The Problems of Modern Families

Urie Bronfenbrenner

Problems in raising children and maintaining supportive family arrangements are apparent throughout the world. Urie Bronfenbrenner reviewed many of these problems as part of an address given at an international conference on "The Educating City." Bronfenbrenner is perhaps best known for his analysis of results of preschool programs for poverty children in the United States and his comparisons of child-raising institutions in the United States and the former Soviet Union.

It is not only the poor...for whom developmental processes are now at risk. In today's world, the well- educated and the well-to-do are no longer protected; in the past other highly vulnerable contexts have evolved that cut across the domains of class and culture. Recent studies reveal that a major disruptive factor in the lives of families and their children is the increasing instability, inconsistency, and hecticness of daily family life. This growing trend is found in both developed and developing countries, but has somewhat different origins in these two worlds. Yet the debilitating effect on child rearing processes and outcomes is much the same. I begin with an example from my own society, since, in this respect, the United States is probably—and regrettably—a world leader.

In a world in which both parents usually have to work, often at a considerable distance from home, every family member, through the waking hours from morning till night, is "on the run." The need to coordinate conflicting demands of job and child care, often involving varied arrangements that shift from day to day, can produce a situation in which everyone has to be transported several times a day in different directions, usually at the same time—a state of affairs that prompted a foreign colleague to comment, "It seems to me that, in your country, most children are being brought up in moving vehicles."

Other factors contributing to the disruption of daily family life include long "commutes" to and from work; jobs that require one or the other parent to be away for extended periods of time; the frequent changes in employment; the associated moves for the whole family or those that leave the rest of the family behind waiting till the school term ends, or adequate housing can be found; and, last but far from least, the increasing number of divorces, remarriages, and redivorces. (Incidentally, the most recent evidence suggests that the disruptive effects of remarriage on children may be even greater than those of divorce.)

What are the developmental consequences of family hecticness? Once again, the observed outcomes are educational impairment and behaviour problems, including long-term effects that now also encompass children of the well-educated and the well-to-do.

Questions

1. What is "family hecticness"? What changes in policies or customs might reduce its negative effects?
2. In what ways were children in earlier generations better off than they may be today?
3. Who or what is most responsible for overcoming contemporary problems that make it difficult to raise children?
4. What, if anything, can or should a classroom teacher do to take account of family "hecticness," instability in family life, or other problems that may be important in students' home environment?

Source: Urie Bronfenbrenner, "Cities Are for Families," in La Ciutat Educadora (Barcelona: Ajuntament de Barcelona, 1990), cover, pp. 545–546.