Disturbing trends
The lives of children in industrialized countries
improved significantly in the period immediately following the Second World
War. Indeed, the quarter-century between 1950 and 1975 has been called the
golden age of social development. During those years, sustained economic growth
combined with an expanding welfare state and stable families to dramatically
improve the life chances of children. Western Europe achieved the fastest
reduction in infant mortality ever recorded, lowering the rate per 1,000 live
births from 44 in 1950 to 9 in 1990. At the same time, secondary school
enrolment rates increased significantly, rising from 35 to 76 per cent of that
age group in Italy and from 39 to 98 per cent in the then Federal Republic of
Germany. (10)
In the mid-1970s, structural conditions began to
change and governments — particularly in the Anglo-American world — became less
attentive to the needs of children. Progress in child welfare slackened and in
some key areas trends were dramatically reversed. The old scourge of child
poverty re-emerged, and this time material deprivation was compounded by more
complicated problems, including underperformance at school, substance abuse,
out-of-wedlock births, teenage suicides and severe eating disorders. Now, even
privileged youngsters seem increasingly overwhelmed “by drugs, pregnancy, bad
grades and bad jobs.” (11)
The factors behind these disturbing developments are
complex. Economic growth slowed significantly in the mid-1970s. In market
economies, growth in gross domestic product (GDP) per capita fell sharply from
an average of 4-5 per cent in the 1950s and 1960s to 1-2 per cent in the 1980s.
The slow-down in growth was associated with increases in inflation and
unemployment, and with growing inequality and low pay — all of which had a
detrimental effect on the circumstances of families with children. Falling wage
rates were especially harmful.
Shrinking wages
The period from 1975 to 1990 saw a startling increase
in the number of lowwage jobs, particularly in Anglo-American economies, where
poor educational standards and inadequate ‘human capital’ encouraged
deindustrialization and the proliferation of low-productivity service-sector
jobs. In the United States, for example, the male wage fell 19 per cent between
1973 and 1987. Wives and mothers flooded into the labour market in an attempt
to shore up family income, but most American families ultimately found
themselves working much harder for approximately the same income. In 1988,
average family income was only 6 per cent higher than in 1973, even though a
third more married women were now in the labour force. (12) In many households,
one well-paid factory job has been replaced by two marginal service-sector
jobs. Burger King simply does not pay as well as the Ford Motor Company.
Congresswoman Pat Schroeder, in describing the need for modern families to work
twice as hard to stay even, has noted that “like the hamster in the wheel, they
run and run and run, but they’re still at the bottom.” (13)
The wage crisis has not been confined to the United
States. In Australia, for example, average real earnings declined by 29
Australian dollars a week between 1984 and 1989 — despite the fact that the
Australian gross national product (GNP) grew at a rate of 4.5 per cent a year
during that period. As might be expected, declining wages triggered a rapid
rise in the number of working wives and mothers. Between 1980 and 1989, the
number of married women in the paid labour force grew by 40 per cent in
Australia. Among couples with dependent children, the proportion with both
partners employed rose from 42 per cent at the beginning of the decade to 57
per cent at the end.
In contrast with the shrinking wage levels typical of
the Anglo-American world, many European countries experienced a steady increase
in wage rates in the last decade. For instance, in the then Federal Republic of
Germany, real hourly earnings in manufacturing increased by 1.3 per cent a year
during the 1980s, while in France, wages increased by 0.9 per cent a year. (14)
Time and the two-income
family
Largely because of these economic pressures, which
have been particularly acute in the Anglo-American world, parents are devoting
much more time to earning a living and much less time to their children than they
did a generation ago. Victor Fuchs has shown that, in the United States,
parental time available to children fell appreciably between 1960 and 1986: “On
average, in white households with children, there were 10 hours less per week
of potential parental time ... while the decrease for black households with
children was even greater, approximately 12 hours per week.” (15) A prime cause
of this fall-off in parental time has been the enormous shift of women into the
labour force. In 1960, 30 per cent of American women worked; by 1988, 66 per
cent were in the paid labour force.
In Europe, trends have been similar. By the late
1980s, 62 per cent of British women, 80 per cent of Swedish women and 59 per
cent of French women were in the paid workforce. University of Maryland
sociologist John Robinson has shown that the more hours mothers are employed,
the fewer hours they can give to ‘primary care activities’ such as playing with
and talking to children; dressing, feeding and chauffeuring them; and helping
them with homework. According to Robinson, employed mothers spend an average of
six hours each week in primary child-care activities —just under half the time
logged by non-employed mothers and twice that of fathers (employed or
non-employed). Robinson points out that wage labour not only eats into primary
care but also influences the total amount of contact parents have with their
children. The data show that the amount of ‘total contact time’ (defined as
‘all time parents spend with children, including time spent doing other
things’) has dropped 40 per cent during the last quartercentury. (16) The drop
is significant because many of the things parents do with children, whether it
is visiting grandma or shopping for groceries, play an important role in
building strong parent-child relationships and in giving families a shared
identity.
It is important to stress that growing economic
pressure on families with children, particularly young families and single
parents, is at the heart of the parental time shortage. Many families are
squeezed on two fronts, dealing with falling wages, while at the same time they
are also facing sharply higher living costs. In the United States, mortgage
payments now eat up 29 per cent of median family income, up from 17percent in
1970, while college tuition consumes 40 per cent of family income, up from 29
per cent in 1970. (17)
Trends are similar in the United Kingdom. House
prices there tripled between 1970 and 1990; indeed, for first-time house
buyers, mortgage payments now consume 40 per cent of net household income, up
from 18 per cent in 1970. (18) It is no wonder that most British families need
both parents in the labour force.
Longer work weeks
If children are affected adversely when both parents
work outside the home, their problems are exacerbated by the structural changes
that have increased the number of hoars both mothers and fathers spend on the
job. Americans are working harder than ever. According to a recent survey, the
average work week jumped from 41 hours in 1973 to 47 hours in 1989. (19) In
better-paying, more prestigious jobs, time demands have become truly
impressive. Entrepreneurs in small businesses are now working 57.3 hours a
week; professionals, 52.2 hours a week; and those with incomes over US$50,000 a
year, 52.4 hours a week. A1988 survey by The Wall Street Journal found that 88
per cent of senior executives worked 10 or more hours a day, and 18 per cent
worked 12 or more hours. On average, these top executives were working three
hours a week more than they did 10 years ago and were taking two days less
vacation each year. (20)
These long hours are not the result of some
collective pathology. Rather, there are new and highly rational reasons why
people are working so hard. Harvard University economist Rosabeth Kanter linked
the longer work week with the manner in which the workplace changed in the
deregulated, newly competitive environment of the 1980s. (21)
The most obvious pressure emanates from a new level
of employment insecurity. During much of the 1980s, the United States labour
market was in turmoil. In an effort to become more competitive, hundreds of
corporations rushed to restructure — merging operations, purging employees,
buying this company, selling off that division. In the space of four years, from
1983 to 1987, more than 2 million people saw their jobs disappear or
deteriorate as a result of mergers and acquisitions. No industry was immune.
The semiconductor industry, for example, a steel performer in the early 1980s,
laid off nearly 25,000 employees after losses of US$2 billion in the mid-1980s.
Overall, more than 13 million Americans lost their jobs between 1981 and 1990.
Two thirds of the people laid off eventually found new jobs, but almost half of
the new jobs paid less than the old ones.
Clearly, the threat of unemployment, and the
knowledge that any new job is likely to involve a wage cut, has led many
employees to work longer hours to show how indispensable they are. In the words
of one middle-level manager, “When you see people being laid off all around you
you’d have to be irrational not to put your nose to the grindstone.” (22)
The cult of the workaholic has spread to the United
Kingdom London’s Low Pay Unit reports that the British male now works five hour
more per week than his continental counterpart. A recent survey of 200 British
executives found that they worked an average of 55 hours a week Fewer than half
took their full holiday entitlement, and 25 per cent worked every weekend.
Advertising campaigns for upscale British cars explore the ‘chic’ overtones of
working long hours. In the words of one commercial: “It’s tough at the top.
When you’re indispensable, working late is tin rule rather than the exception.
But look on the bright side, you’ll have the road to yourself on the way home.”
(23)
Long hours seem to have little appeal elsewhere in
Europe, a fact highlighted in a 1992 study of the formation of British
Petroleum multinational office in Brussels. Working hours became a highly
controversial issue among the 40 senior staff. American and British managers
equated long hours with commitment to the corporation. Scandinavian managers
saw long hours as a sign of incompetence, suggesting that employees caught at
their desks after 4.30 p.m. needed help or training And German managers insisted
that employees be judged by the quality of their output rather than by the
simple input of time.
Relaxed European attitudes towards the work week have
been greatly facilitated by a powerful trade union movement that has kept the
issue of shorter hours at the top of the agenda throughout the postwar period.
In bad economic times, unions have resisted the inevitable pressure for longer
hours, arguing that a shorter work week actually combat unemployment by
spreading the work around. Even during the seven downturn of the early and
mid-1980s, weekly hours for most European workers continued to fall. Only
recently, the large German union IG Metal won a 35-hour work week for its
members, a gain that is expected to spread through the German labour force. And
vacation time continues to rise throughout Europe. Recent collective-bargaining
agreements have set annual paid leave at five to six weeks in France and six
weeks in Germany. Contrast this to the American scene, where in 1989, workers
had an average of 16 days off, down from 20 days in 1981.
Moreover, the worlds of work and of the family have
become particularly incompatible in the United States, where children spend 2?
per cent fewer hours in school than their European counterparts, while at the
same time their parents work longer hours and enjoy shorter vacations than
European parents. In the United States, the typical school day lasts six hours
and the school year 180 days, while in Europe the average school day lasts
eight hours and the school year 220 days. The lack of synchronization between
school hours and work hours is hard on youngsters. By and large, the vacuum
left in children’s lives by the retreat of the traditional home-maker has not
been filled with attentive fathers, quality child care, expanded educational
programmes or any other worthwhile activity. In large measure, the void has
been filled by television. The average American teenager now spends four times
as many hours watching television as doing homework.
Stress and strain
So far, the parental time deficit has been discussed
as a decline in the amount of time parents spend with their children. But the
parent-child relationship depends on qualitative as well as quantitative
factors, and in the early 1990s severe time constraints are compounded by
mounting jobrelated stress. In contemporary Anglo-American societies, children
not only have two parents at work, they also have mothers as well as fathers
who routinely work 55-hour weeks and who come home preoccupied and exhausted,
unable to give much of anything to their children. If one has been biting the
bullet all day at the office — meeting deadlines, rushing orders, humouring the
boss—it can be difficult to devote quality time to children in the evening.
Research by Pittman and Brooks has shown that the
hard-edged personality traits cultivated by many successful professionals —
control, decisiveness, aggressiveness, efficiency — can be directly at odds
with the passive, patient, selfless elements in good nurturing. (24) The last
thing a 3-year-old or a 13-year-old needs at 8 o’clock in the evening is a
mother — or father, for that matter — who marches into the house in his or her
power suit, barking orders, and looking and sounding like a drill sergeant.
Compare the ingredients in a recipe for career
success with those of a recipe for meeting the needs of a child, beginning with
the all-important ingredient of time. To succeed in one’s career may require
long hours and consume one’s best energy, leaving little time to spend together
as a family and precious little enthusiasm for the hard tasks of parenting.
Mobility and a prime commitment to oneself are virtues in the job world;
stability, selflessness and a commitment to others are virtues in family life.
Qualities needed foi career success also include efficiency, a con trolling
attitude, an orientation towards the future and an inclination towards
perfection, while their virtual opposites — tolerance for mess and disorder, an
ability to let go, an appreciation of the moment, and an accep tance of
difference and failure — are what is needed for successful parenting.
Not all high achievers display the goal oriented,
time-pressured approach associ ated with career success, and not all good
parents are endowed with unlimited stores of patience and humour. But most
professionals and most parents will recognize soro of these qualities in
themselves. Most are also aware that the aptitudes, skills and talents that
people hone to become successful professionals may not stand them in good stead
when they assume the role of parent. And the struggle to span the divide
between family and work can be painful and fraught with failure for both parent
and child. It is one thing to pound along home at seven o’clock in the evening
and somehow find the time to help a child with a homework assignment; it is
quite something else to summon the energy and the attitudes that enable one to
be a constructive presence. Many high-powered parents find it extremely hard to
switch gears.
It is a telling comment on the state of affairs that
Hallmark, the greeting card company, now markets cards for overcommitted
professional parents who find it difficult to actually see their children.
“Have a super day at school,” chirps one card meant to be left under the cereal
box in the morning. “I wish I were there to tuck you in,” says another,
designed to peek out from behind the pillow at night.
Fallout on children
Recent research has uncovered ominous links between
absentee parents and a range of behavioural problems in children. A 1989 study
that surveyed 5,000 eighth-grade students (14-year-olds) in the San Diego and
Los Angeles areas found that the more hours children took care of themselves
each week, the greater the risk of substance abuse. (25) In fact, latchkey
children as a group were twice as likely to drink alcohol or take drugs as were
children under the supervision of an adult after school. The increased risk of
substance abuse held true regardless of the child’s sex, race, family income,
academic performance or number of resident parents. All that mattered was how
many hours the child was left on his or her own.
Another surprising finding of the southern California
study is that it was the white children from affluent homes who spent the
largest number of hours on their own. Children from upper-income professional
families seem more likely to have mothers as well as fathers who invest long
hours in their careers and come home at 7 or 8 o’clock, tired and distracted.
Absentee fathers
While the welfare of children is being compromised by
a new and more rigorous set of work pressures, it is also being jeopardized by
burgeoning divorce rates, sharp increases in out-of-wedlock births and a
striking rise in the number of fatherless households. All of these disturbing
trends are most pronounced in the Anglo-American world.
The divorce rate in the United States is by far the
highest in the world: In 1990, 5.3 divorces were granted for every 1,000
people. In the United Kingdom, the figure was 3.2; in Canada 2.6; in Sweden
2.4; in France 1.6; and in Italy 0.2. Fifteen million American children, one
quarter of all children under 18, are now growing up without fathers — 10
million as a result of marital breakdown and 5 million as a result of
out-of-wedlock births. The absence of fathers is twice as common as it was a
generation ago, and no relief is on the horizon. In 1960, 11 per cent of
American children lived with their mother alone; by 1989, the figure had
reached 26 per cent. (26)
In the United Kingdom, the trend developed even more
rapidly. During the 1980s, the number of out-of-wedlock births doubled, and by
1990,25 per cent of all babies were born to single mothers. The disintegration
of the traditional family has proceeded at a much more rapid pace in the United
Kingdom than in the rest of Europe.
Despite our new familiarity with family breakdown,
for children, experiencing divorce and single parenthood, as well as the
absence of their fathers, remain major traumas. Over the past decade, research
by Weitzman, Wallerstein, Duncan, Furstenberg and others has shown the effects
of divorce on children to be unexpectedly profound and longlasting.
For one thing, evidence from a number of countries,
especially the United Kingdom and the United States, shows the financial
repercussions of divorce on children to be extremely serious. The economic harm
to children from the divorce of their parents arises from the fact that fathers
generally earn a good deal more than mothers, but in approximately 90 per cent
of cases, children remain with their mothers after divorce. Noncustodial
fathers are, of course, expected to contribute their share to the costs of
raising a child by paying child support to the mother, but a substantial number
of divorcing men (approximately 40 per cent in the United Kingdom and the
United States) walk away from marriage without a child support agreement. Even
when an agreement is in place, child support payments tend to be low and
unreliable. Despite increasingly tough enforcement laws, a recent American
survey found that only 51 per cent of mothers entitled to child support
received the full amount, 25 per cent received partial payment and 23 per cent
received nothing at all. In the United States, US$4.6 billion is now owed by
fathers to the children of divorce. (27)
Along with the problem of collection, there is also
the problem of the low level of child support awards. In the United States, the
average yearly amount ofchildsupportpaidtoa divorced woman and her children is
only US$2,710 a year. Even if the sum is paid regularly, it covers less than a
quarter of the average annual cost of raising one child. Inadequate child
support combines with low female earnings to produce a situation in which the
income of ex-wives and their dependent children plummets after divorce. According
to Duncan and Hoffmann, on average, a woman’s standard of living drops 30 per
cent in the five years after divorce. (28)
While the economic fallout of divorce on children has
received widespread public attention, the emotional and educational consequences
are less well known. There is, however, a great deal of new evidence showing
that the breakup of a marriage can trigger severe psychic and behavioural
problems in children. Divorce seems capable of derailing a child’s progress in
school and is often the single most important cause of enduring pain in a
child’s life. Many of these problems are caused by the fact that the children
of divorced parents see very little of their fathers. For all the talk about
the new nurturing father, the reality for many youngsters is quite the
opposite: a father who disappears, abandoning his children financially and
emotionally.
The data show minimal contact between non-custodial
fathers and their children. Furstenberg and Harris, at the University of
Pennsylvania, followed a sample of 1,000 children from disrupted families
between 1976 and 1987 and found that 42 per cent had not seen their fathers at
all during the previous year. Only 20 per cent had slept at their father’s
house in the previous month, and only one in six saw their fathers once a week
or more. (29) According to Furstenberg, “Men regard marriage as a package
deal... they cannot separate their relations with their children from their
relations to their former spouse. When that relationship ends, the paternal bond
usually withers.” (30)
For most children, the partial or complete loss of a
father produces long-lasting feelings of rejection, rage andpain, and can lead
to permanent emotional damage. For example, divorce seems to be an important
factor in teenage suicide, which has tripled over the last 25 years in both the
United Kingdom and the United States and is now the second leading cause of
death in the 15- to 24-year-old age group. A study of 752 families by
researchers at the New York Psychiatric Institute found that youngsters who
attempted suicide differed little from those who did not in terms of age,
income, race and religion, but they were much more likely “to live in
non-intact family settings” and to have minimal contact with the father. (31)
In fact, divorce and the absence of the father play a role in the entire range
of adolescent psychological troubles.
In addition to the emotional consequences, there is
mounting evidence that family breakdown and absentee fatherhood contribute to
educational underperformance and failure. A survey carried out by Columbia
University and Bowling Green State University comparing the SAT scores of 295
students from father-absent homes with those of 760 students from
father-present homes found that the absence of the father had a “dramatic”
negative effect on scores — a result that could not be explained away by
differences in income. (32) In a similar vein, a study of 2,500 young men and
women by Krein and Beller found that “even after taking into account the lower
income of single-parent families, the absence of a father has a significant
negative effect on the educational attainment of boys.” (33)
All of the new research linking father absence to
psychological stress and cognitive deficits in children serves to underline a
basic theme: The problems of children in rich nations are far more complicated
than the simple failure of governments to invest enough money in disadvantaged
children. Granted, the resource deficit is severe and expanding, but millions
of middle-class children are failing to thrive because their parents are either
unable or unwilling to provide enough time and attention. There are obvious
qualitative differences between a harried single mother who fails to spend time
with her children because she is working at two jobs to pay the rent, and a
divorced father who shuts his children out of his life to spend time with a new
partner. But whether a child is rejected out of hand or merely left alone for
large chunks of the day, the results are almost never good. Children do not do
well when deprived of parental time and attention.
There is no one recipe for raising children. Harvard
University psychologist Jerome Kagan tells us that precisely how a parent feeds
an infant, hugs a toddler or interacts with a teenager is less important than
“the melody those actions comprise.” (34) Even more critical is ensuring
adequate time. If a divorced father has not seen his son in six months, it is
hard for him to be a constructive presence in the child’s life. Melodies cannot
work their magic unless they are given time and space.
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