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Will the Cradle Fall?
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19596 |
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BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
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10 / 1991 |
3,072 Words |
| Author
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Brigitte Berger
Brigitte Berger is a professor of sociology at Boston
University. Among the books she has authored or coauthored,
the following relate to issues of the family: Societies in
Change, The Homeless Mind: Modernization Consciousness, Child
Care and Mediating Structures, and The War over the Family:
Capturing the Middle Ground. Her most recent book, The Culture
of Entrepeneurship (a book in which the family figures
prominently), will be published in October 1991 by ICS Press
(Institute of Contemporary Studies), San Francisco. |
WHEN THE BOUGH BREAKS
The Cost of Neglecting Our Children
Sylvia Ann Hewlett
Basic Books, 1991
346 pp., $22.95
"Across the face of America, children are failing to flourish. Rich kids, middle-class kids, poor kids--all deal with risk and neglect on a scale unimagined in previous generations. It is the neglect of children, and not military overreach, that will bring about the decline of America's preeminence in the world."
So writes Sylvia Ann Hewlett in When the Bough Breaks: The Cost of Neglecting Our Children, recently published by Basic Books. Many a reader of this as well as a plethora of similar conclusions is bound to ask whether it is really true that the most powerful and arguably richest nation in the world is also the most neglectful of its children, whether a country that has traditionally prided itself on its concern for the weak and those in need could also be the most destructive of its future generations.
To get a grip on questions of this sort, it is useful to take a look at the author's 1986 book on American domestic policy, A Lesser Fate: The Myth of Women's Liberation in America, which attracted considerable attention at the time. For both books, When the Bough Breaks and A Lesser Fate, by this noted economist, are made of the same cloth: The arguments of the first are carried forth in the second, and both books together represent perhaps the most vocal challenge a particular approach to American public policy is able to formulate at this point in time.
While it is important to understand that the present plight of American children did not materialize overnight, some of Hewlett's claims are valid. Changes in private behavior have led to a phenomenal rise in the divorce rate, the skyrocketing number of children born to teenagers out of wedlock, and an unprecedented number of women with young children entering the labor market. These developments have made for structural shifts in the social fabric that pit the lot of the nations children against that of their parents. Our policy options, however, are in no way as simple and straightforward as the author makes them out to be. Underlying the assumptions of the policy approach set forth in these two books are questions whether governmental actions, through legislation and the mounting of a great variety of social programs, are really capable of influencing the well-being
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