Keynote Address: Inventing Today's Families, by Stephanie Coontz

By Chris Beels

Stephanie Coontz is an historian of the family, Professor of Family Studies at Evergreen State College, Olympia Washington, and co-founder and president-elect of the Council on Contemporary Families. Her address raised the question, What does the discipline of history have to contribute to the practice of family therapy? Quite a lot, as her fast-paced, closely argued and carefully qualified address made clear. Coontz has already done our field a considerable service by demonstrating in her most popular book, The Way We Never Were (1992) that the supposedly modal family of the1950s (wage-earner Dad, child-rearing Mom and two children in the little house) was the fleeting idealization of family sociologists in a time of much dogmatic theory but little observation or counting. Her talk to AFTA was an update and a meditation on The Social Origins of Private Life (my own favorite of her books) in which she considered: what are the historical roots of the local conditions with which modern families have to contend, and what might be the consequences for therapy of externalizing those conditions?

After reviewing a number of dogmas from the past (such as the idea in the 1920s that too much cuddling over-stimulated babies) she noted that, peculiar as they were to their times, none of these ideas appear to have ruined a generation, as their critics predicted. In thinking about such folk beliefs, we should not discard them all as merely relative to their times, but, rather, inquire what it was about these ideas that recommended them to the groups in which they occurred? What works for one group does not work for another. Saving for education, a clear value in white middle class America, may not work for the social networks that support unemployed African-Americans, where generosity with money may be more important than saving it. What would be risky sexual behavior in middle-class American young women may be rational in some Haitian groups where the prospect of "stable" marriage actually may cut a woman off from the more reliable support of kin. So we must look at the calculations about resources that families actually have to make, and here history is an illuminating guide. One thing the 1950s sociologists did get right is that for the previous one hundred years, marriage, based on the assumption that there was a male wage laborer to support it, was the principal institution for consolidating property, controlling social and sexual affiliation, forming alliances, redistributing wealth and property (especially to children) and coordinating the division of labor between the genders. Under that powerful system, feelings and private ambitions were secondary. But as open institutions such as schools. universities, corporations, markets, and others took over the functions of the family, marriage was reduced in its scope to the psychological support of the married pair and the nurturance of children. Our profession was created, in the second half of the century, out of the residual fact that people labeled themselves dysfunctional because they expected more from marriage (intimacy, mutual inspiration etc.) at precisely the time when it was able to offer less (real economic security, stable social position, etc.).

We are able to expect more because the old ways no longer work. Women can support themselves, and both they and the men have benefited from the equality ¾ the marriages are "better" ¾ promoting an idealization of "intimacy" just at the moment when the workplace takes over as the center of society. The forty-hour week, for which the workers of the '40s fought, in order to secure the leisure to be with their families ¾ is gone. Both spouses work longer hours, but the workplace still assumes that every worker has a wife at home to take care of everything else. Looking at long historical trends, Coontz observed that divorce is here to stay. It has been rising steadily since the 1890s, a trend well established before the factors that were supposed to have "caused" it came along (sexual revolution, more working women, etc.). Unwed parenting is also steadily increasing, propelled by women's independence before late marriage, and the greater number of those women who are deciding that they have options independent of men. Because of both these trends, more and more children will not be raised in the first-marriage conjugal family that the '50s model assumes. We need to look at child rearing in this new context.

Several trends in child rearing are on a collision course. As older and older children stay at home for more competitive education, social adolescence is extended, while physical puberty (in girls) is occurring at younger ages. At the same time, parents are divorcing, dating and mating, so that there are often different sexual rules for adults and adolescents in the family ¾ a recipe for hostile interaction and "parental failure."

Parents are providing the environment in which youth are segregated from adult responsibilities. And what youth can see clearly in the adult world for which they are being "prepared" is a failure of equity: a disconnection between work and reward, in a world where the rich live on three to four hundred times the wealth of the average worker. This is a family problem: the deferred sense of justice and trust, encouraging a belief in inequality and individualism, in a de-politicized culture that offers no means of protest and no contact with adults to whom they can express their resentment ¾ other than their parents.

And yet parents are spending more time with their children than ever before. These problems are not the result of their bad choices, or something in the individual psyche, or family dynamics. They are better seen as historical changes that have turned the functions of the economy against the interests of the family, by encouraging a belief in the amassing of private wealth rather than in the importance of the public good. By understanding such threats to what they are trying to do, families can devote their ingenuity to being more forgiving, of themselves and especially their children, and more truly productive of change towards their own choices.

Christian Beels is on the faculty of the Ackerman Institute in New York, and has written "Another Story," a history of narrative in psychotherapy, to be published this fall.