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A Manifesto In Support of Parents

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by H.J. Cummins

This country is at war with its parents, according to a new book, and the casualties are the children. Families have to mobilize in their own defense, the two authors declare. The book's demands are consistent with its combat metaphor: Instead of pummeling parents, this nation should offer them the same support it did another group who ensured its future -- the soldiers of World War II.

The time has come for "A Parents' Bill of Rights," write Sylvia Ann Hewlett and Cornel West in "The War Against Parents: What We Can Do for America's Beleaguered Moms and Dads" (Houghton Mifflin, $24). Their idea is inspired by the GI Bill of Rights, the amalgam of federal supports that helped 2.2 million returning veterans go to college and 12 million Americans buy homes or businesses.

The authors' evidence of assault is grim and barely challenged by any commentator on the conservative-liberal continuum: Murder and suicide rates, drug use, poverty and ill health are worse than ever among American children.

The glitch, all sides say, is getting America's 62 million parents to agree on solutions. Parents agree they want better schools, for example, but parent groups are fighting in Congress about whether the answer is more money for public schools or vouchers for private schools. Instead of a unified front, parents are picking one another off in a version of friendly fire.

Part of the problem is that parenting groups have to do so much work simply to survive, said Suzanne Jones, the executive editor of the Single Parent Resource Center, based in Manhattan. Funding is sporadic, said Jones, who has worked with parenting groups in East Hampton and Oyster Bay, and viable services come and go.

Earlier efforts to create a unified, national parents' lobby failed, among them grassroots initiatives such as Parent Action, whose founders included pediatrician and author T. Berry Brazelton and activist Bernice Weissbourd, who also founded Family Focus, a social service organization in Chicago.

The New York organization of the Family Resource Coalition of America has joined in an initiative with parenting organizations in seven other states, including Connecticut. Gail Koser, senior program adviser for the New York group, said the family-support agenda ensures that parents' voices are heard at state and local levels.

Hewlett and West argue that government and the marketplace first make life hard for parents and then blame them for the sad shape of America's youth. Hewlett is the author of "When the Bough Breaks: The Cost of Neglecting Our Children" (Harper Perennial Library, 1992), an accounting of childhood distresses in America. A resident of Manhattan, she also founded the National Parenting Association Manhattan. West is a professor of Afro-American Studies at Harvard University.

Some of their findings:

Families have been the "shock absorbers" in the hyper-competitive push of contemporary business: Americans are working an average of 163 hours a year more than they were 15 years ago, but middle-class wages are dropping.
Families, especially poor families, get socked by taxes. The federal tax exemption for a child, now $2,650 a year, is worth only half what it was in the late 1940s. Also, some of the nation's most fundamental tax policies, including Social Security taxes and mortgage deductions, are regressive. For example: A family in the 15 percent tax bracket, paying $5,000 in mortgage interest a year, gets a $750 tax break. A family in the top tax bracket (39.6 percent), gets a $1,980 tax break.
A "virulent strain of parent bashing" runs through pop psychology today. Titles like "Toxic Parents" and "How to Avoid Your Parents' Mistakes When You Raise Your Children" are demoralizing parents. Parents are told they love too much. Then they're told they love too little. They can't win.
The entertainment industry invades and degrades families. Besides longstanding concerns about sex and violence in mainstream entertainment, there's also growing worry about the countless images of inept or evil parents: "I Stole My 12-Year-Old's Boyfriend" on the Jerry Springer talk show, for example, and the movies "Home Alone" and "Honey, I Shrunk the Kids."

Welcome to my life, said Joann Ellis when she heard "The War Against Parents" inventory of problems. "There are many ways I feel I'm in an us-them thing," said Ellis, the mother of four in St. Paul, Minn.

Among "them" are designer labels. Ellis and her husband strictly regulate what movies and TV shows the children can watch. Still, those compelling ads for $150 Nikes reach them somehow.

"Them" are grocery stores. When Ellis left one recently, she was $200 poorer and had little to show for it.

"Them" is the IRS. "You get so little break for your children," she said. "It feels like you're penalized for being a parent."

"Them" is whoever is supposed to make health care less a burden to the un-rich. The Ellises pay $300 a month for coverage; the Catholic school where her husband teaches insures only him.

"Very centrally placed in this book is the notion that parents are indispensable," Hewlett said in an interview. "Because if you want to teach a child ethics, compassion, all those deeply important dimensions to life, that has to be done within the family by the parents."

Hewlett and West propose a national movement patterned after the American Association of Retired Persons, which, they say, managed to pull together a huge but heterogeneous force around a common interest -- safeguarding their retirement benefits.

Family historian Stephanie Coontz takes exception to some elements of the book. While she agrees that today's culture is harsh toward families, she sees the same toll on others, including the old and the infirm.

"We are living in an economy, and generally a culture, that is winner take all, devil take the hindmost," said Coontz, author of "The Way We Really Are" (Basic Books, $11) and "The Way We Never Were," (Basic Books, $13), both studies of American families. "And in that kind of economic and cultural setting, anyone who's not stripped down to racing mode, anyone who needs a hand up, has problems."

Coontz sees the various metamorphoses of families as not all decay but in fact a series of tradeoffs. "If you have a disabled child, there certainly has been no better time to be around than now," she said.

She also faults the Hewlett-West book on a couple of statistics: It's true, as they write, that parents now spend considerably less time on child-rearing, she said. But that's because people are having fewer children. Also, she said, parents are spending as much time as ever with their adolescents; the time loss is between teens and other adults.

What Coontz most liked about "The War Against Parents" is its call to turn life from a sprint to a long-distance race, "and to the extent that West and Hewlett talk about rebuilding our social safety net and investing in our future, I think that's wonderful."

This article first appeared in Minneapolis-St. Paul Star Tribune

Copyright 1998, 1999, 2000 Star Tribune. Republished here with the permission of the Star Tribune. No further republication or redistribution permitted without the express written consent of the Star Tribune

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