Behavior: The American Family: Future Uncertain

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Business, too, has a responsibility to relieve some of the stress on the contemporary family, according to Psychologist Urie Bronfenbrenner. In a report to last week's White House Conference on Children, he urged business to create flexible work schedules, cut back on travel, on transfers and on social obligations that keep parents away from their children. Bronfenbrenner also feels that large corporations should concern themselves with "where and how their families live," and with more part-time positions, better maternity leave, day-care centers and family recreation plans.

Another suggestion of the report, which urges that businesses "adopt" groups of young people to give them the opportunity to see adults at work, has already been tried by a few firms.

At the White House conference, delegates saw a film about a highly successful program set up by Bronfenbrenner's colleague, David Goslin, of the Russell Sage Foundation. It showed children from the Detroit public-school system spending three days at the Detroit Free Press, learning to relate to the newspapermen and what they were doing, and saying things like "You know, in school you learn a subject, but here you meet people."

In Bronfenbrenner's view, meeting people—especially people of different ages—is all-important to the preservation of the family. Parents now spend their time with other parents, he suggests, children with children, the young with the young and the old with the old. To end this segregation, which is particularly acute in suburban living, Bronfenbrenner and others recommend planning by architects for community clusters where children, their parents and the elderly can intermingle, each group bringing its experience, knowledge and support to the other. University of Michigan's John Platt visualizes clusters he calls "childcare communities" which resemble communes: in addition to enlarged recreational and shopping facil ities, they would include centralized schoolrooms, dining rooms (for both adults and children) and kitchens.

Gypsy Caravan

For all of the family's ills, the U.S. is still probably the most marriage-and-home oriented nation in the modern world. In the 1960s the number of U.S. families grew at a greater rate than the population; 87% of Americans live in families that include both parents. While the divorce rate is rising, so is the rate of remarriage among divorced people. Thus, the nuclear model will undoubtedly remain the basic family structure in the U.S. But that does not mean that it will function as a healthy institution unless ways are found to strengthen its concept and spirit.

A man's family used to be his fate; he could scarcely change it. In the modern U.S., people think easily of changing their family, like their occupation or their home. The result is psychologically unsettling and yet this change ability has obviously become a part of American life and the family will have to adjust to it. Theologian Sam Keen (Apology for Wonder) suggests that one should boldly take the notion of the family as a center for mobility: "It should be thought of like a gypsy caravan. You have that point of stability in the caravan, but it is continually moving and each member of it goes out to forage for food and then catches up with it."