New York TIMES MAGAZINE / August 6, 2010 What the Great Recession Has Done to Family Life By JUDITH WARNER
Economists may assert that we’re in the early stages of a recovery, but surveys continue to show that the impact of the Great Recession on American families is deep, widespread and grim. A Pew Research poll published last month indicated that more than half of all adults in the U.S. labor force had experienced some “work-related hardship” — a period of unemployment, a pay cut, a reduction in work hours or an involuntary move to part-time employment — since the recession began in December 2007. A report in March from the Population Reference Bureau showed that more than 70 percent of Americans age 40 and over felt they had been affected by the economic crisis. Government data indicate that the net worth of the average American household has shrunk by about 20 percent — the greatest such decline since the end of World War II. Long-term unemployment — joblessness lasting six months or more — is also at its highest level since the mid-1940s. According to recent data from the Rockefeller Institute, 20 percent of Americans have seen their available household income decline by 25 percent or more. And yet, despite this bleak reality, some talk persists of silver linings: less cash to spend means less materialism, a real change to “the definition of living well,” as Jim Taylor, a vice president of Harrison Group, a market research firm in Waterbury, Conn., told The Times as the big banks melted down in the fall of 2008. At that time, unemployed Wall Street dads were said to be discovering the unexpected joys of domesticity. Minivan moms in the summertime learned that days at the public beach were just as rewarding as playing tennis while the kids improved themselves at foreign-language camp. The glue of all this new happiness was meant to be togetherness — a belief that still sustains reports that people are volunteering more, pulling together and even replacing their propensity to compete with their neighbors with a new spirit of cooperation and solidarity. “There’s a new level of social coordination,” says Dan Ariely, a behavioral economist at Duke University, relating to me how parents of his acquaintance recently agreed to a multilateral halt in the escalation of kid-birthday-party madness in favor of back-to-basics cake and balloons. “In some areas of our life we’re resetting. Over time, we may get de-escalation.” This glass-half-full narrative, the popular trope that the Great Recession will ennoble us by purging us of our excesses, has, as its reference point, the Great Depression — or a certain idea of the Great Depression. After all, we’ve been told countless times, the Depression put an end to the libertine individualism of the flapper age: families stayed home and played Monopoly, finding strength and sustenance with one another. Missing from this rosy picture, however, historians point out, is the fact that, as Steven Mintz, a Columbia University historian puts it, “they had no choice.” The atmosphere was often pretty rotten in those times of togetherness, he says, and many kids reacted by getting away from their parents as quickly as possible: “Teenagers who were unhappy with their families created a separate culture, a teenage culture, for the first time. Their family lives were unpleasant — their fathers were depressed — these kids separated themselves.” What the Great Depression was actually like — mostly wretched — and how we frequently choose to think of it — as ultimately redemptive — are two very different things. Our society didn’t fully come together over the New Deal; the opposition to it was fierce. What would bring Americans their strongest sense of unity, a powerful sense of purpose and energy — and ultimately, jobs and large-scale, life-bettering educational opportunities — was the cataclysm of World War II, according to the historian Glen Elder Jr., author of the classic “Children of the Great Depression.” Our nostalgia for the Depression speaks volumes about how we feel not just about the past but also about our lives today. A craving for a simpler, slower, more centered life, one less consumed by the soul-emptying crush of getting and spending, runs deep within our culture right now. It was born of the boom, and not just because of the materialism of that era but also because of the work it took then to keep a family afloat, at a time of rising home prices and health care costs, frozen real wages and the pressures of an ever-widening income gap. As the recent Rockefeller report showed, for most families the miseries of the Great Recession don’t represent a break from the recent past, just a significant worsening of the stresses they’ve been under for years and years. That the Great Recession could then bring hope for a major recalibration — a resetting of all the clocks — is not surprising. Unfortunately, though, it’s not happening in any meaningful way. The poor are getting poorer, and the rich, despite stock-market setbacks, are still comparatively rich. The most devastating losses in household wealth over the past two years have been suffered by the middle class. And families are fraying at the seams. The Pew poll showed nearly half of people who had been unemployed for more than six months saying their family relationships had become strained, and a New York Times/CBS poll of unemployed adults last winter found about 40 percent saying they believed their joblessness was causing behavioral change in their children. Parents who have jobs are working longer hours than ever. Mothers are taking shorter maternity leaves. The birth rate is on the decline. The divorce rate is declining, too — it’s too expensive for people to break up their households — but that’s not necessarily a family-friendly thing, as a report from the Council on Contemporary Families noted in April: “We know from the experience of the Great Depression of the 1930s that divorce rates can fall while family conflict and domestic violence rates rise.” What came out of the combined experience of the Great Depression and World War II — broad measures of quality-of-life equalization like a sharply progressive tax policy with rates on the wealthy unimaginable today, the G.I. Bill, government-subsidized home mortgages for veterans — permitted the easier, less-frenzied middle class family life that older Americans remember from the 1950s and ’60s and that younger Americans dream of. In other words, it wasn’t individual families that reformed themselves after the crucible of the Depression. It was our society. Judith Warner is the author, most recently, of “We’ve Got Issues: Children and Parents in the Age of Medication.” -- Jim Devine "All science would be superfluous if the form of appearance of things directly coincided with their essence." -- KM _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
