It is difficult, for those of us who grew up in an era that appeared to embody so many ideals people yearn for now, to acknowledge that it unwittingly set in motion the very forces that sometimes make us feel isolated within our own households and communities today. So alienated do we feel from the larger society at times that we cannot imagine the village existing in any form anymore. But each era gives birth to the village of the next generation.
Like our families, the culture we inherit is a product largely of events and decisions we had little hand in choosing. Not that the culture is our destiny, any more than the family is: families have thrived in the harshest conditions, and individuals have survived in the harshest families. But the society is our context; we do not exist in a vacuum. Even now, in ways we cannot yet feel or recognize, the village in which our children will raise their children is taking shape. It is up to us to think carefully about what kind of legacy we want to leave them.
Every Child Needs a Champion
If I could say just one thing to parents, it would be simply
that a child needs someone who believes in him
no matter what he does.
ALICE KELIHER
MOST OF the people I knew growing up had families remarkably like mine. I did not have a single close friend, from kindergarten through high school, whose parents were divorced. But there was someone I knew very well who was the child of divorce: my mother.
My mother was born in Chicago in 1919, when her mother was only fifteen and her father just seventeen. A sister followed five years later, but both parents were too young for the responsibilities of raising children, and they decided they no longer wished to be married. When my mother was only eight years old and her sister barely three, her father sent them alone by train to Los Angeles to live with his parents, who were immigrants from England.
When my mother first told me how she cared for her sister during the three-day journey, I was incredulous. After I became a mother myself, I was furious that any child, even in the safer 1920s, would be treated like that.
To this day, my mother paints a vivid picture of living in southern California seventy years ago. She describes the smells of the orange groves she walked through on the way to school and the excitement of taking a streetcar to the beach. But these carefree memories were shrouded in harshness. Her grandmother was a severe and arbitrary disciplinarian who berated her constantly, and her grandfather all but ignored her. Her father was an infrequent visitor, and her mother vanished from her life for ten years.
Yet my mother was not without allies and a “village” to support her. A kind teacher noticed that she was often without milk money and bought an extra carton of milk every day, which she gave my mother, claiming she herself was too full to drink it. A great-aunt, Belle, gave my mother gifts and from time to time intervened to protect her from her grandmother’s ridicule and rigidities.
When she was fourteen, my mother moved out of her grandparents’ home and went to work taking care of a family’s children in exchange for room and board. The position enabled her to attend high school, but not to participate in after-school activities. Every morning, she was up very early to prepare breakfast for the children, and every night she stayed up long after they had gone to sleep, to do her homework. The family appreciated her way with children, saw her true worth, and encouraged her to finish high school. The mother, a college graduate, gave her books to read, challenged her mind, and emphasized how important it was to get a good education. She also provided a role model of what a wife, mother, and homemaker could be.
How I wish I could have met Aunt Belle and the woman who employed my mother. I would tell them of my gratitude for the nurturance and encouragement that helped my mother overcome the distrust and disappointment she met with in her own family. They healed her of what could have been lifelong wounds. And yet, to a great extent, my mother’s character took shape in response to the hardships she experienced in her early years. From those challenges came her strong sense of social justice and her respect for all people, regardless of status or background. From them, too, came her passion for learning, and for the joy that knowledge brings.
After high school, my mother moved back to Chicago and took a series of secretarial jobs. At one of them, she met and began dating my father. While my father was in the navy, my mother continued working. When the war ended, my father started his own business. My mother helped him with his work and raised the three of us.
I found myself thinking about my mother’s story when I first met my husband at law school, in 1971. Like her, Bill had grown up in circumstances that were less than ideal. His mother, the late Virginia Kelley, one of the great originals of our time, grew up in Hope, Arkansas, as an only child. After high school, she studied nursing, and during the war she met Bill’s father, William Blythe of Texas. They were married in September 1943, just before he left for the battlefields of Europe.
When he got back, in 1945, he and Virginia moved to Chicago. I’ve often wondered whether Virginia Kelley and my mother might have crossed paths there, perhaps while standing in line at Marshall Field’s big department store downtown.
Virginia became pregnant and went back to Hope to be among family and friends for her baby’s birth. Her husband planned to join her as soon as he got their new apartment ready. He left Chicago to drive to Arkansas, and on the dark, rainy night of May 17, 1946, he had a fatal car crash outside Sikeston, Missouri.
Virginia, although devastated by the loss of her husband, was determined to do her best to provide for her baby. William Jefferson Blythe arrived three months later, on August 19, the birthday of Virginia’s father, James Eldridge Cassidy. Virginia and he went home from the hospital to live with her parents, who shared responsibility for raising him during his first six years. Despite their differences, Virginia and her strong-willed mother, Edith Valeria Grisham Cassidy, were united in one thing—their devotion to Bill.
Wanting to provide a better life for her child, Virginia left Hope to attend a program in New Orleans that would grant her a nurse-anesthetist’s degree. That meant leaving Bill in the care of her parents for a year. Virginia often said that being away from her son almost killed her. One of Bill’s earliest memories was taking the train with his grandmother to visit Virginia for the weekend. As they were leaving on Sunday, he remembers seeing his mother drop to her knees, crying, by the side of the tracks.
Bill’s family were people of modest means, but they understood how important a child’s early years were for his development—intellectually, socially, and emotionally. His grandmother, who had earned a degree in nursing by taking correspondence courses, quizzed him on his numbers, using playing cards taped around his high chair. She read aloud to him every day and encouraged him to learn to read before he started kindergarten.
His grandfather, who had only finished grade school, spent lots of time with Bill, taking him along on errands and to the little grocery store he ran, always stopping to visit with friends along the way. Bill surely owes much of his gregarious nature to those early days of chatting his way through town.
Although I never met Bill’s grandparents, I know that their profound and engaging love for him helped to fill the hole left by the father he never knew and to protect against the pain he would later face.
Bill’s life changed dramatically when he was four. Virginia married Roger Clinton, a local car dealer, and they moved into their own small house in Hope. Almost from the beginning, the marriage was anything but hopeful. Roger had a tendency to drink too much, becoming a mean and bullying drunk. The story of the abuse and violence Virginia suffered at his hands is told in her warm and funny autobiography, Leading with My Heart.
I asked Virginia once why she stayed married to Roger. She explained that she was raised to believe marriage was for life and divorce was wrong. And, she added, most of the time—when he wasn’t drunk—Roger could be sweet and a lot of fun. Even so, she did divorce him in 1962, when his alcoholic rages became t
oo much for her to bear. But three months later, feeling sorry for him and believing his promises to change his ways, she remarried him, against Bill’s advice. Bill, now larger than his stepfather, warned Roger in no uncertain terms never to hit or threaten his mother again.
Roger and Virginia had moved to the larger town of Hot Springs, Arkansas, when Bill was seven. Although Virginia could no longer call on her parents for daily help and felt uncomfortable relying on Roger, there was a clan of Clinton uncles, aunts, and cousins who provided family support for Bill through the years. Virginia also hired a neighbor, Mrs. Walters, to help care for Bill and, later, his brother, Roger, while she was at work. Even with a full-time job and the ongoing tensions in her marriage, Virginia saw to it that their home became a haven for neighborhood kids, who gathered after school to shoot baskets, play music or cards, or just talk. When she got home from work, she joined right in.
Because Bill was old enough to distance himself, physically and emotionally, from his stepfather’s behavior, he was able to weather the tensions of his home life. He also developed relationships with other adults. Some doctors his mother worked with took a special interest in him and spent time counseling him. The teachers and band directors he studied under encouraged his academic and musical talents. And no matter how hard times were, his mother got up every morning to do her job and set an example of self-discipline and resilience that spoke louder than words.
The human family assumes many forms and always has. The Clinton household didn’t fit the conventional model. But it would be presumptuous of anyone to say it was not a legitimate family or that it lacked “family values.” Bill never doubted that his mother and the other adults in his life supported him with all their hearts. His family had its problems. So did mine, and, I imagine, yours. But as psychologist Urie Bronfenbrenner reminds us, “The one most important thing kids need to help them survive in this world is someone who’s crazy about them.” Bill and I were both fortunate to have that.
That kind of love can make up for a lot, but it can’t remedy everything. Virginia loved her second son, Roger junior, who was born in 1957, every bit as deeply as she loved Bill. But as much as she loved him, she could not shield him from the worsening effects of his father’s chronic alcoholism. The problems he experienced growing up were typical of the difficulties children undergo when the structure of the family is unstable, either within a two-parent family or because of divorce.
There is no set formula for parenting success. Many single-parent, stepparent, and “blended” families do a fine job raising children. But in general their task is harder. And these days parents are less likely to have readily available support from extended family or a close-knit community. There are fewer Aunt Belles, grandparents, and other relatives close by, and many of us no longer feel free to ask a neighbor to lend a hand or an ear.
The instability of American households poses great risks to the healthy development of children. The divorce rate has been falling slowly, but for a high proportion of marriages, “till death do us part” means “until the going gets rough.” And there has been an explosion in the number of children born out of wedlock, from one in twenty in 1960 to one in four today.
More than anyone else, children bear the brunt of such massive social transitions. The confusion and turmoil that divorce and out-of-wedlock births cause in children’s lives is well documented. The results of the National Survey of Children, which followed the lives of a group of seven- to eleven-year-olds for more than a decade, and other recent studies demonstrate convincingly that while many adults claim to have benefited from divorce and single parenthood, most children have not.
Children living with one parent or in stepfamilies are two to three times as likely to have emotional and behavioral problems as children living in two-parent families. Children of single-parent families are more likely to drop out of high school, become pregnant as teenagers, abuse drugs, behave violently, become entangled with the law. A parent’s remarriage often does not seem to better the odds.
Further, the rise in divorce and out-of-wedlock births has contributed heavily to the tragic increase in the number of American children in poverty, currently one in five. And while divorce often improves the economic condition of men, who are rarely awarded custody, it nearly always results in a decline in the standard of living for the custodial parent—generally the mother—and the children.
The disappearance of fathers from children’s daily lives, because of out-of-wedlock births and divorce, has other, less tangible consequences. Girls are more likely to respond with depression and inhibited behavior, whereas boys are more likely to drop out of school and to have academic or behavioral problems. As Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan warned more than thirty years ago, the absence of fathers in the lives of children—especially boys—leads to increased rates of violence and aggressiveness, as well as a general loss of the civilizing influence marriage and responsible parenthood historically provide any society.
A child’s prayer is used as the logo for the Children’s Defense Fund: “Dear Lord, be good to me. The sea is so wide and my boat is so small.” Children without fathers, or whose parents float in and out of their lives after divorce, are the most precarious little boats in the most turbulent seas.
Many who protest loudly against welfare, gay rights, and other perceived threats to “family values” have been uncharacteristically silent about divorce. One does not have to agree with all the remarks of former Secretary of Education William Bennett to welcome his acknowledgment before the Christian Coalition that divorce is hard on children: “In terms of damage to the children of America, you cannot compare what the homosexual movement…has done to what divorce has done to this society. In terms of the consequences to children, it is not even close.”
Perhaps the most compelling evidence comes from the mouths of children themselves. I recently received a letter from a fifteen-year-old boy in Louisiana whose parents had divorced. “I’ve come to distrust you adults and the legal system in this country,” he wrote. “It seems to me that you adults do a lot of talking and nothing more.” He went on to describe what the breakup is doing to his family, as a unit and as individuals. “I try hard not to become an angry, bitter young man towards my father and the system,” he told me. “But it is not fair to me or my mom that she has to be both mother and father to me and my little brother. It makes no sense to me.” It should make no sense to any of us.
MY PERSONAL wish, that every child have an intact, dependable family, will likely remain a wish. But there is much we can do to encourage and strengthen marriages and to provide adequate support for children of divorced and single parents. Here are a few examples of what is already happening.
After years of casual attitudes about divorce in this country, heartening efforts are under way to help more couples preserve their marriages. Grassroots campaigns that urge men to take more responsibility for family well-being are cropping up around the country. Diverse (and sometimes controversial) as they and their leaders are, the popular response they have elicited reflects a broad public concern with the question of personal accountability. Promise Keepers, a nondenominational ministry, has filled football stadiums with men seeking guidance and encouragement to live more ethical lives. The Million Man March on October 16, 1995, filled the Capitol Mall with men who, in a genuine spirit of atonement and reconciliation, expressed their determination to take responsibility for themselves, their families, and their communities.
Seminars in marital reconciliation are thriving in educational and religious organizations throughout the country. In his State of the Union address in 1995, the President recognized the work of the Reverends John and Diana Cherry, two AME Zion ministers from Maryland. Through their sermons and their premarital and marital counseling courses, they have dedicated much of their ministry to helping couples stay together or get back together. Their church has an unusually high male membership because of this direct appeal to men to accept and enjoy family
responsibility.
The American Bar Association has initiated a pilot project, the First Year Anniversary Course, which assists new couples in identifying problems most likely to emerge early in a marriage. The course allows couples in crisis to participate in communication and negotiation sessions with lawyers and human relations experts.
The Partners Project, created by Lynne Gold-Bikin, a former chair of the association’s section on family law, is a practical video course designed to teach communicating and negotiating skills to high school students, long before they marry. Each session focuses on a different topic—sharing family income, for example, or domestic violence. Students take turns role-playing in scenarios that dramatize common domestic conflicts: who cooks if both partners are tired, say, or who decides how money is spent. Instructors ask students to identify the problem in each scenario, then to consider alternative approaches. If the staged conflict results in one partner’s considering divorce, a visit with an attorney is enacted, and the teens are introduced to the harsh realities that accompany marital breakup.
My strong feelings about divorce and its effects on children have caused me to bite my tongue more than a few times during my own marriage and to think instead about what I could do to be a better wife and partner. My husband has done the same. Bill and I have worked hard at our marriage with a great deal of mutual respect and deepening love for each other. That we are blessed with Chelsea enhances our commitment.
It Takes a Village Page 4
