The American Family Is Broken

Just as a stopped clock is right twice a day, so too does David Brooks occasionally write an interesting column. Last Thursday, Brooks reported on the decline of the American family. We already knew that the American marriage is broken, with fewer people getting married and fewer children being brought up in intact homes.

Now, Brooks reports that these broken families are not doing a very good job at bringing up children. When parents are in it for their own self-satisfaction, to say nothing of their own self-actualization, children will invariably suffer.

So, children grow up to hate their parents. They resent their parents. They do not want to be like their parents. They are estranged from their parents, thus breaking the generational family bond.

The numbers are staggering. Brooks writes:

At least 27 percent of Americans are estranged from a member of their own family, and research suggests about 40 percent of Americans have experienced estrangement at some point.

The most common form of estrangement is between adult children and one or both parents — a cut usually initiated by the child. A study published in 2010 found that parents in the U.S. are about twice as likely to be in a contentious relationship with their adult children as parents in Israel, Germany, England and Spain.

Of course, our therapy culture mavens have long since told us that contentious relationships are good because they are more honest and open. They have told us that it is good to fight and to bicker and to argue and to struggle. These familial deformities might be just what the doctor ordered. If, that is, the doctor knew what he was ordering.

Surely, much of the problem lies in the proliferation of broken homes. True enough, there are fewer divorces than there were during the early days of the contemporary feminist revolution, but that just means that fewer and fewer people are getting married. Still, the truth is, fewer children are being brought up with a mother and father present at home. And they do not like it. They also do not like the constant drama that such arrangements seem to foster:

The Cornell sociologist Karl Pillemer, author of “Fault Lines: Fractured Families and How to Mend Them,” writes that the children in these cases often cite harsh parenting, parental favoritism, divorce and poor and increasingly hostile communication often culminating in a volcanic event. 

Parents are dumbfounded. They have been following expert parenting advice, without realizing that expert parenting advice is the problem, not the solution. As it happens, family dinners and other family routines contribute mightily to family cohesion and childhood stability. How many children now have them? And yet, how many women, under the aegis of mental health professionals and feminist agitators, have chosen to make dinner time into a struggle against the patriarchy.

Brooks never mentions it, but surely the advent of feminism has contributed mightily to the decline and fall of the American family. In his article, if I may say so, feminism is the dog that doesn’t bark.

As one cutoff couple told the psychologist Joshua Coleman: “Emotional abuse? We gave our child everything. We read every parenting book under the sun, took her on wonderful vacations, went to all of her sporting events.”

Unfortunately for him and his readers, Brooks believes that we all construct our own realities. This is frankly idiotic. If we all constructed our realities we would have no science. Why would you not, in constructing your own reality, decide that the laws of gravity did not pertain? Then you could fly!! The thought, which Brooks tosses off as a nugget of profound wisdom, bespeaks a feeble mind.

Part of the misunderstanding derives from the truth that we all construct our own realities, but part of the problem, as Nick Haslam of the University of Melbourne has suggested, is there seems to be a generational shift in what constitutes abuse. Practices that seemed like normal parenting to one generation are conceptualized as abusive, overbearing and traumatizing to another.

Actually, these normal parenting practices involved stable homes. Now that homes are in constant flux, with parents looking out more for themselves than for family solidarity, behaviors take on a different valence. 

One Joshua Coleman has certainly gotten it right. We have decided that family life must be therapeutic. We believe that we are all individuals seeking self-actualization. We do not feel bound by rules of duty and obligation. And thus, we are inapt to form strong family ties.

No one even thought to measure family estrangement until relatively recently. Coleman, the author of “Rules of Estrangement,” argues that a more individualistic culture has meant that the function of family has changed. Once it was seen as a bond of mutual duty and obligation, and now it is often seen as a launchpad for personal fulfillment. There’s more permission to cut off people who seem toxic in your life.

Some parents, incapable of assuming social defined roles, like mother and father, want to be their children’s best friends. They refuse to provide moral guidance and look on bemused while their children indulge some very bad habits, indeed.

And besides, we have all been taught, by our therapy culture, to blame someone else for all of our maladies.

The meritocracy and high-pressure parenting are also implicated here. Parents, especially among the upper-educated set, are investing more time and effort in their kids. A 2012 survey from the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture found that almost three-quarters of parents of school-age kids said they eventually want to become their children’s best friend.

Some kids seem to think they need to cut off their parents just to have their own life. “My mom is really needy and I just don’t need that in my life,” one Ivy League grad told Coleman. In other cases, children may be blaming their parents for the fact that they are not succeeding as they had hoped — it’s Mom and Dad who screwed me up.

So, Brooks concludes that the breakdown of family relations is of a piece with the breakdown of social relations in America. In that he is surely correct. But, then again, our therapy culture does not prescribe good social relations. It prescribes individual self-fulfillment, to each his own reality, to each his own rules, to each his own path toward self-actualization.

I write about this phenomenon here because it feels like a piece of what seems to be the psychological unraveling of America, which has become an emerging theme of this column. Terrible trends are everywhere. Major depression rates among youths aged 12 to 17 rose by almost 63 percent between 2013 and 2016. American suicide rates increased by 33 percent between 1999 and 2019. The percentage of Americans who say they have no close friends has quadrupled since 1990, according to the Survey Center on American Life. Fifty-four percent of Americans report sometimes or always feeling that no one knows them well, according to a 2018 Ipsos survey.