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Joined at the Heart
The
Transformation of the American Family
By Al and Tipper Gore
Chapter 1
Family
Redefined
Life belongs to the living, and he who lives
must be prepared for changes.
--Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
The Fadley Family
As Susan Fadley was walking down the
aisle to say "I do," she knew she was making
a big mistake. Her brother, who was giving
her away because their father had died when
they were young, also knew the marriage was
a mistake. When the music signaled the
entrance of the bride, the three hundred
wedding guests who filled the church stood
up and turned around to get a good view --
but of course they couldn't hear what Susan
and her brother were saying to each other as
they started walking slowly from the back of
the church toward the preacher and the
groom.
"He looked at me right when the church
doors opened to walk down the aisle," she
recalled. "And he goes, 'Susan, it's not too
late.' And I looked at him and I said,
'Yeah, it is.' And he goes, 'No, it isn't.
It is not too late.' "
Now, eleven years later, Susan says she
went through with the wedding because "I
couldn't see what should have done. If I was
the age I am now I wouldn't have done it. I
was young -- well, I wasn't that
young. Shoot, I was twenty-nine years old!
But I wanted to have kids. I wanted to have
a family. I wanted to be a family."
The one benefit that came from knowing that
she'd made a mistake was that she
reconsidered her intention to have kids
right away. Susan's new husband agreed that
they weren't ready for children, so they
decided that even though they were legally
joined in matrimony, they didn't want to
start their own family until they felt a
stronger emotional connection. Shortly after
the wedding, Susan came to a sad conclusion:
she liked her husband, but she really didn't
love him. And so, predictably -- at least
these days it's predictable -- two years and
three months after getting married, Susan
and her husband divorced.
Susan is a resilient and loving woman: she
bounced back from her mistake and is now
happily remarried, to Dick Fadley. Together,
she and Dick have created a beautiful and
happy family. They live with their children
in a house with a big backyard and a jungle
gym for the kids in a middle-class suburb of
Columbus, Ohio, that was a cornfield until
just a few years ago. Like most parents
today, they both work. He sells flooring for
a successful building subcontractor, and she
is a kindergarten teacher with expertise in
special education. He's a hockey fan; she
likes to read. They love each other and
spend most of their free time with the
children. They have a friendly dog named
Buttons. You could say they're an O-American
family.
End of story? Well, no. Not in today's
world. After all, they are a 2002 model of
the American family, not a 1960 model. Dick,
too, was married before, and now he and
Susan have two children -- or four, or five,
or six, depending on how you redefine
family. Theirs, you see, is a so-called
blended family, and they are fully or partly
responsible for six children from four
different couples.
This is all still something of a surprise
to Susan, who told us that when she was
growing up, she thought she would someday
have her own version of the classic American
family. "I guess I figured -- like everyone
did at that time in America's life-that you
would grow up, get married, have children,
and stay married. That was just the
expectation I had -- and it didn't happen.
And that's okay."
The story of how Dick and Susan's six
children came into their lives says a lot
about how different Susan's reality is from
her original expectation. But first a
warning: as so often happens with the new
and often complicated families that populate
our country today, you may need a scorecard
to keep all the family members straight.
Although Susan had no children from her
first marriage, Dick's first wife, Dee, had
already had a child, Jacob, before she met
Dick. After they married, Dick legally
adopted Jacob, then three years old, having
obtained the written consent of Jacob's
father. Then Dee and Dick had two daughters,
Katie and Maggie, who now both live with
Dick and Susan. Jacob, now eighteen, lived
with his mother and has just enlisted in the
U.S. Navy.
After his divorce from Dee, Dick fell in
love with another woman, Caitlin. They were
together for three years and had a child,
Emily, who is now eleven and lives with her
mother. Emily is a frequent visitor in the
Fadley household, and surprisingly -- if
there's anything left that is surprising in
the new kinds of families Americans are now
creating -- Caitlin and Susan are also
close. They talk on the phone and visit
regularly to coordinate child care and
baby-sitting for Emily, as well as for Dick
and Susan's own children -- Claire, who is
five, and Joseph, who is one and a half.
"Caitlin and I have been pretty good about
helping each other out when we need it,"
Susan told us. "It's very complicated, and
at times it can be crazy trying to figure
out schedules and who is coming when and all
that, but for the most part it works really
well."
For Susan, one of the hardest challenges
in making her new blended family work came
four years ago, when she had to figure out
how her relationship to Maggie changed when
Maggie moved in with them. "I am not her
mom. I told her -- and we have had many
discussions about this -- I am her
stepmother. And I want to be her friend. Yet
I am in charge of this house." It all runs
pretty smoothly now, she said, but at first
it was really tough: "We have our moments,
but we were having our months
before."
One of the keys to resolving the conflict
was to reach beyond the relationship between
stepmother and stepdaughter and reexamine
the role Dick was playing in the family as
father and husband. "He was going through a
transition of being a weekend parent to
having to be a full-time parent. That was
hard for him. He had to step up and be a
full-time parent. And he did. And once he
stepped in and took the lead -- because he
had to-everything started falling into
place."
Three years later, when Katie followed
her younger sister to join the Fadley
household, once again there was another
major adjustment to be made. This time,
Susan recalled, "It was quite a bit easier.
I think a lot of that is age. Also
experience, having been through it once
already. And also the fact that Katie was a
little older when she came, and could
understand the family dynamic." Now everyone
"pretty much" gets along, especially Susan
and the girls, because, as Susan says,
"Through our struggles we just bonded." What
conflict there is now seems to be mostly
between the two full sisters, now sixteen
and fourteen years old. Maggie acknowledges,
"Me and Katie sometimes go at it, but it's
because of our age."
Looking back, Susan says that her
childhood imaginings of the ideal family
were based in part on her "biggest family
influence," the marriage modeled for her by
her paternal grandparents. "They had the one
and only loving married relationship that my
siblings and I saw on a consistent basis,
and it was an awesome one. You could tell
how much they really loved each other. And
it was a lot of fun to go there. It was a
really safe place to go."
Susan's parents divorced, and then, when
she was fourteen, her father died in a car
accident. For a few years, her grandparents
played an even bigger role in providing
stability for her and her siblings and
giving them an example of how wonderful and
warm it felt to live in a happy, fun, and
safe household.
By contrast, the relationship between her
grandparents on her mother's side was not
the best. Susan told us that her mom "didn't
have any role models for a happy marriage
and had some insecurities as a result, but
Mom tried her best to make sure we didn't
feel any of that. My mom has been -- for me
-- the most awesome mom in the whole world.
I'm sure history has a way of repeating
itself in some form, so I'm sure we had some
impact from it, but you do the best you
can." Susan added that despite their marital
difficulties, her grandparents were very
loving to all the grandchildren.
One of Dick and Susan's biggest
challenges in their own marriage stems from
not always having enough time and energy
left over for each other after working and
taking care of the children and managing all
of the relationships in their complex
family. A lot of the time, Susan says,
"We're doing the parent thing and not the
couple thing. I think that neither one of us
are very good about planning a time for us
to get away together, just us, even if it's
out for dinner. I know that is a part of
marriage we have to work on, and we have
talked about that."
The one thing that is absolutely certain
about their marriage, they both agree, is
that it is going to last. "The two of us
have flat out decided that we are sticking
it out. We're both so determined that we're
not giving up because we've both been
through relationships that haven't lasted.
We are going to stay together and we are
going to figure it out. We do have a lot of
stresses in our lives. It's not an easy
family relationship we have built here. It's
very, very stressful."
Finding harmony in a blended family can
be -- to say the least -- challenging.
"This family is definitely a crazy, mixed-up
family," Susan says. "But we've figured out
a way to make it work. It would have been
real nice to have a family with two parents
and children from those parents, but life's
choices didn't have it happen that way,
unfortunately -- or fortunately, because
then we wouldn't have who we have now."
The
Transformation of the
American Family Since 1960
The Fadleys' story offers a vivid
illustration of how much the American family
has changed over the past two generations.
Both Dick and Susan were born in the early
1960s -- he in 1961, she in 1962 -- which
proved to be the fault line of an era.
America in the period right after World War
II for the most part seemed conservative,
traditional, and homogeneous. In fact, many
changes were afoot. Turmoil in the South was
sparked when African-American servicemen
returned from World War II to rightfully
claim full and equal rights, eventually
leading to the Supreme Court's reversal of
officially sanctioned school segregation.
Contrary to popular impression, the rate of
teenage pregnancies peaked in 1957. Still,
the 1950s were certainly placid compared to
what came in the 1960s: the full-blown civil
rights movement, the sexual revolution,
feminism, distrust of government, the
beginnings of the modem environmental
movement, and many other trends that still
affect our lives. It was a remarkable decade
in our culture, when everything, including
families, began to change dramatically.
If the Fadleys provide one snapshot of how
much has changed in the past forty years,
the U.S. Census Bureau and other government
statistics provide another. When the reams
of data gathered by the Census Bureau and
other government sources are reduced to
their essence, what emerges is a kind of
family portrait of America. We decided to
compare the statistical portrait taken in
2000 with the one taken in 1960, and then
isolate the ten trends we think are the most
important. When you place these snapshots
side by side, some of the differences are
truly startling; families today are as
different as Ozzie Nelson, of Ozzie and
Harriet fame, and Ozzy Osbourne of
The Osbournes, a "reality" television
show that's surprisingly popular at the
moment.
Ten Key Trends in the Changing American
Family
1. Americans are
creating fewer married-with-children
families. Married couples with children
under age eighteen now represent only 35
percent of all families; they made up over
half of all families in 1960.
2. The divorce rate has doubled.
For every four marriages in 1960, there was
one divorce. There is now a divorce for
every two marriages. However, Americans have
continued to remarry at rates comparable to
or higher than in 1960, leading to an
increase in the number of blended families.
3. Single parents head more families.
Single parent families with children under
age eighteen, only five percent of all
families in 1960, now account for 13
percent. Those families now raise almost one
in three children under age eighteen, a
steep increase from the one in ten just two
generations ago.
4. More children are being born to
unmarried mothers. In 1960, only 5
percent of American children were born to
unmarried mothers. In 2000, only two
generations later, the comparable figure was
33 percent, a six-fold increase.
5. More mothers are working outside
the home. By 2000, more than 60 percent
of married mothers with young children
worked outside the home, three times as many
as in 1960.
6. Fewer people are married. In
1960, almost 70 percent of the entire
marriageable population was married. In
2000, just over 55 percent were married. The
number of cohabiting unmarried couples as a
proportion of all households increased
five-fold from 1960 to 2000.
7. Families are forming later.
Forty years ago, women married at about age
twenty and men at about age twenty-three.
Now, women are about twenty-five and men
about twenty-seven at their first marriage.
Children are coming much later as well:
today, a quarter of all women have not yet
had a child before they turn thirty-five,
almost double the rate in 1960.
8. Families are having fewer children.
The average family had 2.3 children in 1960
and only 1.9 in 2000. (And yes, we know
that’s impossible, but these are statistics
after all!)
9. More grandparents are playing an
active role in raising children. The
average life span today is approaching
eighty years old, nearly ten years longer
than it was in 1960. More than 5.5 million
grandparents now share a home with one or
more grandchildren. The proportion of
children being cared for by grandparents has
gone up, particularly for families where the
middle generation is a single parent or not
present.
10. Families are becoming more
diverse. In 1960, America was about 90
percent white, and there were fewer than
200,000 interracial couples, accounting for
less than half a percent of all married
couples. Now, America is 75 percent white,
and there are almost 1.5 million interracial
couples, representing almost 3 percent of
all married couples. If marriages between
Hispanics and non-Hispanics are included,
the proportion of diverse marriages is much
higher still.
There are, of course, a lot of other
statistics we could cite, but the main point
ought to be clear. In the last two
generations, the American family has
undergone a profound transformation, one
that will forever change the way we think of
ourselves as individuals, family members,
and citizens. The classic nuclear family of
our childhood -- the breadwinning dad, the
homemaker mom, two or three kids -- is not
gone, but it's very much a minority of
families now. Alongside it today are
two-income families, single-parent families,
and a host of other types. When you compare
the snap shot taken in 1960 with the one
taken in 2000, the face of the American
family -- like the country as a whole --
looks entirely different.
*****
The
Consequences of Divorce
Now let's slow the story down again and
look at a crucial trend that began to emerge
into public view during the 1960s: the
rising incidence of divorce. As usual, the
various statistics available can be
interpreted in different ways, but it's
probably accurate to say that the divorce
rate is now about twice as high as it was
forty years ago. Contrary to conventional
wisdom, however, the divorce rate didn't
begin rising in the 1960s: in fact, the rate
began rising slowly but steadily in the
second half of the nineteenth century, and
continued through the first half of the
twentieth century. It then stabilized in the
1950s. Then, in the early 1960s, the rates
began accelerating. Hernandez dates the
acceleration to 1964, when the baby boom
ended: "Once the baby boom was over, people
no longer felt that they had to stay at home
with the children. [That's when] we see this
increase in divorces." As women entered the
labor force in even greater numbers, their
increasing economic freedom gave them more
options, including leaving the marriage if
they wanted to. Women working also increased
the independence of men, who began treating
their incomes as their own and came to
believe they could leave without destroying
the family financially, Hernandez observed.
In 1960, there were about twenty-six
divorces for every one hundred marriages.
The divorce rate rose steadily for the next
twenty years and peaked around 1980, when
there were about fifty divorces for every
hundred marriages; since then, it has
dropped to forty-eight per hundred.
Currently, according to the Centers for
Disease Control and Prevention, one in three
first marriages ends in separation or
divorce within ten years, and 43 percent end
within fifteen years. Each year an estimated
one million children are involved in a
divorce. According to Hernandez, however,
divorce has now reached a kind of saturation
point. "The fundamental reason is that for
the past twenty years or so it's been
necessary to have two incomes in order to
support a middle-class style of living."
Susan Fadley, of course, knows divorce
firsthand: her parents divorced, she has
been divorced once herself, and now she's
raising stepchildren who have been through
the breakup of a marriage. She feels that
it's hard to judge someone else's decision
on divorce, because it all depends on the
situation. Her mother's parents, for
instance, stayed in an unhappy marriage for
years. As she put it, "They stuck it out but
didn't pursue any ideal. They didn't work at
it." She feels they definitely should have
gotten a divorce, in part because of the
harmful effect of their constant and bitter
conflict on their children.
But Susan acknowledged that for a younger
generation -- hers -- which considered
divorce much more acceptable, the effects
were turning out to be harder to deal with
than they'd expected. Indeed, many of the
single-parent households that were created
found a great deal of economic hardship.
Copyright © 2002 Al and Tipper Gore
For more information visit the Web site
www.joinnedattheheart.com.
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