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Unrealistic family myths - myths distort public views of marriage, divorce, unwed mothers and sex - Brief Article
USA Today (Society for the Advancement of Education), Dec, 1997
According to Stephanie Coontz, professor of history and human values, Evergreen State College; Olympia, Wash., and author of The Way We Really Are: Coming to Terms with America's Changing Families, the public's views of marriage, divorce, sex, and unwed mothers are distorted by longstanding myths.
Myth: A return to more traditional family values and gender roles would save many marriages and protect children.
Reality: Many problems usually blamed on the "breakdown of the traditional family" exist not because! we have changed too much, but because we haven't changed enough. The failure of men to share housework and child care with their partners, for example, is a primary source of overload for working mothers and a major cause of marital conflict.
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Although having the wife quit work while the kids are young may have worked for couples in the 1950s, backsliding into traditional gender roles after the birth of a child tends to destabilize modern marriages, often sowing the seeds of a future divorce. Women get depressed, and men are cut off from crucial early experiences in becoming competent fathers. Men who accept traditional roles of male-breadwiner/female-nurtuer are the ones most likely to abandon children after divorce or remarriage. Fathers with egalitarian gender attitudes and a stronger identity as parents, by contrast, are more likely to maintain contact with their children following a divorce, and even after remarriage.
Myth: Families of the past didn't have problems like families do today.
Reality: Desertion. child abuse, spousal battering, and alcohol or drug addiction always have troubled significant numbers of families, and many of today's problems are in comparison with where we ought to be, not where we used to be. More students graduate from high school today than ever, and test scores have improved steadily since the 1950s. Yet, we haven't improved our curriculum and school effectiveness as much as most of our main rivals in the global economy Child poverty is lower today than in the 1950s, but it has been rising since 1973, and the U.S. now is in last place among 18 Western industrial nations in the percentage of children living in poverty It's also worth noting that the abuse of women and children once were legal rights of the household head Not until the end of the 19th century did courts reject the right of a husband to beat his wife and children.
Myth: The 1950s male-breadwinner family was the traditional form in America.
Reality: Not until the 1920s did a majority of children come to live in a home where the husband was the breadwinner. the wife was a full-time homemaker, and the kids could go to school instead of working for wages. The 1950s family reversed a 100-year trend of rising divorce rates, failing fertility, and increasing educational equity for men and women. The resumption of those trends after 1960 was more in line with historical norms.
Myth: The sexual revolution of the 1960s caused the rise in unwed motherhood.
Reality: The sharpest rate of increase in unwed motherhood occurred between 1940 and 1958, when it tripled from 7.1 births per 1,000 unmarried women to 21.2. The rate leveled off from 1960 to 1975, then started to climb again, doubling to 45.2 unwed births per 1,000 unmarried women in 1992. This obviously is a long-term trend that predated the sexual revolution.
The age of marriage for women is at an all time high. Women who marry at an older age are less likely to divorce and more likely to have economic, emotional, and educational resources that benefit their children. They also face a longer period when they are "at risk" for an unmarried pregnancy. Combined with falling rates of marital fertility, the rising age of marriage means that a significant percentage of children will continue to be born out of wedlock even if rates of childbearing by unwed females decrease. This is not a trend that can be wished or "shamed" away.
Myth: The rise in pregnancy among young teens is a result of today's sexual revolution and shows the dangers of women's liberation.
Reality: Men over age 20 father five times more births among junior high school girls and two and a half times more births among senior high school girls than do the girls' male peers When the mother is 12 years old or younger, the father's average age is 22. These girls may be responding to new sexual options, but they are doing so within a very old pattern of unequal, even exploitative, power relations. Three-fourths of girls who have sex before age 14 say they were coerced, and research suggests that a majority of teens who give birth have been physically or sexually abused at some point in their past.
Myth: Children of divorced or unwed mothers are almost sure to fail.
Reality: While divorce sometimes causes serious problems for children, it is not always good for parents to stay together "for the sake of the kids." There is much wider variation among children from single-parent families, including never-married ones, than there is between the averages for each category. It's how a family acts that really counts, not the makeup. The number of times you eat dinner with your kids every week is a better guide to how well they'll turn out than the number of parents at the dinner table. A mother's educational status has more influence on her child's future achievement than her marital status.
