 90 percent were working; forty years later, only 67 percent are. Considering that life expectancy rose sharply during the same period, these changes in work patterns can only be described as revolutionary.

The question of why men are leaving the labor force so early is the subject of a vast literature. But the most important reason is clear: Men are retiring earlier because they can afford to. They can afford to because we are a much richer society than we used to be. But they can also afford to retire earlier because of Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, disability insurance, public pensions, and tax-deferred private pensions. Through these programs and others, the U.S. government makes very large payments to elderly citizens. These payments appear particularly large when compared with government payments to young adults and children.

The second key demographic fact is the striking increase in the number of women working, in particular women with young children. If older men often quit work because they can afford to, these young women often work because they can't afford not to.

Betty Friedan once said that women are rushing into the labor force out of "sheer economic necessity," in order to "survive." This argument is buttressed by statistics that show income has grown more slowly for younger than older workers in recent years.

Even so, the concepts of "economic necessity" and "survival" clearly have to be reinterpreted somewhat if we are to take any kind of historical perspective on the matter. Barbara Bergmann, a forceful supporter of the cause of women in the work force, has noted that "a husband in the 1980s commands a salary that is (after accounting for inflation) perhaps four times as large as |that of~ his counterpart at the turn of the century, whose wife did not 'need' to work. If today's family is so well provided for by the salary of the husband alone, in what sense does the family 'need' the wife's paycheck?"

Furthermore, where economic "necessity" would appear to be less--in intact, as opposed to single-parent families, and for educated, as opposed to uneducated women--labor force participation is higher. Of mothers with infants, 68 percent of those with four or more years of college are in the labor force, compared to 30 percent of those who have less than a high school education.