FAMILY QUESTIONS
Allan Carlson
New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Books, 1988
294 pp.
"Among politicians…the family issue has usually been equated with the…so-called 'underclass'…However, this popular reduction of the family issue to a welfare or ethnic matter is grievously misleading. The family in America--black, white, Hispanic, and Asian--is actually in the throes of basic upheaval. A crisis point…may have already been passed."
With those words, Allan Carlson--president of the Rockford Institute, an organization devoted to research primarily on family and cultural topics--opens his new book Family Questions. He then catalogs some of the relevant evidence. The U.S. divorce rate, Carlson points out, rose 140 percent from 1960 to 1981. The rate of first-time marriage fell 30 percent. The birth rate was nearly halved. The nation's net reproduction rate has been negative since 1973. Illegitimate births jumped from 224,000 in 1960 to 715,000 in 1982. The number of legal abortions climbed from 745,000 in 1973 to 1,557,000 in 1981. "Such massive swings in the statistical measures of family life for a nation are unprecedented," states the author.
Family problems
To examine some of the issues involved, Carlson then launches into eighteen separate chapters on specific aspects of the nation's family problem. He covers an impressive range of topics. There are essays on day care, comparable worth, sex roles, depopulation, teen pregnancy, and school-based contraceptive clinics. There are others on working mothers, work at home, farm families, suburbanism, even shopping malls. The elderly, Social Security, child abuse, and youth suicide are also covered.
The standard formula goes like this: Briefly outline a current controversy. Then turn to a detailed rendering of the often obscure history of the issue--for instance, the development of our child abuse laws over the last two centuries, the origins of legal prohibitions on home work, the World War II roots of state day-care centers, the changes in American thinking on sex roles over the decades.
This historical discussion usually makes up the bulk of the chapter. Heavy use is made of quotations from contemporary sources. It is shown that on many questions important to families and family makers, "progressives" have completely switched sides in the last few decades--for instance, from opposing employment of new mothers to encouraging it. Almost always, the position of the American family is found to have deteriorated, and the roots of the problem are often shown to lie far back in American history. Our individualistic culture, our economic structure, as well as specific events like the social shifts of the 1920s and the upheavals of the '30s and '40s, are said to have planted the seed or much of the bitter fruit borne during the '60s and '70s.
Following this lengthy historical examination, some current data are usually presented (perhaps a recent study or two) and a short analysis and discussion of some present aspects of the dilemma are introduced. Then on to the next
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