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Blindness to Children's Suffering
Reflections on the Presbyterian Report on Families
by Elizabeth Marquardt May 14, 2003
Don Browning's critique of the new report by the Presbyterians, titled "Living Faithfully with Families in Transition," is unflinching and powerful. I sincerely hope that the authors of the report, and other leaders in the denomination, will seriously consider his critique before voting on the document.
Like others, I read the report and was quite disappointed. Here are my personal reflections:
Overall, the report makes clear in several places that it is concerned with justice issues for children when it comes
to the natural environment, the economy, and the larger society. The authors of the report have no problem stating what is wrong with each of these domains and how these problems negatively affect children. However, when it
comes to the family, they make clear that if we form judgments about what is good and bad for children, then we are "stigmatizing" these children and their families.
I am a child of divorce. I have interviewed
many children of divorce as part of my own research. Almost never do I hear children of divorce complain of being stigmatized. Perhaps, decades ago, social stigma contributed to the suffering of children of divorce,
but that era has long passed. However, children of divorce, and other children who, for a variety of reasons, are living without their two, married parents, continue to suffer greatly, and the numbers of these children are
growing.
Unfortunately, as Don Browning makes clear, the report barely acknowledges their suffering. To hear them state it, merely accepting these families will make the problems go away.
I am accustomed to this
line of argument. It is a popular, secular, liberal way of responding to changing family structures. But I am appalled to hear it from a committee at a major denomination who spent five years studying this
issue. The church is not called to accept suffering in the hopes that it will go away. The church is called to be a prophetic voice, to say what is unpopular, to speak up and act on behalf of the suffering, especially the
voiceless, especially children.
The blindness to children's suffering is the most glaring problem with the report, but it also contains many assumptions that irritate some of us who research and study the family.
It portrays divorce as a normal part of the family life cycle (as something that happens to families just like other transitions do, such as children leaving home, family members dying, and so forth). It says that
"negative terms" contribute to stigmas, so we should use new terms such as "blended families"(as if the words are what cause suffering for children, rather than the experience itself). It frequently compares
our current situation to the 1950s, saying that we cannot go back to that decade (as if any of us who are critical of changing family structures ever claims to want to do that). It says that marriages used to end early because
a spouse died, and now they end early because of divorce (as if, in a society that has managed to extend the lifespan for most people, we should be satisfied with trading divorce for death, because the number of broken families
ends up being about the same). It says that the option of "safe and effective birth control" now means that "marriage is no longer an automatic indication of a commitment to have and care for children"
(as if, because some couples can choose not to have children, we should soften the idea of marriage as a child-centered and child-protecting institution). It says, "Social science data shows there is no predominant family
form in the U.S." (which is one of the clear errors in the report - married couples with children are still the predominant family form in the U.S., but that's not really the point, is it?) Finally, it suggests that any
weaknesses in families are always due to economic forces, never to cultural changes or individual choices.
To further obscure the issue, the authors of the report offer a laundry list of family forms, some of which even
those of us who study the family may never have heard of: "Today, there are many configurations of people who lovingly bond as family in difficult situations. These include mutually adoptive families (where older youth who
are homeless or from dysfunctional families are blended in by non-kin); organization-adopted families (in which a congregation as a whole, a community organization or individual mentors become family to youth who are resettled
refugees or who cannot live at home); shared parenting (in which a parent away at college or career visits with the other parent and child when possible); and grandparents rearing grandchildren." To list these
families, while never addressing the issue of children's suffering, is to miss the point. No one longs for their child to grow up in divorced family or to be homeless and forced to seek out a "mutually adoptive
family." The vast majority of Americans long to be married and long for their children to grow up in healthy, happy marriages. How would the Presbyterians like to help in achieving that goal?
One of the
newest, growing types of family forms is same-sex couples raising children. Here, the authors of the report cite the limited number of studies on these families (which tend to be conducted by advocates and have small
samples) to say that these children are doing "fine." In the 1970s, similar types of small studies were cited by experts to say that the children of divorce are doing fine. It took decades for larger
studies, and grown children of divorce themselves, to reveal the suffering that is apparent to any sensitive observer of these children. Must we wait decades for the same thing to happen for children of same-sex families?
For instance, no matter where one stands on the issue of same-sex marriage, shouldn't we ask how these children fare, emotionally, with the loss of connection to at least one of their biological parents?
In closing, the
authors of the report write: "In times of social transition, the task of describing 'family' is difficult; no single description is adequate and none can be definitive for all times. Yet, it is a serious moral and
theological task." They are only half right. In times of social transition, "describing" the problem is not really the hardest task at all. Yet that is all that the authors of this report have
attempted to do. Prophetically responding to the problem is the genuine, serious, moral and theological task that is before us. On that, the authors of this report utterly failed.
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