Marilyn Berlin Snell
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These days, even a modest standard of living comes to us at the
price of an 80-hour
work week. When both parents work full time away from the home,
and when children are
entrusted to day care operators, the idea of "family" is
dramatically transformed.
Almost imperceptibly, we have altered the family structure to
accommodate the
imperatives of our work schedule and our consumerist definition
of the "good life". For the majority of Americans that managed to stay afloat with dual incomes, despite falling real wages, the economic boom of the eighties brought with it an escalation of consumer expectation. For most, the limits of the "indispensable" expanded from the mortgage and the car to such late-modern necessities of life as VCR's, another car, microwaves, CD's and Nikes. But this frenzied, "shop-til-you-drop" syndrome has had its price: In order to purchase the pleasures that insulate us from the world, we must work til we drop and contract out the care of our children to others. A society in which parents can't afford to raise their children is not sustainable. Yet, the answer does not lie in a return to conservative values; it lies in the substitution of consumer values with conserving values. Conserving values assume a commitment to the future: we must take care of our children so they can grown into healthy, responsible adults; and we must preserve our environment so that it can sustain future generations. Such a commitment to the future inevitably requires compromise from everyone -- not just a select, disenfranchised group... ...In fact, a recent New York Times poll showed that two-thirds of those parents surveyed would take care of their own children if it were economically feasible. Thus far, however, we have only succeeded in reorganizing the family to accommodate the consumer economy... ...Historically, one of the most far-reaching accomplishments of the American labor movement was the creation of the eight-hour work day. As the century winds down, with our parents and their children becoming strangers, and our ranks of the permanently unemployed growing, the six-hour work day could bring parents home and the unemployed into the work force. Somewhere between materialism and utopia lies a new set of possibilities rooted in conserving values: A mode of living based on intergenerational responsibility between parent and child with respect to the environment; shared responsibility between parents for work and child rearing; and a notion of productive endeavor that rejects the kind of social and economic hierarchy that reveres the work of stockbrokers and celebrities while it devalues the work of pregnancy, child birth and the nurturance of our children.
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