The preamble of the Constitution enumerates the most fundamental purposes of our nation. Among these is “to establish justice.” Another is: “to ensure domestic tranquility.”
Recently, I spoke about establishing Justice in America. Here, I outline a program for domestic, or as we would probably describe it today, civic tranquility.
There is only one path to civic tranquility in any nation. Tranquility cannot be imposed through force, by police methods from outside-in. It must be developed slowly, through nurture, in strong and good families.
What a government does, or does not do, deeply affects every family within its jurisdiction. Wise decisions by government cannot be made without a clear social policy for protecting family life. Sadly, this nation has never formulated such a policy. Our political leaders have neglected the most basic institution of all.
By contrast, George McGovern and I propose -- not only a national policy for families -- but, rather, a political vision whose starting point is this maxim: What is good for families is good for nations; what hurts families, hurts nations.
For thousands of years, in scores of different cultures, the institution that has served human beings best and disappointed them least is the family. In the family, normally our deepest values are learned; our innermost identity is acquired. In the family, we experience the most intimate, most moving moments of our lives.
The most basic human emotion of all -- love -- is learned first in the family, before it becomes a model for the world; love between man and wife; the love of a father and mother for their children; the love of children for them; the love of brother and sister.
If family life is unhappy, few other satisfactions make up the loss. If family life offers satisfactions, defeats of many other kinds are lightly borne.
No other institution so nourishes us with images of compassion, sympathy, trust and hope. The fate of no other institution so precisely measures the greatness or the decline of national life. Without good families, normally children do not learn to trust, they do not learn compassion; they do not acquire the sensitivities and insights on whose strength civilization rests.
Without good families, there is no internal source of civic tranquility. Why then, are we so neglectful of the politics of family life?
- Our young people get very little training, often none, in how to create and nourish living families.
- Industrial and social developments -- highways and high rises and factories -- arrogantly disrupt family patterns that have endured for centuries.
- Legislators, activists, and political technicians too seldom measure the consequences of governmental policy for actual families.
- Cruel segregation by age prevents humans at the varying stages of life from being vivified and nourished by each other, young by old, old by young.
- The concept of “taking care of” has been diminished to a purely economic bond. The family comes to resemble a service station rather than a home.
No wonder we have heard for years about the erosion of family life, the breakdown of extended family, the battle between generations, and the inability of the family to impart basic values that make life civilized, democratic and humane.
The Past and PresentThe “crisis of the family” has no simple cause. Social pressures have been forcing family life to change for the past one hundred years. Some of these changes are beneficial; some are damaging.
For most of our history, the strong and nurturing family was taken for granted. America was founded by strong families, who, working together and in support of each other, were able to survive the dangers, risks, troubles, and pains of exile in order that they might live according to their deepest values. These families had a passion for justice, freedom and excellence which could be sustained -- against all odds -- because each person could depend on a whole family for comfort and support.
A hundred years ago, families worked together. Young men and women saw their mother’s and their father’s work and were apprenticed to it. Unmarried aunts and uncles, grandparents, hired laborers, and neighbors made daily family life thick with personality and interest.
Immigrant families cherished their solidarity, and centered their lives on neighborhoods, even on certain blocks, in which many adults and many children shared a common life.
Working men and women worked in or near the same establishments. Relatives and neighbors cared for each other’s children and tended each other in birth, in sickness and in death.
Then our society changed. Families moved away from relatives and friends. Economic advancement began to take precedence over family loyalty.
Today, many American families are faced by profound dilemmas -- dilemmas posed by massive changes in our national style of life which have not been met by appropriate national action. These are the dilemmas so many of us feel have influenced our lives, but about which our national leadership these past four years has been mute, or worse, dishonest.
I speak here of the dilemmas created by mobility, by the vast increases in the numbers of working mothers, by the economic problems confronting every working family, and by the general malaise that has overtaken so many families and over which they feel no power. Let us discuss these dilemmas of mobility, mothering, money and malaise.
Mobility. Most American families move four, five or six times from the time of marriage, and many of these moves are not only from one neighborhood to another, but from one city to another. Relatives often live in other towns or states, separated by hundreds or thousands of miles. To a child, a grandmother or grandfather can seem like a distant stranger.
Ninety-five percent of families with preschoolers have no other adult at home to lend an extra pair of hands and extra heart to the tasks of nurture and affection. More than one-fourth of all American families have strangers living next to them. In the suburban home and the urban high-rise, the nuclear family -- mother, father, and children -- live in isolation, without knowledge of or feelings about the people whom they see every day. Families have little concern for each other -- and all feel perhaps for the first time in one thousand years, alone.
Friendships are formed for the moment, out of convenience, and children have little opportunity to observe a variety of adults whom they can respect, on whom they can model themselves.
Isolation is most painful for the family in difficulty. Living among strangers, where can they turn? In our society, no substitutes for the older social institutions -- the extended family and the neighborhood community -- have been systematically encouraged.
The next dilemma results from a major change in the large number of mothers who have chosen or been compelled to seek employment. More than half of American mothers and one-third of mothers of preschoolers work outside the home. For many of these mothers as well as fathers, there is a painful conflict, described by Premier Golda Meir -- “The eternal division, this double pull, this alternating duty toward here [sic, “her”?] family and her work.”
For other mothers, there is naked anger that in a society which given lip service to family life they are forced by economic pressure to give up the full time mothering to which they feel committed -- and which they know they are uniquely able to provide.
For still other mothers, the opportunity to work provides a personally satisfying way to actualize their own potential, to provide economic resources for their family, and to make significant social contributions. All families with working mothers share a common concern, how to provide their children with wholesome care while parents are at work. Our nation has no satisfactory provisions for the children of such parents today. Hundreds of thousands of children are left alone, or cared for by siblings who are too young to assume responsibility. Hundreds of thousands of others accompany their parents to the work site, where no special care is available. Hundreds of thousands of other children are left in settings that are destructive.
Nobody doubts the great formative importance of the first years of life. Yet as a nation we leave millions of children in circumstances that guarantee that they will never achieve their optimal development... and that some will be damaged and try to damage others.
The third dilemma faced by many working families is that of money. This is not a new dilemma, but it has become especially severe for the poor and for many, working families in which both parents must work, or the father must hold two jobs.
One-third of all American families earn less than the government standard for a low family budget. Fully one-half of all families--even where both parents work--earn less than $10,000 per year, barely enough for a family of four in some cities and certainly inadequate for a family of five or more. I am not speaking of families who are seeking luxuries, but rather those who try to provide food, clothing, shelter, basic health care and a minimum of amenities.
Parents who long to take gentle and loving care of their children are often prevented by long working hours away and short tempers at home, from being the kind of parents they once dreamed they would become.
Many families live in constant financial fear, particularly in matters of health. Serious illness can decimate the resources even of the well-to-do family.
Our nation ranks 14th among industrial countries in the death of infants during the first year of life, 11th in the percentage of mothers who die in childbirth. It is hard to imagine that there are ten nations where mothers are more likely to survive childbirth than in the United States.
What can be more moving than the sight of a sick child? Yet twenty-five million American children suffer from poor health. Is there a nation so wealthy as ours that leaves the physical well-being of its children so much up to chance?
Many poor children are victims of inadequate pre-natal care; inadequate medical care during infancy; poor nutrition; lead poisoning; anemia; parasites; and a variety of other curable or completely preventable diseases commonly untended among the poor.
The fourth dilemma that faces many American families is the deep malaise infecting many families: a lack of pleasure in being together; a dispersal of the family, one going this way, one that, in pursuit of fun; no pride of accomplishment in doing well as parent or as child.
When society does not support and value families, what value can a parent place on mothering or fathering? Too many parents allow television to be their substitutes. The average child under seven watches four hours of television every day.
For many children, values are borrowed from peers, rather than from the mature wisdom of their parents or other adults whom they love.
Young parents often come to parenthood without experience in caring for children, unsure of what to do or how to do it, uncertain of their own importance to their children.
If parents feel their children’s values come from television and from friends; if parents feel uncertain of their own value and authority, it is little wonder they do not have the sense they are the most important people in the lives of their children, the shapers of their children’s beliefs and ideals.
This unnamable malaise infects the treatment given also to the elderly. Where once they were revered and played a central role in the development of families, today the elderly are often left to sit alone in their own apartment or, worst of all, placed in nursing homes where too often the quality of care is an outrage.
What sort of society are we: The abuse of our elderly is common, and the abuse of children by parents has also, for the first time, become a shocking revelation: One in every ten children is physically mistreated.
A society that suffers this malaise loses respect for the lives of those who must need love -- the very young and the very old.
But this malaise also has another form: we Americans shower children with gifts--with toys, and souvenirs, mementoes, clothes and vehicles: scooters, tricycles, bicycles, motorbikes. If money were love, our children would have vast affection.
But the hardest gift of all to give our children -- all the more if they are children who have everything -- is purpose. So many children of America seem to share a common sickness, a plague perhaps upon the land: a common aimlessness and lack of goals. Paul Goodman called it “growing up absurd.”
Where do they learn this aimlessness? Perhaps they watch. They keep their eyes on us -- their parents; their teachers; the policemen; the politicians; the businessmen and coaches; and their idols in the movies.
Robert Coles lists those children’s questions that penetrate our own adjustments, startle us, expose us: “Why do people kill one another? Why do we live this way and other children, whom we see on television, live in another way? Why is it that on television we keep hearing that people have headaches and stomachaches? And why are they so nervous? What is it, being nervous?”
“What is it like to be poor? What is it like to live in a country where bombs are falling all the time? What would you really like to be doing, Daddy? Why do we say one thing outside the house and something else when we are alone?”
“Is it true, mother, that the country is in trouble and that the world might be all blown up?”
“Why did they arrest people who work for the government? Aren’t you supposed to be honest if you work for the government?”
We can avoid these questions. We can give evasive answers. Then, turned away, the children accept adjustments we accept. They become like us. They become mere images of us. That is the malaise.
These, then, are the dilemmas: mobility, mothering, money and malaise. For four long years, each has been identified time and again by concerned citizens, by the Congress, and by experts in family life. What has been the response of the current administration?
Government Effects Under NixonI wish I could report that our government has opened its heart to families, or at least recognized that its own policies have helped to weaken families. The tragic truth is that this administration has contented itself with voicing platitudes about family life. It has failed to take concerted action to aid American families. It has failed to give moral leadership -- it has failed to develop a comprehensive policy for families.
The problems of the family are not merely problems of funding. They are not merely problems to be solved by government programs. But government must remove obstacles to family life; rectify injustices; and compensate for damages done the family by modern industry and shortsighted governmental policies. Only then will the family have a chance to help itself.
Richard Nixon, for example, promised this nation that there would be no hungry children in America by Thanksgiving, 1970. Since that promise, Richard Nixon has sold millions of dollars worth of wheat to Russia, but the number of hungry children in America still exceeds three million.
- Richard Nixon has withheld $700 million appropriated by the Congress for food, for pregnant women and young children.
- Richard Nixon promised in 1969 “a national commitment to provide all American children an opportunity for healthful and stimulating development during the first five years of life.” Yet in 1972, under Richard Nixon, children receive only 10% of the federal money allocated for personal health services; in 1960 they received 50%.
- Richard Nixon vetoed programs for crippled children and programs for retarded children.
- Richard Nixon refused to supplement a program to help the states screen, diagnose, and treat children eligible for Medicaid before their maladies grow and become infinitely more expensive. He has been penny wise and pound foolish, concerning the health of children.
- Richard Nixon said in 1969: “This administration is committed to a new emphasis on child development.” Yet his family assistance legislation requires even the mothers of three-year-old children to work if benefits are to be obtained. It provides benefits at a level so low that the only thing guaranteed is a life without dignity; a family in which a healthy environment for the child is impossible.
- It provides day care for no more than 350,000 children full-time whereas the number of virtually abandoned children in desperate need of adult affection is ten times that number; and millions need some help at some time. It provides day care centers which investigators have found to be little more than warehouses for young children.
- Richard Nixon vetoed Senator Mondale’s comprehensive child development bill. On that occasion, Mr. Nixon exceeded even his own considerable standards for hypocrisy by alleging that child-care “threatened American family life.” This bill represented the first effort of our nation to set up a comprehensive network of neighborhood centers of great variety -- including high quality day care for working mothers, educational intervention programs for young children, compensatory programs for older children and nutritional and health services for children in need.
The Mondale Bill passed both houses of Congress. It was endorsed by over 100 organizations including all major religious organizations, and all major non-sectarian organizations, concerned with family life. Many of its provisions are supported by the White House Conference on Children, by the joint commission on the mental health of children, and by five volumes of Congressional testimony. Yet Nixon vetoed the bill.
The crisis of the family in America runs deeper, however, than the failures of Richard Nixon. All Americans must share the blame. Our time today would not be usefully spent in accusation along; we must offer new and comprehensive insights and proposals.
McGovern-Shriver ProgramGeorge McGovern and I want to be remembered as the men who put families at the center of political concern. Eleanor McGovern and my wife Eunice are as committed to a family- centered administration as the Senator and myself. We will involve every member of our Administration in the labor of strengthening family life by all means possible. The McGovern-Shriver Administration will try to measure and evaluate governmental policies in many ways, but always we shall include, whenever appropriate, one clear test: does / it help -- or hurt -- the American family?
The Environmental Protection Agency requires hearings that produce evidence about the impact of federal policies upon the environment. We believe that there should be a family protection agency, requiring hearings that produce evidence about the impact of federal policies upon families.
For example, we carefully monitor the prices of automobiles. Why don’t we require hearings on the impact of rising food prices on every family in the land? This is the biggest item in the family budget; it is central to the family’s health. It should be monitored.
We will attack the problem of mobility. The practices of the Department of Housing and. Urban Development will, in our Administration, guarantee that families and neighborhoods take precedence over highways and thoughtless redevelopment.
We will ask large employers to modify policies which require employees to move frequently. We will ask industries to monitor the impact of their work on the families of their workers. We will make certain that as a major employer the federal government leads the way in adopting practices that strengthen family life.
Secondly, we will attack the dilemmas of mothering. A McGovern-Shriver Administration will commit itself to providing a network of high quality day care centers. Such legislation will be based on one fundamental principle: it must be the family that is strengthened, not the government.
Centers established with federal funds will be controlled by the parents themselves and by the neighborhoods where the centers are located. Our approach will be a family approach and these centers will serve as a general support system for family life.
Parents will be able to turn to these local centers to develop their own sensitivities and skills. Older men and women of the neighborhood will be invited to share with younger parents their wisdom in raising children. Adolescents in the neighborhood will be invited as apprentice child-care workers -- older children caring for younger children under the supervision of adults -- to the benefit of all three generations.
Many women today work outside the home, not because they have to, but because they want to. Exactly in the same way, we will defend the right of women who choose to fulfill their vocation in the home, not because they have to, but because they want to. Women are tied to no one ideology and to no one role -- nor should they be. As many options as possible should be kept open to every woman.
Hence, we also propose a program of home visitors to help mothers, otherwise isolated, resolve the normal developmental and disciplinary problems every family encounters. Such programs -- already proven to be successful – help older children to raise standards for younger children, deepen family solidarity, and heighten respect for child raising throughout the community.
We also propose to expand the parent-child centers -- first established by O.E.O. -- to which neighbors bring their own children. These centers have three key advantages: parents in the neighborhood get paid for helping with the children of others; they learn skills in child-care that make them eligible for paying jobs in later years; and both their children and other children benefit by the resources of the center.
Such programs will strengthen every family and every neighborhood in the country.
Thirdly, we will attack the dilemma of money and employment, by trying to increase the range of work opportunities. The length of the work-day should be tailored to family needs -- in many cases, to school hours. Employers should as a matter of course grant maternity leave and design working hours to protect the needs of children.
We will be especially sensitive to the needs of families of the blind child, the deaf child, the emotionally disturbed and mentally retarded child, and the crippled child. Providence distributes such challenges unevenly, and in a social order like our own -- fragmented and mobile -- only government can provide the resources many of these families require. No handicapped child should fail to fulfill his potential due to his family’s inability to afford therapy.
Many retarded children in this country are not getting any education at all. Every child, regardless of its mental ability, has a right to receive an education in this country.
Therefore, we will sponsor the passage of an Equal Opportunity Act similar to the one passed in Pennsylvania, to provide such education.
We will attack the malaise that has infected family life. We propose to expand this nation’s skills in child-care and family life throughout the entire population, by sponsoring special programs.
Drawing on the skills of our elderly, as foster parents.
Launching programs in community centers, high schools and colleges that offer students insight and skills into the practical problems of family life and development.
We will do all we can to dispel the hopelessness that characterizes the institutionalized child needlessly separated from his parents. Today, 90% of child welfare funding goes to “after-the-fact” programs; to foster care, to juvenile homes, to detention centers, and to institutions for the retarded and disturbed. Yet most children are almost always better cared for in their own home. We will help families to keep their children at home by using local schools, local recreational facilities, and workshops to give them assistance.
When only institutions alone can provide the necessary care, we will try to make such institutions home like, loving, educational and small. Today under the Nixon Administration, the conditions in many child institutions are barbarous and unfit even for animals.
This man, who utters such pieties about children, sets low federal standards even for institutions that collect more money per child than Harvard or Yale. Children live in them in filth, subject to physical abuse, enduring the torments of endless neglect.
For our part, a McGovern-Shriver Administration will make distant institutionalization less necessary by building resources at the neighborhood level. We will assure:
- Neighborhood rehabilitation services for children convicted of crimes.
- High quality family foster care homes and halfway homes for children whose families are temporarily unable to care for them properly.
- Appropriate medical care and counseling for run-aways.
Finally, two other problems of concern to every parent must also be mentioned: the threat of drugs and the consequences of sexual promiscuity. The roots of both of these threats are cultural; social policy must attack them at their roots.
Every family in America lives, even unwillingly, in a sea of drugs. Television advertises drugs for every sort of ailment, physical or mental. Supermarkets offer huge cases of drugs as though they were candies. Our children grow up with the inescapable impression that taking drugs is as ordinary as brushing teeth.
A McGovern-Shriver Administration will attack the culture of drugs at its root: the drug industry, the medical schools, mass advertisers and mass distributors.
We will have the Federal Drug Administration make drastically expanded studies of drugs and ban the use of those that are junk, or harmful, or of unknown effect, or useless.
We will offer incentives to medical students to study the effect of prescription-filling and drug-taking in family environments in diverse neighborhoods, so that they can see at first hand the varied social effects of daily reliance on drugs -- and of the almost superstitious practice of writing out a prescription -- almost any prescription -- just to make a patient “feel better.”
We will establish new standards for the advertising of drugs in environments accessible to children; new standards for the honesty and completeness of drug company descriptions of the contents and effects of their products before they market them.
Further, we will give the, National Institute of Health as its highest priority the study of the cultural conditions that stimulate drug addiction or the mechanism that produces it. Why is it that a young and energetic nation should digest $5 billion worth of prescription drugs, almost $3 billion of non-prescription drugs, an estimated $6 billion of heroin and untold other sums on other illegitimate drugs every year? What is it about us that prompts this reliance and how can it be halted?
The Federal Drug Administration will be authorized to discourage the advertising of drugs as an escape from ordinary emotional problems.
No struggle against drugs will be successful unless the whole drift of our society is reversed. The task will be long, but it must be begun.
A similar threat to the family springs from the incomplete sexual education of many teenagers. Courses on sex-education are given in the schools -- but not courses on family life. No one teaches young people how to become good parents.
A hundred erotic solicitations every day bombard our young people from advertising, films, songs, and fashions -- but family life is depicted in unreal, condescending ways or even ignored.
Families have first responsibility for moral and emotional development. Still, the lives of adolescents center for many hours of the day and night around school activities. Thus we will encourage schools to take responsibility not only for education in mental skills, but also for education in skills of caring, compassion, and helping others. If our young people lead rich emotional lives in helping the elderly, the blind, the retarded--in taking care of children--in teaching others--in visiting the sick and the lonely--then their hearts will not be empty. A richly textured emotional life will make sexual life more healthy.
We also propose to enlarge the activities of parents, public health nurses and neighborhood volunteers, to counsel young men and women in familiar neighborhood settings -- to answer their questions about sexual and other matters -- to help them in their many dilemmas -- to offer them a willing ear, the wisdom of experience, and the trust of friends. Three-way conversations by people who know and trust one another -- parents, children and counselor -- have proven their effectiveness to many grateful families.
Yet, in the end, all questions of morality come back to the influence of the family.
How do children learn to be moral? You would think that no subject would be of greater interest to a wise state -- no other subject so thoroughly explored by scholars and desired by parents. Instead, much to our shame, we discover that very little serious research on the moral development of the child has been conducted.
We read a great deal about the “adjustment” of children, a great deal about their “emotional health,” a great deal about “normal behavior” -- but very little about how to instill a passion for justice and honesty and fidelity, how to teach compassion and humility, how to make striving for excellence second-nature and heroism a way of life.
Parents need to know how to teach such qualities. The few studies that do exist suggest that children learn their moral attitudes more from parents than from any other sources. Practical instruction of parents, therefore, is of the utmost importance. We will sponsor the needed research through the National Institute of Health and make certain that the fruits of these studies are available to every parent.
George McGovern and I make the family central in our plans with one idea in mind. The liberties of all Americans -- the health of our law and customs -- depend on the vigor of family life. The family is the teacher of the heart. There is only one realistic road to domestic tranquility -- to law and order -- to the flowering of liberty and justice and equality -- to the spread of wisdom, caring and compassion. And that road lies through strong and vital family life in every family of the land. It is a long road. It must be taken. Every voyage, howsoever long, begins with the first step. What we have begun here today is the construction of a family policy for America -- to guide every agency of government.
George McGovern and I intend to establish justice in America. We will ensure domestic tranquility. We will bend our every energy for the sake of all within this room and all within the range of hearing -- for all of us belong to families, and all our families need, deserve, and will obtain the privileged assistance of the government of the United States.
