Parenting and politics: giving new shape to 'family values.'

Christian Century, July 29, 1998 by Mary Stewart Van Leeuwen

As a team, West and Hewlett have some rhetorical advantages over other writers on the family. She is a white female of moderate feminist sensibilities. He is an African American male with a proven record of calling for black empowerment. They have set aside (without downgrading) their particular agendas in order to galvanize a larger constituency on behalf of reempowered parenting. That kind of combination is likely to catch the attention of people who have stopped listening to unnuanced feminist and Afrocentric arguments.

The British-born Hewlett adds a welcome international perspective. Most American writers on social issues simply assume that the U.S. is the center of the universe and that its problems and solutions set the standard for every other country. So it is enlightening to be told, for example, that France's and Britain's child poverty rates of 4 and 8 percent would be 21 and 26 percent respectively without government tax and transfer policies favoring families. By contrast, government action in America reduces child poverty by a mere 2 percent, from 22 to 20 percent which is still the highest rate of all the rich nations. Such comparisons `also mean that globalization pressures, which affect Western democracies more or less equally, cannot be invoked as the sole reason for America's failure to help children thrive.

Another rhetorical strength lies in the authors' avoidance of the self-righteous tone that pervades some books on the family by conservatives and liberals alike. They alternate argument and analysis with personal reflections and even confessions of weakness. West and Hewlett both grew up in the postwar era, he in a segregated black neighborhood of Sacramento, she in a Welsh mining village in economic decline. Both agree that racism, sexism and classism pervaded their young lives to varying degrees, and they have no desire to whitewash that era or return to it. But they insist on rescuing some essential wheat from the better-documented chaff of the 1950s.

For West, the presence of intact, hard-working families and the network of clubs, churches and sports leagues made segregation easier to bear and gave him the education, vision and self-confidence to join the civil rights movement as a young adult. Moreover, the even-handedness of the GI Bill enabled West's father and many of his peers to buy a home, get a college education and obtain health insurance--all of which gave economic mobility to African-Americans even under segregation.

Similar supports helped Hewlett thrive amid food shortages and the decline of the Welsh mining industry--and under the stigma of having the wrong accent. While national rationing required British adults to endure a spartan lifestyle, children received food and health care and mothers were given allowances. Equally important, her parents' personal and academic attention helped Hewlett become the first student from her high school to attend Cambridge University. It is this combination of structural and cultural supports for child-rearing that the authors wish to recover, without losing the gains won in the past 30 years for women and people of color.