balance” folks are not thinking about taxes or deregulation, which seem to them far removed from family life. And the “free-market family values” conversation is turning a blind eye to the dark side of the free market. Meanwhile, we have become a far more unequal society—and, at least after the late 1990s boom, curiously more tolerant of it.66
So how do we move forward? By starting with the right premises. Added up, all this research suggests that families are creatures of their context. Those who link free-market policies to family values herald the importance of “free choice.” To be sure, parents and children do make “free choices.” But they do so within contexts which constrain those choices. Obesity, physical illness, mental illness, teen pregnancy, violence, and social distrust—all these involve individual choice. A small child watches TV ads for junk food, gains weight, and becomes diabetic. He may have chosen to eat three bags of M&Ms, but not to have become fat and ill.
Meanwhile, a child’s individual choice becomes a family matter. His mother takes the morning off from work to take him to the doctor. She learns how to give him insulin shots, and now she worries about the medical bills. The child made an “individual choice” to eat the candy, but a powerful industry made its free choice to put billions of dollars into making him want to do that. Should we blame the child, the parents, or the industry?
A painter falls from a scaffolding. He is taken to the hospital with a broken back. The family cannot afford the medical bill, so his stay-at-home wife gets a low-paid job, but she cannot pay both the house note and hospital bill. We can ask whether the painter was careful enough as he walked out on the scaffolding, or we can ask when the safety inspector last checked it.
A family cancels a lakeside camping trip because a public park has closed. We can ask why Mom and Dad were not working hard enough to foot the bill for a week at the Holiday Inn, or we can ask why the public camping ground is not open.67
People live in families, and families live in contexts. For Americans today, an increasingly powerful context is the market: large and small companies in our version of a free-enterprise system. Companies offer us much of what is good and necessary in life, but as systems they are also inherently designed to uphold the values—and free choices—of stockholders, not the value of families. To expand the power of companies and contract the power of everything else (the government, non-profits, and community), as “free-market family values” advocates wish us to do, is to adopt a stockholder’s view of family life.
Some conservative leaders even behold the family through stockholder eyes. In an astonishing speech on work-family balance given to Harvard Business School students, for example, a young Mitt Romney, the 2012 Republican candidate for U.S. president, spoke of children as investments. “Your children [will not show] any evidence of achievement for 20 years,” Romney warned, but if parents do not invest enough time and energy, their families could end up as “dogs”—which is “consultant-speak,” a New York Times reporter explained, for the unprofitable parts of a corporation, “sucking energy, time and happiness” from the family.68
So how’s the family doing? In America, not so well. This is not because Mom and Dad are at the office, and it is not because Americans do not value families. It is because we have yet to open a third conversation, built on studies such as these, about what can help. Holding ourselves open to this evidence has everything to do with the “moral zoning” we apply to our empathy maps (chapter 3). These empathy maps will determine how many children—in the country or world—we think of as our own. When we set out to vote, we will need to ask what a good government would do and how to get ours to be a good one.69 And we will need to work for more socially responsible corporations, more imaginative nonprofits, and more vital communities. In the end, Americans need not fly off to Norway in search of a better family life. We can find our own examples in the low-gap, higher-well-being states that Wilkinson and Pickett discovered right here in the United States. So the next time someone asks “How’s the American family?” we can proudly answer “Couldn’t be better.”
FIVETime Strategies
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