Finally, preliminary research shows that marriage education workshops can make a real difference in helping married couples stay together and in encouraging unmarried couples who are living together to form a more lasting bond. Expanding access to such services to low-income couples, perhaps in concert with job training and placement, medical coverage, and other services already available, should be something everybody can agree on.
But for many social conservatives, these commonsense approaches don’t go far enough. They want a return to a bygone era, in which sexuality outside of marriage was subject to both punishment and shame, obtaining a divorce was far more difficult, and marriage offered not merely personal fulfillment but also well-defined social roles for men and for women. In their view, any government policy that appears to reward or even express neutrality toward what they consider to be immoral behavior — whether providing birth control to young people, abortion services to women, welfare support for unwed mothers, or legal recognition of same-sex unions — inherently devalues the marital bond. Such policies take us one step closer, the argument goes, to a brave new world in which gender differences have been erased, sex is purely recreational, marriage is disposable, motherhood is an inconvenience, and civilization itself rests on shifting sands.
I understand the impulse to restore a sense of order to a culture that’s constantly in flux. And I certainly appreciate the desire of parents to shield their children from values they consider unwholesome; it’s a feeling I often share when I listen to the lyrics of songs on the radio.
But all in all, I have little sympathy for those who would enlist the government in the task of enforcing sexual morality. Like most Americans, I consider decisions about sex, marriage, divorce, and childbearing to be highly personal — at the very core of our system of individual liberty. Where such personal decisions raise the prospect of significant harm to others — as is true with child abuse, incest, bigamy, domestic violence, or failure to pay child support — society has a right and duty to step in. (Those who believe in the personhood of the fetus would put abortion in this category.) Beyond that, I have no interest in seeing the president, Congress, or a government bureaucracy regulating what goes on in America’s bedrooms.
Moreover, I don’t believe we strengthen the family by bullying or coercing people into the relationships we think are best for them — or by punishing those who fail to meet our standards of sexual propriety. I want to encourage young people to show more reverence toward sex and intimacy, and I applaud parents, congregations, and community programs that transmit that message. But I’m not willing to consign a teenage girl to a lifetime of struggle because of lack of access to birth control. I want couples to understand the value of commitment and the sacrifices marriage entails. But I’m not willing to use the force of law to keep couples together regardless of their personal circumstances.
Perhaps I just find the ways of the human heart too various, and my own life too imperfect, to believe myself qualified to serve as anyone’s moral arbiter. I do know that in our fourteen years of marriage, Michelle and I have never had an argument as a result of what other people are doing in their personal lives.
What we have argued about — repeatedly — is how to balance work and family in a way that’s equitable to Michelle and good for our children. We’re not alone in this. In the sixties and early seventies, the household Michelle grew up in was the norm — more than 70 percent of families had Mom at home and relied on Dad as the sole breadwinner.
Today those numbers are reversed. Seventy percent of families with children are headed by two working parents or a single working parent. The result has been what my policy director and work-family expert Karen Kornbluh calls “the juggler family,” in which parents struggle to pay the bills, look after their children, maintain a household, and maintain their relationship. Keeping all these balls in the air takes its toll on family life. As Karen explained when she was director of the Work and Family Program at the New America Foundation and testified before the Senate Subcommittee on Children and Families:
Americans today have 22 fewer hours a week to spend with their kids than they did in 1969. Millions of children are left in unlicensed day care every day — or at home alone with the TV as a babysitter. Employed mothers lose almost an hour of sleep a day in their attempt to make it all add up. Recent data show that parents with school age children show high signs of stress — stress that has an impact on their productivity and work — when they have inflexible jobs and unstable after-school care.
Sound familiar?
Many social conservatives suggest that this flood of women out of the home and into the workplace is a direct consequence of feminist ideology, and hence can be reversed if women will just come to their senses and return to their traditional homemaking roles. It’s true that ideas about equality for women have played a critical role in the transformation of the workplace; in the minds of most Americans, the opportunity for women to pursue careers, achieve economic independence, and realize their talents on an equal footing with men has been one of the great achievements of modern life.
But for the average American woman, the decision to work isn’t simply a matter of changing attitudes. It’s a matter of making ends meet.
Consider the facts. Over the last thirty years, the average earnings of American men have grown less than 1 percent after being adjusted for inflation. Meanwhile, the cost of everything, from housing to health care to education, has steadily risen. What has kept a large swath of American families from falling out of the middle class has been Mom’s paycheck. In their book The Two-Income Trap, Elizabeth Warren and Amelia Tyagi point out that the additional income mothers bring home isn’t going to luxury items. Instead, almost all of it goes to purchase what families believe to be investments in their children’s future — preschool education, college tuition, and most of all, homes in safe neighborhoods with good public schools. In fact, between these fixed costs and the added expenses of a working mother (particularly day care and a second car), the average two-income family has less discretionary income — and is less financially secure — than its single-earner counterpart thirty years ago.
So is it possible for the average family to return to life on a single income? Not when every other family on the block is earning two incomes and bidding up the prices of homes, schools, and college tuition. Warren and Tyagi show that an average single-earner family today that tried to maintain a middle-class lifestyle would have 60 percent less discretionary income than its 1970s counterpart. In other words, for most families, having Mom stay at home means living in a less-safe neighborhood and enrolling their children in a less-competitive school.
That’s not a choice most Americans are willing to make. Instead they do the best they can under the circumstances, knowing that the type of household they grew up in — the type of household in which Frasier and Marian Robinson raised their kids — has become much, much harder to sustain.
BOTH MEN AND women have had to adjust to these new realities. But it’s hard to argue with Michelle when she insists that the burdens of the modern family fall more heavily on the woman.