Family & Children

The battle's over. For half a century, legions of planners, urbanists, environmentalists and big city editorialists have waged war against sprawl. Now it's time to call it a day and declare a victor.

The winner is, yes, sprawl.

Ever wonder why Social Security didn't crash and burn years ago? After all, for nearly all of the program's history, each generation of retirees has taken far more money out of the system than it contributed in taxes.

The answer is simple, though largely ignored in the current debate over Social Security reform. Today's retirees may not have paid anywhere near as much in taxes as today's workers do. But most contributed something far more valuable to the system: They created, raised and educated the baby boomers.

For the better part of the last half century, urbanists, planners, and environmentalists have railed against suburbia, and the dreaded trend of cities to "sprawl" outward from the old city core. Yet despite many attempts to discourage such growth, the pattern continues -- not only in America but in nearly all modern countries. The battle against sprawl is over. Sprawl won.

In recent years, researchers, the media, and policymakers have struggled to examine the shifting dynamics of work and family and to better understand the implications of these changes for American life. Most experts can agree that American families have changed. We no longer fit the June and Ward Cleaver model. In 1960, 70 percent of American families with children had at least one parent home full-time. By 2000, this trend has been completely reversed. Today, nearly 70 percent of families are headed by either two working parents or a single working parent.

It was, perhaps, appropriate that Democrats held their convention this summer in Boston--a charming old city of declining population and fewer and fewer families. The Democrats, after all, may like to think of themselves as the party of working families; but in reality, the exit polls and demographic trends suggest that they are increasingly the party of family dysfunction. To date, analysts have mostly blamed Kerry's loss on a failure to connect with religious voters or to reassure Americans that he would be tough on national security.

It wouldn't be the holiday shopping season without schmaltzy commercials, mall Santas, and Halo 2, the most hotly anticipated video game in American entertainment history. Expected to gross $80 million, this "shoot-'em-up" sensation may not change the world, but it could help put the compassion back into conservatism with a financial boost for chronically under-funded domestic policy programs.

Across the industrialized countries, nearly five decades of steady growth in female employment has radically changed life for many parents and children. One of the most striking changes in Europe, Canada, and the United States has been the increase in employment among mothers with very young children. Nearly 85 percent of American mothers employed before childbearing now return to work before their child's first birthday. Rising women's employment -- among both single and coupled women -- is an encouraging trend from the perspective of women’s economic independence.

For Cora Featherson , a 54-year-old Memphis woman who is raising her granddaughter and six nieces, nephews and cousins, taking care of family is more than a responsibility.

"If you can find room in your house and your heart, you have to help," says Featherson. "I've come this far, and I can't let these kids down."

Since she took in her first child almost 20 years ago, Featherson has worked hard to keep her family out of foster care, relying on her modest income, occasional help from her church and monthly food stamps.

A year ago in September, strangeness was afoot in Boston. A gorilla roamed the streets of Dorchester, and the Red Sox made the playoffs. Water droplets on the window of an ophthalmology clinic coalesced into the shape of the Madonna and Child, and forty thousand pilgrims came to marvel. A burly seventeen-year-old from Roxbury named Rousseau Mieze, a child of Haitian immigrants, welcomed any climate obliging to miracles. His family was poor, his high-school grades were mediocre, and he wanted to go to college.

In 1994, Republicans in California distributed a voter education pamphlet titled "The Welfare Mess." On its cover was a vivid montage of ghetto pathology: food stamps intermixed with hundred-dollar bills, drug paraphernalia alongside a snub-nosed pistol. Inside, the pamphlet catalogued welfare's pernicious effects. Teen pregnancy, runaway crime, moral decay, even falling SAT scores--all were blamed on a welfare system run amok. The pamphlet closed with a dire warning: "If You Don't Vote, THEY WIN."