Family Crisis,\" Stephanie Cootz Asserts,

¶ … Family Crisis," Stephanie Cootz asserts, "If it is hard to find a satisfactory model of the traditional family, it is also hard to make global judgments about how families have changed and whether they are getting better or worse." (14) Yet, her work doesn't support this statement very well. Cootz provides an historical perspective of the family, making negative value judgments throughout her recounts of many earlier times. Yet, when she gets to the modern-day family of the late twentieth century her criticisms are few. She spends most of her time describing why things are just as good, if not better now, than they were in the 1950's. Most damningly, near the end of the chapter, she makes a recommendation for a problem of the twentieth century family that she had claimed just pages earlier didn't really exist. Still, her work is valuable because it does an excellent job of convincing the reader that there are a lot of myths about the traditional family, both historically and today, that simply aren't true. If Cootz had stuck to her initial statement that it's hard to compare the family at different times in history because of complex contextual factors, her work would have been more objective and, therefore, valuable.

Cootz states that people believe the appropriate function of today's family has somehow broken down and many desire a return to times long gone when they believe family values were much stronger. but, she believes that people's notions of earlier times are based on myths and that the true realities of these times wouldn't be as appealing. For example, some may see the strict patriarchal authority of colonial days as preferable to today's more egalitarian environments. but, they would be shocked to discover the sexual morality of that time was actually much more liberal than today's practices. Instead, one might lament that the Victorian era of the 1830's and 1840's is the better time for the family because this is when middle-class women were freed from time-consuming chores by the spread of textile mills. but, admirers might think twice when they learn that this freedom came at the expense of slaves and child laborers.

By the end of the nineteenth century, "Reformers advocated adoption of a "true American" family -- a restricted, exclusive nuclear unit in which women and children were divorced from the world of work." (13). In the 1920s and early 1930's, the independence and isolation of the nuclear family became a concern, but was later seen as resolved by the hardships of the Great Depress and the Second World War that ushered in a new kind of family ideal that took root in the 1950's. According to Coot, this ideal wasn't really better than any other time for the family throughout history.

Next, Cootz dispels myths about the family in the late twentieth century. Even though this is a time we are experiencing, we appear to be just as subject to embracing fallacies and myths about our present situation as we are for prior historical eras we have only experienced through books. It would have been useful if Cootz had spent some time discussing why this is true.

Today, according to Cootz, there is the misguided feeling that our system is completely broken. One of the most common myths of modern-day families is that they Americans have lost touch with its extended-kinship networks and have weak parent-child bonds. Yet, research shows this simply isn't true. In fact grandparents are living longer and relatives are visiting each other at the same rate as they did in the 1950's. Somehow, people have gotten the feeling that more modern ideals are destroying the institution of marriage even though ninety percent of men and women eventually marry today.

Perhaps one of the most important findings of Cootz is that there's the feeling that married couples today just aren't as happy as they were in the golden age of the 1950's. Here, she doesn't do a great job of refuting this supposed myth. She did find data that more couples reported their marriages to be happy in the late 1970s than did so in 1957. but, the use of data this old simply shows that Cootz lacks appropriate evidence to support her argument. At least she does admit that between the late 1970s and late 1980s, marital happiness did decline in the United States. When dealing the higher deaths rates of our present generation, Cootz does a poor job of putting these numbers in an unbiased contextual perspective. Cootz explains how many marriages in the past were terminated by the death of a partner rather than divorce which she infers is the modern-day equivalent of death in marriage. This is a ridiculous inference. There's absolutely no way to prove that if the partners in the marriage had lived longer they would have gotten a divorce. To her credit, Cootz does acknowledge that while many men have learned to be better fathers and spend more time with their children, more fathers are walking out on their families than ever before.

Cootz is more credible when she talks about putting data on youngsters in context with the historical times. She points out that the proportion of youngsters receiving psychological assistance role by eighty percent between 1981 and 1988 and that child abuse reports increased by 225% between 1976 and 1987. Cootz convincingly argues that these increases may just as likely represented heightened consciousness about these problems rather than actual increases in occurrences.

Finished with describing where families have come from, Cootz turns her attention to where families are going. On this matter, she says "Lack of perspective on where families have come from and how their evolution connects to other social trends tends to encourage contradictory claims and wild exaggerations about where families are going." (18) Polls today reveal that women are increasingly dissatisfied with the failure of employers, schools and government to come up with ways that would make it easier to combine work and family life. Two-thirds of women responding to one national poll said they wanted more traditional standards of family life. At the same time, women rejected the idea that "women should return to their traditional role." (21) the results of these polls do seem to indicate that women do have a perspective of where families have come from, perhaps it's just not the same perspective that Cootz has.