Two Writers; Two Perspectives; One Understanding of the Role of Family Breakdown in Society’s Ills
What do this opinion piece (Daily Mail, 9/13/09) and this one (Daily Mail, 9/13/09) have in common, other than the fact that they appear in the same publication. As apparently opposed as they are, they actually argue for the same thing.
In the first, Peter Hitchens savagely condemns British society for the children it produces. In the U.K. recently there have been a series of stories about the worst, most brutal behavior, by teenagers. From standard hooliganism and drug and alcohol use, all the way up to and including torture, rape and murder, the country has been knocked back on its heels at the news about what their children are doing. As outrageous as it may seem, we've heard serious calls by public officials for the state to simply take children of certain families at birth and place them for adoption.
Hitchens retails the fact, also recently learned, that many children appear at school for the first time, totally unequipped for the task at hand. Many are so poorly brought up that they don't even know how to hold a knife and fork or simply listen when another person speaks to them.
For his part, Anglican Archbishop Sentamu defends children and cites examples of those who have risen above their upbringing and surroundings to make important contributions to their communities. He pronounces himself "fed up to the back teeth" with denigration of young people like Naomi Cumming who, in the Archbishop's telling, seems to be a fine, productive 15-year-old.
Whether they know it or not, though, Hitchens and Archbishop Sentamu are aiming at the same target - family breakdown. As Sentamu writes,
The State must have a role to play in safeguarding – but it also has a role to play in supporting communities and individuals to own their responsibilities to one another, not least through the support of the families who are the building block of any community.
The State must support marriage because in creation, it is given as the ‘foundation of family life’.
Hitchens writes about basic early-childhood learning and, while no fan of British schools, places the blame exactly where it in fact lies:
But we were not born with these blessings. We learned them in thousands of tiny steps, from parents who were present in our lives from our earliest moments, not for a brief few months before everyone had to go back to the grindstone.
Our schools are terrible, and have been for years – so terrible that even the authorities are beginning to admit it.
But the teachers are right when they say that the real problem is in the home.
That's where Hitchens goes off the rails. He blames family breakdown on society's willingness to violate "human nature," by which he means our desire for equality between men and women.
Let's be clear on something. Nothing in "human nature" dictates that women should be prevented from earning a living. Whatever human nature may be, we live in the 21st century and making half the population dependent on the other half of the population accords with none of our values. Neither does denying economic equality and freedom to half the population. Neither does denying society the talents and energies of half the population.
Biologically, we are a "bi-parental" species, which means that both men and women come to parenting with the same set of hormones that nature provides to connect mammal species with their offspring. Stated another way, both fathers and mothers can care for children perfectly well. Our ethical standards that require non-discrimination against one sex or the other demand that we accomodate ourselves both to the paid work of women and the fatherhood of men. This is something we can do.
But to do it we have to address the catastrophe that is family breakdown. Both Hitchens and the Archbishop realize that as the crux of our children's problems. We've known this for decades now. Senator Daniel Patrick Moynahan warned us about family breakdown some 45 years ago. We've inherited the wind of our failure to attend to his words.
But marriage and families will not be made whole again by laws that seek to tie parents to their obligations at the risk of civil or criminal penalties. What's required is to make people understand two simple truths.
The first is that children do better in every way when they are raised by both biological parents. That means that people should be made to understand from their childhood years that the decision to have a child is the decision to raise the child to adulthood. If parents want to divorce, there will be plenty of time to do so after the child has reached the age of 18 or thereabouts.
Second, if a marriage is so bad that the parents can't meet their obligation to the child, then divorce must also recognize the value of both parents to the child. That's where parenting plans and equally shared parenting come in. It's also where family courts need to be educated about the value of both parents to children. It's where state legislatures need to drop the notion that parenting post-divorce should consist of one primary parent and one visitor with few parental duties and fewer parental rights.
We're a long way from where we need to be. But we know the facts about the consequences of family breakdown, and more and more, those facts are making it into public consciousness and that of legislators, judges and policy makers. And what we also know is the price of doing what we've been doing for the past 40 years. It's what the British have seen so much of recently.
Thanks to Duncan for the heads-up.
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