Strong Families

In a perfect world, families would have no problems. Parents would know how to rear their children to be responsible adults. Americans and others throughout the world are trying to learn what makes strong families. Perhaps families can learn how to solve their problems. Researchers at the University of Nebraska have found some answers. Strong, happy families share some patterns whether they are rich or poor, black or white.

Strong, happy families spend time together. After dinner, for example, happy families may take walks together or play games. Strong families also talk about their problems. They may even argue so that problems can be resolved before they get too big. Members of strong families show each other affection and appreciation. Members of strong families are also committed to one another and they tend to be religious. Finally, when problems arise, strong families work together to solve them.

The values that Americans cherish, such as democracy and economic and social freedom, are values that Americans want for their families. Americans work hard to make their families successful. Today, however, families are changing, but they are not disappearing. Americans accept that strong, happy families come in many sizes and shapes.

Text 2

A.Wolfe

Two very different models of family life exist in America. One that longs nostalgically for a world in which families stayed together, three generations lived in proximity to each other, children obeyed their parents, women remained at home, and everyone believed in God; and another in which both parents are free to pursue careers, children are anxious to escape the home and give themselves over to the attractions of a consumer and entertainment culture, grandparents try to avoid either being burdened by or dependent on their grown children, and the language of rights and self-fulfilment comes to play as much a role as the language of obligation and duty. There is little question, in other words, that America is furiously divided over the family.

Still, there is one thing very much out of focus in this picture: These divisions over the family do not take place between camps of people; instead they take place within most individuals. … Middle-class Americans believe in both the traditional and the modern version of the family simultaneously.

Longing for a world that no longer exists but having no intention of giving up the one that does, they are torn between nostalgia and necessity. As much as they lament the passing of the family meal, and they lament its passing mightily, they are too American not to appreciate the benefits that flow from both the material benefits of an additional salary and the political and social advantages of greater equality and personal liberty. Deep ambivalence, not ideological or religious certainty, characterizes the views of most American on family matters. What the sociologists Peter and Brigitte Berger called “the war over the family” may not be a war at all, but an inevitable, and perhaps even healthy, conflict between two different sets of needs, both of which have compelling reasons to exist. In theory, people cannot satisfy both needs at the same time; in practice, they are trying their hardest to do exactly that.