The rewards of home and family, on the other hand, are almost all intrinsic. In today’s world society is not on the sidelines giving praise and affirmation in your role as a father or mother. You’re not paid to do it. You don’t get prestige out of doing it. No one cheers you on in the role. As a parent your compensation is the satisfaction that comes from playing a significant role in influencing a life for good that no one else can fill. It’s a proactive choice that can only come out of your own heart.
Laws
These changes in the popular culture have driven profound changes in the political will and in resulting law. For example, throughout time, “marriage” has been recognized as the foundation of a stable society. Years ago the U.S. Supreme Court called it “the foundation of society, without which there would be neither civilization nor progress.”9 It was a commitment, a covenant among three parties—a man, a woman, and society. And for many it included a fourth: God.
Author and teacher Wendell Berry has said:
If they had only themselves to consider, lovers would not need to marry, but they must think of others and of other things. They say their vows to the community as much as to one another, and the community gathers around them to hear and to wish them well, on their behalf and on its own. It gathers around them because it understands how necessary, how joyful, and how fearful this joining is. These lovers, pledging themselves to one another “until death,” are giving themselves away, and they are joined by this as no law or contract could ever join them. Lovers, then, “die” into their union with one another as a soul “dies” into its union with God. And so here, at the very heart of community life, we find not something to sell as in the public market but this momentous giving. If the community cannot protect this giving, it can protect nothing. . . .
The marriage of two lovers joins them to one another, to forebears, to descendants, to the community, to Heaven and earth. It is the fundamental connection without which nothing holds, and trust is its necessity.10
But today, marriage is often no longer a covenant or a commitment. It’s simply a contract between consenting adults—a contract that’s sometimes considered unnecessary, is easily broken when no longer seen as convenient, and is sometimes even set up with the anticipation of possible failure through a prenuptial agreement. Society and God are often no longer even part of it. The legal system no longer supports it; in some instances, in fact, it discourages it by penalizing responsible fatherhood and encouraging mothers on welfare not to marry.
As a result, according to noted Princeton University family historian Lawrence Stone, “The scale of marital breakdowns in the West since 1960 has no historical precedent that I know of, and seems unique. . . . There has been nothing like it for the last 2,000 years, and probably longer.” And in the words of Wendell Berry, “If you depreciate the sanctity and solemnity of marriage, not just as a bond between two people but as a bond between those two people and their forebears, their children, and their neighbors, then you have prepared the way for an epidemic of divorce, child neglect, community ruin, and loneliness.”11
Economy
Since 1950 the median income in the United States has increased by ten times, but the cost of the average home has increased by fifteen times and inflation has risen by 600 percent. These changes alone are forcing more and more parents out of the home just to make ends meet. In a critical review of The Time Bind (referred to above), Betsy Morris takes exception to Hochschild’s view that parents spend more time at work because they find it more pleasant than dealing with the challenges of home life. “More likely,” she says, “is that parents are killing themselves because they have to keep their jobs.”12
To make ends meet and for other reasons—including the desire to maintain a certain lifestyle—the percentage of families where there is one parent working and one at home with the children has dropped from 66.7 percent in 1940 to 16.9 percent in 1994. And today some 14.6 million children live in poverty—90 percent of whom live in one-parent homes.13 There is simply much less parental involvement with children, and the reality is that for many, family gets “second shift.”
The very structure of the economic world in which we live has been redefined. When the government took over the responsibility of caring for the aged and destitute in response to the Great Depression, the economic link between family generations was broken. And this has had a reverberating effect on every other link of the family. Economics define survival, and when this economic sense of responsibility between generations is broken, it begins to cut into the other tendons and sinews that hold the generations together, including the social and the spiritual. As a result, the short-term solution has become the long-range problem. In most cases “family” is no longer seen as an intergenerational and extended family unit that cares for itself. It has become reduced to the nuclear family of parents and children at home, and even that is being threatened. The government is seen as the first resource rather than last.
We now live in a world that values personal freedom and independence more than responsibility and interdependence—in a world with tremendous mobility in which creature comforts (especially television) enable social isolation and independent entertainment. Social life is being fractured. Families and individuals are becoming increasingly isolated. Escape from responsibility and accountability is available everywhere.
Technology
Changes in technology have accelerated the impact of changes in every other dimension. In addition to global communication and instant access to vast sources of valuable information, today’s technology also provides immediate, graphic, and often unfiltered access to a full spectrum of highly impactful visual images—including pornography and vivid scenes of bloodshed and violence. Supported by and saturated with advertising, technology puts us into materialistic overload. It has caused a revolution in expectations. Certainly it increases our ability to reach out to others, including family members, and establish connections to people around the globe. But it also diverts us and keeps us from interacting with and relating in meaningful ways to members of our family in our own home.
We can look to research for these answers, but there may be an even better source. What does your own heart tell you about the effects of television on you and your children? Does watching television make you kinder? More thoughtful? More loving? Does it help you build strong relationships in your home? Or does it make you feel numb? Tired? Lonely? Confused? Mean? Cynical?
When we think about the effects of the media on our families, we must realize that the media can literally drive the culture in the home. In order to take seriously what is going on in the media (unlikely romance, promiscuity, battling robots, cynical relationships, fighting, and violent brutality), we must be willing to engage in a “suspension of disbelief.” We must be willing to suspend our disbelief in actions we know as adults are not real—to desensitize our adult wisdom—and for thirty or sixty minutes allow ourselves to be taken on a journey to see how we like it.
What happens to us? We begin to believe that even TV news is normal life! Children especially believe. For example, one mother told me that after watching the six o’clock news on TV, her six-year-old said to her, “Mommy, why is everybody killing everybody?” This child believed what she was seeing was normal life!
It is true that there is so much good on TV—good information and enjoyable, uplifting entertainment. But for most of us and for our families, the reality is more like digging a lovely tossed salad out of the garbage dump. There may be some great salad there, but it’s pretty hard to separate out the trash, the dirt, and the flies.
Low-grade, gradual pollution can desensitize us not only to how awful the pollution but also to what we are trading off for it. It would take an enormous amount of benefit from television to trade off the time that could be spent with family members learning, loving, working, and sharing together!
A recent U.S. News & World Report poll reported that 90 percent of those polled felt that the nation is slipping deeper into moral decline. That same poll found that 62 percent felt TV was hostile toward their moral and spiritual values.14 So why are so many watching so much TV?
As the societal indicators of crime, drug use, sexual pleasuring, and violence go on their upward climb with few plateaus, we should not forget that the most important indicator in any society is the commitment to loving, nurturing, and guiding the most important people in our lives—our children. Children learn the most important lessons not from Power Rangers or even Big Bird but from a loving family who reads with them, talks to them, works with them, listens to them, and spends happy time with them. When children feel loved, really loved, they thrive!