Tag Archives: family

Strong families, Strong Communities, Strong Nation

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Last night in the State of the Union address, President Obama highlighted the critical importance of early childhood for the well-being of children, their families, communities and the nation.

“Study after study shows that the sooner a child begins learning, the better he or she does down the road.”

It isn’t when a child begins learning, but how and what he or she learns. Learning begins before birth regardless of the choices parents make. What a mother eats and drinks (and smokes) while pregnant affects a child’s learning capacities. From their first moment out of the womb, all children are immersed into a learning environment. The emotional attachment that children form (or fail to form) to their parents in the first year of life has a lifelong effect on learning. The tone and number of words that they hear in the first three years of life furnish them with the tools with which to explore the world.

In short, the President’s call to make preschool available to all children is laudable. Preschool really can be a wonderful learning environment for children. But the really great gains are made in interventions with families (not just children) even earlier in life. After all, without intervention to support parents, preschool is not prevention; it is remediation.

The power of universities

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Recently I read my nine-year-old a biography of John Stott. (In 2005, he was named by Time Magazine as one of the 100 most influential people in the world.) Stott’s biographer, Julia Cameron, emphasized Stott’s life-long commitment to university students with these words:

[University] Students will soon become schoolteachers, doctors, lawyers, lecturers, writers, and journalists. Some will go on to serve in government. All these people influence the way others think. To change a nation, you have to begin in the universities. (p104)

This is true, and Dr. Stott placed wise and persevering effort on universities. But to truly change a nation, you have to begin in the family in the earliest years of life because those formative years are the most powerful predictor of whether a child will enter university. If you wait until university, the underclasses will always be underrepresented, and nations will not change. Indeed by waiting until university, the educational class system becomes even more entrenched.

Given the cultural power that universities (and especially elite universities) have, that is probably the point at which students must learn the inordinate cultural power of the family in the earliest years of life. If this is done, both the power of the university and the power of early formation in the family are employed for the common good.

Family as the cornerstone of society

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Today I saw a quotation attributed to Lyndon B. Johnson posted on Facebook. It caught my attention, so I traced down the source: his commencement address to Howard University on June 4, 1965. It is well worth reading in its entirety – especially in our age of sound bytes.

In order to entice you, let me give you an aperitif of that speech, and a commentary on its implications for public policy and civic engagement.

Perhaps most important [as an obstacle to the well being of poor black Americans]–its influence radiating to every part of life–is the breakdown of the Negro family structure. For this, most of all, white America must accept responsibility. It flows from centuries of oppression and persecution of the Negro man. It flows from the long years of degradation and discrimination, which have attacked his dignity and assaulted his ability to produce for his family.

This, too, is not pleasant to look upon. But it must be faced by those whose serious intent is to improve the life of all Americans.

Only a minority–less than half–of all Negro children reach the age of 18 having lived all their lives with both of their parents. At this moment, tonight, little less than two-thirds are at home with both of their parents. Probably a majority of all Negro children receive federally-aided public assistance sometime during their childhood.

The family is the cornerstone of our society. More than any other force it shapes the attitude, the hopes, the ambitions, and the values of the child. And when the family collapses it is the children that are usually damaged. When it happens on a massive scale the community itself is crippled.

So, unless we work to strengthen the family, to create conditions under which most parents will stay together–all the rest: schools, and playgrounds, and public assistance, and private concern, will never be enough to cut completely the circle of despair and deprivation.

President Johnson cites other powerful forces, including the terrifying force of slums in cultural formation.

Men are shaped by their world. When it is a world of decay, ringed by an invisible wall, when escape is arduous and uncertain, and the saving pressures of a more hopeful society are unknown, it can cripple the youth and it can desolate the men.

Yet among these and other forces, he puts his finger on the family. Here is what I think needs to be noticed at this point in history.

  1. White responsibility. President Johnson recognized the culpable cultural force of centuries of oppression. He did not look within the family exclusively when assigning responsibility, but addressed both personal and social responsibility.
  2. Family culture. The president who was known for his “Great Society” programs recognized that family was the cornerstone of society.
  3. Crippled community. LBJ saw that individuals aren’t islands, and nor are families. Communities where the families have collapsed are relational shanty-towns – and children born into this bear the relational scars.
  4. Work to strengthen the family. This was the sine qua non of renewal and restoration without which “all the rest: schools, and playgrounds, and public assistance, and private concern, will never be enough.”

There is, I think, one fatal flaw in the president’s reasoning. It is the notion that we can “create conditions under which most parents will stay together.” He was entirely right about the power of the family for cultural formation. He was spot on concerning the importance of unity and durability of marriage. He nailed the social collapse caused by entire communities in which the family fails. But, I would submit that it is impossible to “create conditions” for marital success without an animating Story that answers the question, “Why should I persevere when it is hard and I don’t want to?”

The family situation in 2012 is worse than it was in 1965. In addition to higher rates of divorce, lower rates of marriage, and higher rates of children born outside marriage, we have prison populations that could hardly have been imagined in 1965. In the intervening years, multiple generations have been initiated into patterns of social life in which marriage is foreign and almost incomprehensible.

The question now stands: Who will have the courage to offer a Story that can answer the Why question with beauty and power? Without that, we will only see an increase of what Kay Hymowitz has already chronicled as Marriage and Caste in America: Separate and Unequal Families in a Post-Marital Age.