A Child's Christmas in America

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BROKEN FAMILIES. The notion of the American family as a mommy, a daddy and 2.4 towheads may always have been a confection of Norman Rockwell. Today it looks particularly fictitious. As divorce rates rise (one in four marriages now breaks up), single-parent families become increasingly common. In 1970 a fourth of all children were living with only one parent, almost twice the number who were doing so ten years ago. Over the same period, reports Bronfenbrenner, the number of families headed by women who have never been married has tripled. There are almost a million (out of 54.3 million families in the U.S.). "Children's literature, schools, toys, movies, and of course TV bombard children with images of mom and daddy, daddy at work, mommy in the kitchen. How does the single mother deal with this situation?" asks the new magazine MOMMA, aimed at the nation's 7,000,000 mothers-unmarried, separated, widowed or divorced-who are living alone with their children. How do the children react? Said one California eight-year-old whose parents were getting a divorce: "Families are good when they get along but they are not when they make children cry."

Many teachers and psychologists report increasing tension in classrooms and on playgrounds. Says Peggy Harris, first-grade teacher at Edward Devotion School in Brookline, Mass.: "It is very difficult to have a classroom situation in which the kids all sit down and do something together, which you could do if not five, then ten years ago. The children today tend to be very much more upset. The teacher has to be very understanding of the problems that the children have to deal with at home."

POLITICAL CYNICISM. The fatuities and corruption in high places are not beyond the grasp of even the smallest U.S. children. "My daddy said they would arrest me if I said again what I think of Mr. Nixon," said an eleven-year-old in Atlanta. "But Presidents don't lie," a confused five-year-old Californian told his father. Says Robert Wayne Jones, child psychologist at Georgia State University: Watergate has led children to believe "politicians are the guys we don't want to be like."

New York Child Psychologist Rita Frankiel is harsher: "Our political fathers are failing kids today," she says. "The values that one strives for in one's self and encourages in one's children are corrupted in the highest places." As proof she cites the child thief who asked, "Why not? Mr. Agnew did it."

Even on the lowest level, kids have begun to treat politics the way Johnny Carson does. Among preteens, a favorite magazine is Mad, with its juvenile japes on the themes of the Watergate follies ("Nixxon-the same old gas").

VORACIOUS CONSUMERS. Children have long been enthusiastic collectors of bottles, tin cans and newspapers for neighborhood recycling efforts. Some enjoy "survival" classes, finding acorns in the woods and grinding them into flour-in comfortable, all-electric kitchens. Like their elders, they are beginning to be aware of the new shortages ("Next winter we might all freeze to death") and they have their own solutions. Suggested a first-grader: "When the astronauts get all those pictures, then we can sell them and get money and pay it to the Arabs for oil."