Reviewed by Cara Camden
The Assault on Parenthood: How Our Culture Undermines Parenthood is a study of the current cultural war on the family. In fact, a nearly airtight case can be made that we are living in a “post-family social order” — Brave New World, indeed. Judging from the hair-raising incidents that author Dana Mack has uncovered, the family as an institution is in serious danger. The trend of the past 50 years is to remove intermediary associations (including the family) and leave only the state and the individual. This ensures that people will have to rely only on the government.
The author spent several years interviewing families across American about the difficulties of raising children in the current culture. With chapters such as “Parent as Pariah,” “Schooling for Leveling” and “Material Kids,” Mack points out that everywhere parents turn, there is someone trying to undo the way in which they are raising their children. Under pressure from self-described family “experts”—teachers and school administrators, bosses, government officials, the courts and the media, the family is threatening to crumble.
According to Catholic Church principles, the primary purpose of marriage is the procreation and education of children, and it is parents who are primarily entrusted with the education of their children. That is anathema to the current idea of “state as superparent” that is pushed by many academics. For instance, as Mack notes, “Today… Sylvia Hewlett’s When the Bough Breaks, Arlie Hochschild and Anne Machung’s The Second Shift, or Hillary Clinton’s It Takes a Village, betray the fallacious assumption that in the modern world it is up to institutions, and not up to parents, to rear children.” Common sense has gone out the window, and so-called experts offer advice that can only correctly be called insane. Mack recalls: “I remember a close associate of my father’s turning his home into a veritable training ground for democracy-in-action a la [Dr. Thomas] Gordon’s P.E.T. [Parent Effectiveness Training]—that is, until it occurred to him that at least one member of the ‘family council’ was repeatedly showing up for meetings stoned out of any legislative frame of mind.”
Underlying the humor, though, is a frightening truth: There are many people in authority who would love to free children from parental authority, with the ultimate goal of no hierarchical family structure, just a group of individuals who all live in one house. Attempts to discipline can result in a visit from Child Protective Services, and at worst, removal of the children from the home. Attempts to instill traditional morality, particularly as it relates to sexual behavior, are undermined at school. Society’s lax attitudes toward discipline and personal responsibility are very much reinforced by the media, which is one of the dominant forces in shaping children’s ideas.
Family courts often undermine stability, as we see in news reports of cases like “Baby Jessica” or “Baby Richard,” where children are taken from loving adoptive families long after they have bonded, and returned to irresponsible biological parents whose claims on their children should have expired long ago.
Mrs. Mack certainly accomplishes her goal of exposing a plot against family life of massive proportions, the likes of which has probably never been seen before.
Our progress as a society is definitely a double-edged sword. With increased leisure time and more egalitarian political structure comes a definite lessening respect for the foundational unit of society, the family. Mack outlines several policy changes, such as tax relief, education reform and media responsibility, that would go a long way toward restoring parents to their proper role as the primary care-takers for their children.
(Cara Camden is a graduate of Franciscan University of Steubenville and a freelance writer for HLI. This article appears in the August 2001 issue of HLI Reports, courtesy of Human Life International.).
