A New Focus on Family Values

Creating an emphasison family values.

By Hara Estroff Marano, published on November 01, 1997

For years the debate on family values has focused more on ideology than on what actually keeps families together. Now social scientists are trying to shift the basis of family policy from politics to research.

"Family is important because it is the only institution in contemporary society that is unabashedly committed to love and caring as its primary function."

--Michael Lerner in The Politics of Meaning

FAMILY ISSUES HAVE LONG BEEN HELD PRISONER BY POLITICS, and a particularly narrow cell of politics at that. To care about families is to have "family values," a term that has been co-opted by ideologies, especially those on the political right. Conservatives have not simply dominated public discourse on family issues; they have framed the debate. And for some time now, to be "pro-family" has largely boiled down to one thing: being against divorce.

Certainly there have been great changes in the American family over the past several decades. One child in four is now born to unmarried parents. The number of couples who live together outside of marriage has increased sevenfold since 1970. Divorce has been epidemic for some 25 years. And families with children are feeling particularly burdened these days, as more and more kids grow up poor.

The political right insists that such problems are fallout from the liberalization of divorce laws which occurred throughout the 1970s and early 80s, and it has begun a campaign to rewrite or repeal laws that allow easy-to-obtain, no-fault divorces. In late June, Louisiana marked the first legislative success of a nationwide movement led by conservative Christians: the state now permits couples who are tying the knot to choose a particularly binding marital contract called "covenant marriage" (a biblical-sounding term for the covenant with God embodied in Christian marriage). Couples can still opt for a standard marriage, dissolvable by no-fault divorce, but if they choose a covenant marriage the relationship can be ended only if one spouse can prove that the other has committed adultery, abandoned the home, been imprisoned for a felony, or abused their spouse or children. A separation of at least two years is required before the marriage can end.

But independent thinkers around the country are beginning to alter the nature of the family values debate. They believe that family issues and family policy have been defined too narrowly for too long. They see a much broader array of actions--by government and business as well as by individuals--that affect families and their problems. These factors include the role economic policies play, subtly or overtly, in influencing family composition; the availability of jobs and job training; the supply of suitable men; and numerous others.

The "M" Word

One of the new thinkers is Theodora Ooms, M.S.W., executive director of the Family Impact Seminar, a Washington-based think tank. She contends that while politicians and government officials have vowed to strengthen and support families, they have left out the primary ingredient. "Programs and services designed to support families in fact focus only on mothers and children," she says. But "the cornerstone of the family--the relationship of the couple, whether married or unmarried--has been essentially ignored."

At a recent two-day round table in Washington, D.C., Ooms invited scholars to shift the center of family-values discussion from ideology to research-based information. The ultimate goal: to broaden family policy so that it is informed by all the facts, takes into account the needs of all the members of a family, and supports the relationship that is the family foundation--without condemning those women (or men) who are raising children on their own.

Ooms believes that making marriages harder to dissolve is not the best way to support families. That has the effect of trapping unhappy families in their misery and, perhaps, of exposing abused women and men to danger. And by raising the "cost" of marriage, it could well push more couples into cohabitation, where legal protection exists neither for partners nor for any children they may have.

The most sensible approach is not to make marriage harder to get out of, but to make marriage better to be in. After all, Ooms points out, marriage remains a goal for the vast majority of Americans. Ninety percent marry--and, of course want their marriages to work. "It's puzzling," she says, "that policy-makers have invested so little in finding out what, if anything, can be done to help marriages succeed." In "tribute" to their avoidance, Ooms often refers to marriage as "the M-word."

Better SEX

One reason marriage is desirable is that when it works well, it has emotional payoffs for partners. But Linda Waite, Ph.D., a sociologist at the University of Chicago, has marshaled evidence that marriage also has substantial benefits for health and well-being. Among the findings Waite reports:

Married men drink less, live more safely, and live longer. Especially for men, marriage supplies a crucial network of emotional support.

Married women have better health, and live in better material circumstances, than single or cohabiting women