Ten Reasons The Original Sin Doctrine is Damaging for Children

Why rewrite the story of salvation? Here are 10 good reasons to rethink one's approach. Can you think of one or two good ways to tell the gospel? Well, if you can't think of any, might I suggest starting with...

God's deep love and how this Love means and frames everything around us in our daily experience? 

Or, perhaps, the sublime story of Jesus - who He was, how He spoke of His father, or why His ministry differed so deeply from the High Pharisees of the Jewish faith.

In essence, there's a lot of ways to talk of God and salvation and its importance to humanity and why it's so important that the church display this Grace-filled God by love, sacrifice, service, and ministration both in word and by deed.

It is the entire foundation and basis of the gospel of God to humanity.

R.E. Slater

June 21, 2018

Photo by Carlos Alberto Gómez Iñiguez on Unsplash

Ten Reasons The Original Sin Doctrine

is Damaging for Children

http://cindywords.com/ten-reasons-the-original-sin-doctrine-is-damaging-for-children/

by Cindy Brandt

June 15, 2018

I’ve talked about sin before, how the way we spoke of it in the evangelicalism of my youth was far too limited to address our human condition. Then I talked about itagain, confessing how it threw me into a state of spiritual anxiety and trapped me in false guilt.

And now I want to talk about the Original Sin in the context of parenting, namely, how it is extremely damaging for children. To recap, for those who are blessed to not have grown up with the concept, Original Sin is the theological doctrine that we are born with a sinful nature. Somehow, when Adam and Eve bit the forbidden fruit in the Garden, their act of rebellion transferred to all their descendants. Theirs was the Original Sin, and because of them, we all are spiritually wired to sin. The good news about all of this bad news, is of course, that by believing in Jesus we are cleansed from our dirtiness and also empowered to live free from sin. That is the Christian gospel in a nutshell.

If this sounds benign to you, it’s because it has become so widely and popularly accepted that it is normalized. But this is NOT normal, and in fact, is detrimental to children. Here are ten reasons why:

1. Separation from God. The Original Sin states that we are separated from God because of it. Danielle Shroyer says in the Original Blessing, that Original Sin “frames the gospel as a story of separation.” Children have a fundamental need to be loved and to belong. To set them up in a separation story is to unnecessarily sever a beautiful bond between them and God.

2. Self-fulfilling prophecy. If a child is told they are inclined to sin, it sets them up for failure. And when they do make poor choices, it’s self-defeating because well, they know they were born to be that person.

3. Disingenuous to a child’s experience. Kids do sometimes misbehave, but they are also inclined to love lavishly. Original Sin doesn’t make room for those expressions of love and kindness—what’s a kid to understand why they feel compassion for others if they are told they have the Original Sin?

4. Discourages intuition. If what’s inside is bad, then a child is told not to trust their own intuition. This sets them up for all kinds of abuse because they are told to ignore warning signals, the intuitive sense that something feels wrong.

5. Disempowering. There is zero intrinsic motivation in the doctrine of Original Sin—every effort to do good has to come from Jesus or other religious/parental authority because the child is told what comes from their own motivation is always evil.

6. Disregards normal development. A toddler who tests boundaries is doing what’s healthy for them as they differentiate their own boundaries and way of being in the world. Original Sin relegates behaviors that are developmentally normal as proof that children are rebellious instead of exploring children’s psychology and healthy development.

7. Gets them off the hook. Each time a child makes a poor choice, it is an opportunity to learn and do better. Original Sin gets them off the hook, because if they sin they know it’s their inevitable nature and asking for forgiveness wipes their slate clean. No real work is done to become a better version of themselves.

8. Fixed Mindset. Psychologist Carol Dweck developed the insight of Fixed vs. Growth Mindset. Twenty years of research shows that the way you believe about yourself, whether that your character traits are fixed or has potential for growth, determines the person you become. Original Sin is the ultimate fixed mindset, because you’re told a sin nature is the hand you’re dealt. Any attempts to be a better person only makes you feel like a fraud or futile attempts to prove yourself worthy.

9. Antagonistic relationship to God. Original Sin states that you are an enemy of God from the get-go. Sure, reconciliation is possible through Jesus, but a baby is born waging war against God. This doesn’t set the child up for a healthy relationship with God.

10. Cheapens salvation. If we reduce the good news of the gospel to acquittal from the Original Sin, then we are withholding a far more beautiful gospel to our children—one that affirms a God who unconditionally loves them from day one, is present with them through all their joys and pain, offering steady, unflinching hope in their grittiest days. That gospel does not need the Original Sin, and neither do our children.

*This post is inspired by Danielle Shroyer’s book, The Original Blessing: Putting Sin in its Rightful Place, find a thorough treatment of this subject in her rich and accessible book and say goodbye to the Original Sin forever, for your sake and for the kids.

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Amazon link

Paperback: 217 pages

Publisher: Fortress Press (November 1, 2016)

Language: English

ISBN-10: 1451496761

ISBN-13: 978-1451496765

Of the world's three major religions, only Christianity holds to a doctrine of original sin. Ideas are powerful, and they shape who we are and who we become. The fact that many Christians believe there is something in human nature that is, and will always be, contrary to God, is not just a problem but a tragedy. So why do the doctrine's assumptions of human nature so infiltrate our pulpits, sermons, and theological bookshelves? How is it so misconstrued in times of grief, pastoral care, and personal shame? How did we fall so far from God's original blessing in the garden to this pervasive belief in humanity's innate inability to do good? In this book, Danielle Shroyer takes readers through an overview of the historical development of the doctrine, pointing out important missteps and overcalculations, and providing alternative ways to approach often-used Scriptures. Throughout, she brings the primary claims of original sin to their untenable (and unbiblical) conclusions. In Original Blessing, she shows not only how we got this doctrine wrong, but how we can put sin back in its rightful place: in a broader context of redemption and the blessing of humanity's creation in the image of God.

Catherine Keller - Parenting & the Uncontrolling God

Catherine Keller on the Uncontrolling God

http://thomasjayoord.com/index.php/blog/archives/catherine-keller-uncontrolling-god

Guest Post by Catherine Keller

November 15th, 2016

A friend describes a process she learned as a mother: “I never did try to control my kids, there were too many of them to do that. I had three children in two years, and it became very clear early on (such as day one), that control was not possible. Instead of getting in their way and trying to run their play, I had to arrive at some other mode of being with them as they are.”

So she invited friends over for them to play with, and chaos mounted. But this is what she observed: “If I were willing and able to let the four or five very young children jostle, master round, explore for about 45 minutes-with the ground rules of not hurting each other or the home-if I just let them go through whatever procedures they needed to go through, they would come up with something that they loved to do together. They would arrive at some game, project, make-believe… That would keep them positively, joyfully engaged for up to three hours. All of them.”

This is a humble parable of creation from chaos. It illustrates uncontrolling love.

Parents and all who relate in love have to “let be.” So do good teachers, pastors, and leaders. As Elohim italicized “Let be” the light? John McQuarrie defines “letting be” as something much more positive than just leaving alone: “as enabling to be, empowering to be, or bringing into being.” Thus our experience of “letting be” may serve as an analogy of “the ultimate letting-be.”

Love does not control. It opens up the space of becoming. The space is not without protective boundaries, not without rules.

The healthy parent is not merely permissive, but constantly teaching ideals of fairness, cooperation, and creative development. This space comprises neither rampant disorder nor imposed order. It opens at the edge of chaos, without plunging into the abyss. It supports the free play of relations — and satisfies desires of both parent and children. This uncontrolling care empowers the children to construct their own “complex self-organizing system.” At least temporarily!

---

If I may push our parable a bit further, the desired into play is not about a private “me and my God” relation but I love open and out into a fuller sociality. “Two or more gathered in my name.” In the communality of genesis things are risky, noisy, messy. But fresh order continues to emerge from the chaos. And while its equilibria do not last forever — “love never ends” (1 Cor. 13:8).

Does God just choose not to interfere with our freedom? The so-called free-will defense of God’s goodness and omnipotence tries that middle road: God permits, but does not cause evil, and so leaves us our freedom. This is close to the chilly deism Calvin railed against.

But usually those who hold this reasonable view also hold out for occasional special or miraculous interventions on God’s part. But then: Why didn’t God manipulate the vote just a bit so that Hitler would lose the election? Or, for that matter, heal my friend’s little sister’s leukemia? Or excise that bad gene in the first place? Or all bad genes?

The free-will defense only works if held consistently. But that is hard to do. To say God “permits” evil for the sake of our freedom implies that God could step in at any time, and as far as history demonstrates, just chooses not to.

The alternative to omnipotence lies in the risky interactivity of relationship. It does not toss the creatures into a deistic void, chilled but autonomous. It continues to call them forth, to invite… The power of God, if it is response-able power, empowers the others – to respond. In their freedom.

In what sense then is the divine powerful? It can perhaps even be called all-powerful, if that language for the biblical God seems indispensable to some, in this sense: God has “all the power” that a good God, a God who fosters and delights in the goodness of the creation, could have or want to have.

But the point is that this is not the unilateral power to command things to happen out of nothing and then to control them under threat of nothingness. It is another kind of power all together, a qualitatively different power — a power that seems weak when dominance is the ideal.

The metaphor of “power perfected in weakness” tried to make comprehensible the difficult alternative to coercive force: the contagious influence that flows from a radically vulnerable strength. Two thousand years later, we have made limited collective progress in its realization. Perhaps experiments in social democracy, in which persuasion is favored over coercion, and care valued as a supreme public strength, hint at the alternative. Perhaps experiments in gender equality and nonviolent parenting are also advancing, here and there, our metaphoric reservoir.

The One who calls forth good even from the ashes of evil, a good that requires—indeed commands—but cannot coerce our cooperation. A power that makes possible our response.

---

From On the Mystery: Discerning God in Process pp. 88-90 copyright © 2007 Fortress Press. Reproduced by permission. For a more complete treatment of the subject consider purchase of the book, which may be found at the following link: http://fortresspress.com/product/mystery-discerning-divinity-process

Catherine Keller is Professor of Constructive Theology at The Theological School of Drew University. She’s the author or editor of more than a dozen books, her latest being Cloud of the Impossible: Negative Theology and Planetary Entanglement. New York: Columbia University Press, 2015.

American Mythology - The Way We Never Were: Family Life in America

Amazon link, October 1993

The Way We Never Were:

American Families and the Nostalgia Trap

"I'm increasingly thinking of the need for quality child care and limits on the work week as the new health and safety regulations we need in this society." - Stephanie Coontz

"Providing children with good care, and families with decent health insurance,

are in the public interest." - Stephanie Coontz

About The Way We Never Were

October 1993

This myth-shattering examination of two centuries of American family life banishes the misconceptions about the past that cloud current debate about "family values." "Leave It to Beaver" was not a documentary, Stephanie Coontz points out; neither the 1950s nor any other moment from our past presents workable models of how to conduct our personal lives today.

Without minimizing the serious new problems in American families, Coontz warns that a consoling nostalgia for a largely mythical past of "traditional values" is a trap that can only cripple our capacity to solve today's problems.

From "a man's home was his castle" to "traditional families never asked for a handout," this provocative book explodes cherished illusions about the past. Organized around a series of myths and half-truths that burden modern families, the book sheds new light on such contemporary concerns as parenting, privacy, love, the division of labor along gender lines, the black family, feminism, and sexual practice.

Fascinating facts abound:

• In the nineteenth century, the age of sexual consent in some states was nine or ten, and alcoholism and drug abuse were more rampant than today
• Teenage childbearing peaked in the fabulous family-oriented 1950s
• Marriages in pioneer days lasted a shorter time than they do now

Placing current family dilemmas in the context of far-reaching economic, political, and demographic changes, The Way We Never Were shows that people have not suddenly and inexplicably "gone bad" and points to ways that we can help families do better.

"Seeing our own family pains as part of a larger social predicament means that we can stop the cycle of guilt or blame and face the real issues constructively," Coontz writes. "The historical evidence reveals that families have always been in flux and often in crisis, and that families have been most successful wherever they have built meaningful networks beyond their own boundaries."

--The Publisher.

Family Studies historian, author, and speaker Stephanie Coontz

Wikipedia Bio

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephanie_Coontz

Stephanie Coontz (born August 31, 1944) is an author, historian,[1][2] and faculty member at Evergreen State College. She teaches history and family studies and is Director of Research and Public Education for the Council on Contemporary Families, which she chaired from 2001-2004. Coontz has authored and co-edited several books about the history of the family and marriage.

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Official Stephanie Coontz Blog Site - Archieve Articles

http://www.stephaniecoontz.com/articles/



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Reviews of The Way We Never Were

http://www.stephaniecoontz.com/books/thewayweneverwere/

Review of: The Way We Never Were

Kirkus Reviews, 8/15/92

Placing the American family in its historical, cultural, economic, and philosophic context Coontz (co-ed., Women's Work, Men's Property, 1986) identifies the myths and their sources, functions, and fallacies that Americans generate around family life, as well as the terrible burden these illusions create.

Violence, abuse, poverty, ignorance, alcoholism, dependence on government support -- in brief, all the social ills attributed to the breakdown of the family -- have in fact been a part of American social life since Colonial times, Coontz says. She further argues that our ideal of family life is primarily an invention of the 50's, projected in TV sitcoms such as Leave It to Beaver, and is an ideal as pernicious as are the social problems it supposedly prevents.

Families always have been diverse and fragile, shaped by a community of interdependencies and reciprocities easily lost. Even the division of labor between the nurturing, altruistic female and the aggressive, competitive male -- to whom she is supposedly connected by a bond of love -- is an illusion and a source of great unhappiness. Indeed, many of the problems in family life, Coontz says, are caused by the unfounded belief that the family should be a symbol of strength, a model of self-sufficiency, a center of values in which people find refuge and raise children who will be good citizens.

Today, the survival of the family depends on realistically assessing its diversity and what it can and can't do, on its overcoming the fantasies of what it is supposed to be and how it is supposed to function; and on recovering its civic commitments.

Clear, incisive, and distinguished by Coontz¹s personal conviction and by its vast range of cogent examples, including capsule histories of women in the labor force and of black families. Fascinating, persuasive, politically relevant.

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Ozzie and Hariet Lied

The New York Times Book Review, November 4, 1992, By Donald Katz

Two models of the American family have been on view in this political season. The family Clinton has presented itself as an up-to-date survivor model, replete with storytelling about family trouble - the beaming young couple who have worked past their problems, the working mother of the candidate, the once drug-addicted and imprisoned brother. The family Bush has appeared as a more traditional survivor family with a similar persistence of love and loyalty in the face of loss and pain, and yet, being "traditional," accoutered with all sorts of Little-League and car-pool nostalgia.

The purpose of the nostalgia, of course, has been to create a morally superior memento of a better family part. And it is what remains of this idealized, once-upon-a-time American family that the historian Stephanie Coontz shreds into tiny pieces in the first half of her often brilliant and invariably provocative new book, The Way We Never Were: American Families and the Nostalgia Trap.

Pick a favorite presumption about American families during better times -- the "notion that traditional families fostered intense intimacy between husbands and wives while creating mothers who were totally available to their children," for instance -- and Ms. Coontz proceeds to unravel the mythical conceit. She says it is a 1950's vintage amalgam of the mid-19th century, middle-class obsession with the "mother-child axis" and the contradictory view of married life prevalent during the 1920's, which eroticized the adult relationship and called on mothers to curb their "over-investment" in their children.

No wonder that the pressure to abide by the hydraheaded, myth, as Ms. Coontz documents, drove so many women to therapy and substance abuse in the 1950's. Pick an era when you think a more decent American family was in ascendancy, and, Ms. Coontz, who teaches at the Evergreen State College in Olympia, Wash., offers dozens of facts in support of her contention that pain has always been a part of family life. The fabled colonial household was fragmented by early death, and children frequently heard explicit talk of sex. The idealized Victorian home hid a rate of marital dissolution, albeit without divorce, that would easily rival current divorce rates.

Contrary to popular opinion, Ms. Coontz writes, "Leave It to Beaver was not a documentary." In the Beaver's 1950's; before food stamps and public housing programs, one in four Americans was poor. There were Federal programs - G.I. benefits, housing loans, highway construction and job-creating research and development. But she argues that such programs rendered the 1950's suburban family "far more dependent on government handouts than any so-called 'underclass' in recent U. S. history." Incidents of family violence and abuse remained buried under the idealized images of the times, "Wife battering was not even considered a 'real' crime by most people," and "by 1960 ... experts described, incest as a 'one-in-a-million occurrence.'" Following a fascinating recapitulation of the development of modern gender roles, Ms. Coontz addresses contemporary myths about the American family. Here she begins to break less interesting historical news and clutters her effort to clear away the mist of myth. Her analysis is almost exclusively centered, on the economic and political genesis of domestic problems and the economic and political solution to them. Her discussions of heavily freighted cultural issues such as childbearing and maternal employment, latchkey children and the impact of day care on infants are terse; each subject is dealt with in a bit over a page, the boomers' penchant for "nesting" is written off as manufactured, romanticization.

But a change in focus has occurred, and Americans are leaving behind the habits of an era in which money-getting and what some commentators have called expressive individualism -- a phrase applied, depending on your point of view, to privileged self-involvement or Promethean liberation -- were idealized in a way that marked and even injured innumerable Americans. The current "turn toward home" that Ms. Coontz says is historically unproductive is precisely the cultural change that has allowed the warts-and-all family storytelling of the Clintons to appear just as all-American, value-laden and "pro-family" as the "nostalgia traps" laid out by the Bushes.

The last half of The Way We Never Were nevertheless complements the historical research contained in the first. Ms. Coontz tries to turn the focus of a tedious public debate away from an idealized image of individual roles and domestic life by using economic and social data to describe an America in which people are struggling every day to make ends meet, and raise their children.

Once we have shed all the unhelpful myths, our understanding of the American family must come to include the schools in which family members learn, the houses and communities in which families live, the medical system upon which families depend, and the economy that ultimately dictates the relative ability of each family to thrive. Perhaps at that point, somewhere in the future, we will finally create the Golden Age of the, American family.

Donald Katz is the author of "Home Fires: An Intimate Portrait of One Middle-Class Family in Postwar America."

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Whole Truth Behind Dream '50s

Newsday, by Vickie Erv

Oh, we families had a jolly time in the '50s, living and breathing family values, whatever those are. Such happy, moral days: babies booming, divorce and illegitimacy half of what they are today, home ownership skyrocketing, daddy venturing out to win bread, and mommy staying home to express her femininity through intricate housework maneuvers. This was not just Leave It To Beaver. This was the real thing. Of course, in order to play this American Family Dream Game, you really did have to be white and middle class.

On the other side of the tracks, according to family historian Stephanie Coontz, 25 percent of Americans were poor in the mid-'50s, a time before food stamps and housing programs. Forty percent of black women with small children worked outside their homes. African-Americans, whose labor sustained the economic expansion of the time, were restricted from living in white neighborhoods.

To tell the whole truth, postwar middle-class happiness was achieved through an enormous public investment. If there was indeed a brief moment of prosperity for the many working-class people who entered the middle class, it wasn't because individuals suddenly became more ambitious and self-reliant.

Fifties-style upward mobility arrived courtesy of the federal government, which subsidized college education through GI benefits, boosted house buying and home building through federal housing loans and built highways out to the suburbs through publicly financed projects.

And while we're telling the truth, middle-class life could be psychologically harrowing. According to a study of San Francisco Bay area women hospitalized as "schizophrenic" in the 1950s, some wives, unhappy with enforced domesticity, were labeled schizophrenic, institutionalized and sometimes given shock treatments "to accept their domestic roles and their husbands' dictates." For some women who sought abortion, shock treatments were also recommended, because the failure to want a baby was considered to signify dangerous emotional disturbance. And as for the myth of '50s-style deferred sexual gratification, in 1957, more than 97 out of every 1,000 girls aged 15 to 19 gave birth. (By the by, sexual morality wasn't so pristine at other times in American history either. In the 20 years prior to the revolution, one-third of all children born were conceived out of wedlock.)

If the '50s weren't picture perfect, surely we could hitch our nostalgic yearning for family values to some other eras in American history! Perhaps the gentle Victorian family. Not so gentle for Victorian families who weren't middle class. In The Way We Never Were, Coontz presents fascinating facts and figures that explode the cherished myths about self-sufficient, happy, moral families. This book will convince you that the good old days for families can -- and should -- never be ours once again. You may come to doubt political candidates who promise to return us to a golden age.

Coontz successfully proves that we are not going to solve any current social crises by trying to recreate models of family bliss that were realized only in the haze of nostalgia.

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Facts of Life for a Whole Nation

The News Tribune, Wednesday May 28, 1997. By Kathleen Merryman

Those who say "Here's what's wrong with families" in front of Stephanie Coontz had better be able to pull out the numbers.

Stephanie Coontz can't thank Dan Quayle enough. She had just published The Way We Never Were: American Families and the Nostalgia Trap when [Vice-President] Quayle blasted television character Murphy Brown for choosing to become a single mother. There was Quayle, conjuring up a nostalgic vision of "traditional" American values sustained by "traditional" families that looked very much like 1950s sitcom icons. And there was Coontz, the Evergreen State College professor of history and family studies, using history to demonstrate that Quayle's vision was a seductive myth.

Radio and television producers from I-5 to the Washington Beltway booked her.

Pat Buchanan debated her.

The National Enquirer misquoted her.

And thousands of ordinary people - precisely the kinds of ordinary people that college professors rarely get to meet - called her on talk shows and wrote to her.

Over and over they told her they were sure they were failing as families. Money was tight. Jobs were insecure. They were stressed and isolated. They blamed themselves, and they got lots of help. The airwaves and opinion columns are stuffed with pundits, politicians and preachers blaming the nation's problems on the collapse of family values. If only Americans would return to the traditions of the past - when men brought home the bacon and women cooked it and the kids washed their hands and said please before they ate it - everything would be fine again.

Politicos from the left offered no comfort to folks who aren't as affluent or educated as policy makers and futurecasters, she said. Society is changing, deal with it or get left behind, they said - and did nothing to help.

The people Coontz heard from had been buying the blame argument - it was so simple when everything else in their life was so complex - and blaming themselves.

Coontz stopped them right there.

Families aren't failing and pulling America down with them, she told them. The situation is far more complex, and the solution does not lie in imaginary visions of the past or predictions of -an affluent techno-future.

She believes it lies in accepting change and enlisting government and business and individuals to deal with it creatively. When Coontz didn't hear creative, practical solutions from the left or the right, she stepped in with a sequel to The Way We Never Were.

The Way We Really Are: Corning to Terms with America's Changing Families, ($23, Basic Books, HarperCollins) musters the tools of social science to explain what's going on in real homes and communities. For starters, what's going on right now is not the Apocalypse of American Society. It is intense economic and social change, and - with the possible exception of winning Lotto - change is always tough. For most people things are changing in very complicated ways.

They experience their anxiety as a loss," Coontz said on a sunny afternoon in the cozy bungalow she shares with her son and husband in Olympia. Outside, lilacs planted 40 years ago scented the air. Inside, the phone rang with more talk show producers and the graduation ceremony coordinator at the high school where her son is a sophomore. She married two years ago, but for much of her son's life, Coontz; has been a single mom with a full-time job.

Coontz's home life was the American situation in miniature - Everything looked the same on the surface, but there has been a huge shift in how people are supporting and living within it. All the time, when she debates proponents, of the family values argument, she explains that it's not enough to point to the past and lead the troops backward toward a cozy memory.

For starters, the realities of the past and the way it is being remembered are very different things, she said. Coontz reminds readers of The Way We Really Are that in the 1950s government supported families to a much greater extent than it does today, with low-interest home loans, college educations for veterans and massive public works projects. Business re-invested its profits and unions negotiated living wages. A dependable worker could expect employment security. The minimum wage of $1.48 in 1968 was enough to keep a full-time worker's family of three above the poverty line, she wrote in the fact-stuffed book bolstered by 46 pages of footnotes.

Life for some people - especially white people - was full of hope. But segregation was still the law in large chunks of the nation, and violence against minorities is part of almost every major city's history. "At the end of the 1950s, despite 10 years of economic growth, 27.3 percent of the nation's children were poor, including those in white 'underclass' communities such as Appalachia," Coontz wrote. "Almost 50 percent of married-couple African American families were impoverished - a figure far higher than today."

Even if families could choose to return to the shape they held in the 1950s, it's unlikely that business and government would follow, Coontz said. Government has shifted its economic benefits away from workers and toward businesses and the wealthy, she argued, and she can produce figures to back it up. "Corporate subsidies and tax breaks cost the Treasury $1,388 per person per year - more than three times what we spend on all child nutrition, food stamp and welfare programs," she wrote.

As the people who called and wrote kept telling her, jobs are a gamble. Layoffs are a constant threat. They see benefits eroding. They can't take care of their families with one salary. More than a third of all two-parent families with children would be poor unless both parents worked, Coontz said.

It's absurd and pointless to blame mothers for working, she said. Many are working to keep their children out of poverty. Sometimes, that one salary is all that protects a family from economic and emotional disaster. She cited studies that show that when a breadwinner loses a job, the stress manifests itself in the family. There are arguments, poor parenting decisions, and a disproportionately high number of divorces. While some family-values proponents want to make divorce more difficult - and to penalize single mothers socially and economically - Coontz argued that punishments or a mandated return to past roles won't save or encourage marriages - especially in the face of overwhelming economic pressures. She suggested that government and business should try a little tenderness.

"Employers aren't catching up. Schools aren't catching up. Government isn't making any of the policy changes that are needed, though there's certainly public support for them. People want quality child care, parental leave and insurance," she said. "There is absolutely no evidence that working parents - or decent child care - are bad for kids," she said, anticipating the argument she's often heard: that if mothers stayed home, their children wouldn't need child care.

"I'm increasingly thinking of the need for quality child care and limits on the work week as the new health and safety regulations we need in this society," she said. She's debated conservatives who say that's not government's role, and it would be intrusive for government to require business to meet those needs for its workers. She disagrees.

Providing children with good care, and families with decent health insurance, are in the public interest - as are the federal health and safety regulations the meat-packing industry fought as intrusive earlier in the century, she maintained. Already, she said, businesses that don't recognize that employees have lives are paying. Employers who are demanding more are getting less as employees who can't settle family issues at home are increasingly getting it done on work time. "The more employers make family life harder, the more they get the worst of both worlds. Employees who are not renewed in the family make up that renewal on work time," Coontz said.

She suggested measuring the work day in some businesses by what's Produced and not by time spent. That would cut down on time wasted on the phone, on e-mail or in pointless meetings. Flextime could help some employees who want to be home for their children - especially their teens.

"Kids get in trouble between 3 and 6 p.m.," she said, pulling out studies that document the times of day when kids have sex, get hit by cars and commit crimes. Moms or dads who could go to work early and get off in time to monitor their kids could have a stabilizing influence on whole neighborhoods.

Schools could rework schedules to match kids' needs. Research has shown that teens especially have a tough time waking up early. High schools that begin at 9:30 a.m. and let out at 4:30 p.m. would fit kids' body clocks - as well as the schedules of parents who could be home around 5 p.m. "Let's kick the notion around," Coontz said. If parents had more free-time, Coontz predicted, the community would benefit. Parents would find it easier to volunteer -especially in activities that benefit children.

"The track records for certain programs are exemplary," she said. Young people who volunteer can benefit from the experience, too, provided they're doing meaningful work. Her own son volunteered several years at Camp Easter Seal, she said. This summer, that experience helped him earn a meaningful summer job at the camp. And that, she said, will help set him on a straight course into the future.

Stephanie Coontz -
Families Studies of America





Couples Study of Sleeping Apart





On Divorced and Single Families





On Marital Roles

Family Studies historian, author, and speaker Stephanie Coontz