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FOURSo How’s the Family?

Over the last half-century, talk of family has often focused on the working mother—her hours, her wages, her commute, the sympathies of her boss, the culture at her workplace. In the 1960s and 1970s, it was the “mom is working, so how are the kids?” conversation. Later people spoke of “work-family balance,” but still held to the question: if she is working, how are they doing?

Over time, talk moved to an array of changes that a working mother would need to raise thriving children—partners who share the second shift, state-of-the-art childcare, a shorter workday, a three-day weekend, flextime, or flexplace, for example. Although some called for public programs such as European-style parental leaves and federally funded childcare, such calls were gradually abandoned in America as being hopeless pipe dreams. In the hallway at conferences, conversations on work-family balance through the 1990s and 2000s seldom mentioned tax policies that exacerbated a growing class gap, or the deregulation of advertising to children. Such issues seemed far beyond the scope of “mom is working, so how are the kids?”

Meanwhile, a separate but parallel conversation arose linking a free market to family values.¹ Cuts to public services, deregulation, reduced corporate and individual taxes, privatization—such policies, its advocates claimed, strengthen both a free market and the family. In their talk of “family values,” conservative commentators generally exclude gays, oppose a woman’s right to abortion, and link the idea of a free market with that of a strong, loving home. The smaller and less active the civilian government, they propose, the stronger the family.

For the most part, these two conversations—“mom is working, so how are the kids?” and “free-market family values”—have moved along separate tracks. Even today, those who engage in the one do not engage in the other, or not at the same time. So what if we link the two conversations and ask: In an era of the working caregiver, how do free-market policies affect families? In search of the answer, we discover a surprisingly rich body of evidence.

But first a word about why this question matters. When American women moved en masse into the workforce, they were not alone. The female labor force participation rate increased 20 percent worldwide between 1993 and 2003, while the participation rate of men decreased in all regions but Southeast Asia.² Over 70 percent of working-age women in Denmark, Norway, Sweden, and Switzerland are now in paid work, as are 53 percent in Spain and 46 percent in Italy.³ The United States, the United Kingdom, Germany, France, and most other states of the European Union fall in between.⁴ So the rise of the working woman in America is part of a global trend which shows no sign of reversing itself.

And there are many stakeholders in this trend. As Klaus Schwab, the head of the World Economic Forum, wrote in the preface to the 2012 Global Gender Gap report:

With talent shortages projected to become more severe in much of the developed and developing world, maximizing access to female talent is a strategic imperative for business. The World Economic Forum has been among the institutions at the forefront of engaging leaders to close global gender gaps as a key element of our mission to improve the state of the world.⁵

Indeed, the World Economic Forum (WEF) report links each nation’s ranking on an index of gender equality to its GDP and its score on the so-called Global Competitiveness Index.⁶ If women were to perform paid work at the rate men do, the authors state, the American GDP would rise “by as much as 9 percent, the euro-zone G.D.P. by as much as 13 percent . . . [and] the Japanese G.D.P. by as much as 16 percent.”⁷ When women work they also earn, of course; as they consume more goods and services, they push up the GDP.⁸

State officials have still other interests in the employment of women. Especially in Europe, women are encouraged to earn money and contribute to social security to help bankroll the state pensions currently drawn by retirees in a “graying” Europe.⁹ To sustain pension funds, some countries are raising the retirement age of public employees—from 65 to 67 years old in the United States, from 60 to 62 (and 67 for some workers) in France, and from 65 to 67 in Spain.¹⁰ Meanwhile, 2.1 children per woman are considered necessary to maintain a country’s population. But in some countries, the fertility rates have sunk lower—Italy and Greece are at 1.4, and the United Kingdom is at 1.9.¹¹ So women are urged both to work more and to have more children.

Women themselves take jobs for many personal reasons, of course—to pay family bills, to develop talents, to be more autonomous, and to contribute to society. With two parents working full time, then, the call turned to “work-family balance”—both a balance between the contribution of one partner and the other, and a balance between the demands of home and work. In The Second Shift, I found that comparing the paid and unpaid work of women to the paid and unpaid work of men, husbands (all fathers of children aged 6 years and under) enjoyed an extra month a year of leisure compared with their full-time working wives. But from 1980 to 2005, this leisure gap between the sexes narrowed to between a half and a third of what it had been.¹² At the same time, as the workday has lengthened for the middle class, jobs have become more insecure. So men, like women, are putting on shoes for a work-family shuffle that the comedian Tina Fey describes as a “tap dance recital in a minefield.”¹³

A call has also gone out for a new workplace. With flextime, workers can work at the kitchen table, or a nearby hub-office, saving time, gas, and space on traffic-clogged freeways, and fetch the children from school. But only 16 percent of workers actually telecommute in any given year.¹⁴ Job-sharing and good part-time work are also yet to become part of the normal scene. And in an era of insecure jobs, many workers are loath to ask too much of hidebound bosses who might lay them off. The “mom is working, so how are the kids?” and “work-family balance” conversations continue into the present, with less and less hopeful talk of help from the government.

FREE MARKETS AND FAMILY VALUES

Meanwhile, in a parallel conversation linking the free market to family values, proponents have called for a set of government policies: lower and less progressive taxes, privatization, deregulation of companies, and cuts to state services. These policies are said to free the market and, by so doing, to strengthen the family. Just as General Motors’ CEO once argued that “what’s good for General Motors is good for the American people,” so free-market advocates argue that what is good for the free market is good for the family. Lower and more regressive taxes may widen the class gap, they note, but it will not harm families because wealth will “trickle down” from top to bottom. Deregulation will also help by allowing companies more freedom and—although this is a less explicit part of the argument—inducing them to invest in the United States.¹⁵ Strong cuts in state services will make for a leaner, “less bloated” government, they say. Yet the U.S. government supports companies such as Wal-Mart, Boeing, and Target through offers of free or low-cost land, the building of free water and sewer lines, and low-cost financing and insurance. Companies also raise billions of dollars through tax-free bonds. So their call to reduce bloat refers only to cuts in public services, not to policies that benefit companies.¹⁶ The more America pursues these policies, they say, the freer the market and the stronger the family.

But is this true? One way to approach this question is to compare children in nations that have embraced free-market policies with children in nations that have not. A 2007 UNICEF “Report Card 7” does just that.¹⁷ Capitalist countries vary among themselves, of course. The United States, United Kingdom, and Australia, and some now include Portugal—so-called neo-liberal regimes—do not favor publicly funded services such as paid childcare or family leave.¹⁸ They have weaker social safety nets for the poor, and they pursue tax policies permitting wider gaps between rich and poor. Thus, the Report Card scholars were able to compare countries that pursue free market policies more with those—such as Norway and Sweden—who pursue them less.

Conducted by an international team of scholars, the report draws from dozens of national surveys as well as from cross-national data gathered by the World Health Organization (WHO) and the World Bank. Focusing on the twenty-one richest countries in the world, and comparing the health, education, and material and emotional well-being of middle school children, the researchers asked such questions as whether the children had a quiet place to study, a dictionary, and schoolbooks. They asked them whether they had someone to talk to, and if they had had an accident within the last year.

The highest ratings of child well-being went to the Netherlands, Sweden, Norway, and Denmark—nations that, far more than the United States or United Kingdom, tax the rich, regulate commerce, and provide public services such as paid parental leave. The lowest overall ranks went to the nations most strongly pursuing a free-market agenda—the United States and United Kingdom, both of which ranked in the bottom third for five of the six key dimensions of child well-being. The United States ranked dead last among the twenty-one affluent countries in child poverty and ranked second to last in “family and peer relations” and “behaviors and risks.” The likelihood of a child skipping breakfast, becoming fat, smoking pot, or getting pregnant—on all these measures the United States and United Kingdom ranked worse than nearly all the other nations. Indeed, American girls had the highest rate of teen pregnancy.¹⁹

When asked how often they eat their main meal of the day with their parents “around a table,” nearly 80 percent of the children from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries reported “several times a week”—in contrast to 66 percent of American children. A smaller proportion of American children described their peers as “kind and helpful” (53 percent) than did OECD children overall (66 percent). Compared with their OECD counterparts, a smaller proportion of American children ate breakfast each morning or fruit every day, and more 13- to 15-year-old Americans were overweight (25 percent vs. 13 percent). A higher proportion of teens in the United States had smoked pot in the last year (31 percent) than had teens from the OECD countries that provided information on its use (21 percent). In addition, each child in the study was shown a picture of a ladder and was told the top of the ladder (10) is the “best possible life for you” and the bottom (0) “the worst possible life for you” they were then asked where on the ladder they stood. In how far up they placed themselves, the U.S. children ranked a low 18 out of 21.²⁰

A 2010 follow-up study, UNICEF Report Card 9, recounted the same bad news—the United States ranked 23 out of 24 nations in the proportion of its children in poverty, beating out Slovakia, which came last.²¹ The United States ranked 19 out of 24 in education and 22 out of 24 in health.

What are we to make of these findings? Most of us assume that richer countries offer children better lives than do poorer countries. But by itself, a nation’s wealth does not improve the average well-being of its children. Nor is a higher proportion of stay-at-home mothers correlated with higher ratings in the well-being of children. Norway has one of the highest proportion of women aged 15 years and over in paid work (62 percent), but it ranked 7 out of 21 in overall child well-being. The United States, with its lower proportion (57 percent) of women in paid work, ranked 20 out of 21 in the overall well-being of children.²²

Many Americans I have spoken to about the UNICEF report have responded with one reason or another why the high-state-support model would not work for the United States. “You can pay for state supports for working parents in little Norway with its population of 5 million,” one man told me, “but not in a country as big as the U.S.”²³ Yet the sheer size of a nation’s population does not correspond to its Report Card ranking. Germany, with its population of 82 million, won higher scores in child well-being than Austria with its 8 million. Gathered together, the children of the 500-million-strong European Union rank higher than those of the 312-million-strong United States.

Still others point to the high proportion of poor minorities in the United States. “It’s easier for Europeans to earn higher average scores on child well-being than it is in America,” one woman explained, “because the U.S. has more minorities and immigrants who pull down our scores.”²⁴ Although it is hard to compare the United States with the European Union in numbers of minorities—official figures are not comparable—France and Germany are home to roughly the same proportion of immigrants as the United States, yet they still score higher in child well-being.²⁵

On the heels of the UNICEF study, the British epidemiologists Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett offered in their landmark book The Spirit Level: Why Greater Equality Makes Societies Stronger the most comprehensive cross-national overview we have of studies on the well-being of adults.²⁶ Drawing on 400 scholarly studies, the authors compared twenty-three of the richest countries in the world, looking at such things as rates of obesity, violence, drug abuse, mental illness, teen births, suicide, levels of social trust, school performance, social mobility, infant mortality rates, and overall health and life expectancy. Using studies based on data gathered by the United Nations, the OECD, and WHO, among others, Wilkinson and Pickett divided nations not by their wealth or government support for working families but by the gap between each nation’s richest and poorest 20 percent.²⁷ In nearly all measures of human well-being, the low-gap nations were far better off than the high-gap nations—namely, the United Kingdom, Portugal, and especially the United States.

People in high-gap societies, they reported, suffer a homicide rate ten times that of people in low-gap nations as well as eight times the per capita rate of teen births and three times the rate of mental illness. Populations in high-gap societies are more likely than those in low-gap societies to disagree with the statement “most people can be trusted.” They worry more about muggings and rape, their children are exposed to more violence, and they live with larger prison systems. Again, it is not a nation’s GDP that correlates with these problem rates but, along with other factors, the size of the gap between rich and poor.

It is not simply that unequal societies have more poor people and the poor are more distressed than the rich. Even middle-class people in high-gap societies, the authors found, suffer poorer health, more mental illness and obesity, and feel less safe in their communities than do the reasonably affluent in low-gap societies. Those earning household incomes of $60,000 in high-gap countries suffer higher rates of death from all causes than do the $60,000-income people living in low-gap countries.²⁸ Similarly, infant mortality is lower in low-gap Sweden than in high-gap England for families at every occupational level.²⁹ Within the United States, Wilkinson and Pickett also compared low-gap states such as Vermont, New Hampshire, Minnesota, and North Dakota with high-gap states such as Texas and Louisiana, where homicide, teen pregnancy, and high school dropout rates are higher.³⁰

Evaluating Wilkinson and Pickett’s research, some scholars have confirrmed the authors’ findings regarding different rates of distress but have pointed out inconsistencies, too. Claude Fischer notes that between 1970 and 2003, U.S. homicide rates dropped by 30 percent even while inequality rose. However, he also concludes that “even the skeptics . . . do not argue that inequality is good for anyone but those on the top of the pyramid.”³¹ Another critic has questioned why the authors analyzed drug use instead of alcoholism, which is a bigger problem in low-gap Scandinavia than in the high-gap United States.³²

As the “good outcome” nations are nearly all Scandinavian and the “bad outcome” nations are Anglo-American, Fischer observed, we are comparing the culture of “Sven” to that of “Jack.” Surely he is right that national culture matters. But if the political policies that result from Jack’s approach hurt families, maybe Jack should take a cue from Sven.

Another study of change over time in the United States provides powerful support for Wilkerson and Pickett’s thesis. In his book Coming Apart: The State of White America 1960–2010, the conservative political scientist Charles Murray traces the move between 1960 and 2010, during which the U.S. shifted from being a low-gap society to a high-gap one.³³ Drawing on five decades of U.S. government data as well as a host of national attitude surveys, Murray compares the top 20 percent of non-Hispanic whites in the United States (those with bachelor’s degrees or higher, who are employed as managers or professionals) with the bottom 30 percent (those with high school diplomas or none, employed in blue-collar or low-level white-collar jobs).

In 1960, he found, rich whites (in their 30s and 40s) fairly similar to poor ones. Most were married, went to church, took pride in their work, and felt attached to their communities. Children were born to married mothers, and most couples stayed married and raised their kids together.

A half century later, family life was pretty much the same at the top and drastically worse at the bottom. In 2010, prime-age whites at the top pretty much fit the profile of prime-age whites in 1960: married, working, and involved in the community. But life for their lower-class counterparts had greatly changed. The lower-class mother who was likely to be married in 1960 was very likely to be single in 2010. Three percent of upper-class children but 22 percent of lower-class ones in 2010 lived with their single moms.³⁴ Women in the bottom 20 percent have become less likely to go to church, to volunteer in their schools or communities, to trust their neighbors, or to say they were happy than were their counterparts in 1960. Men have come to work shorter hours. Unemployed men passed up low-wage jobs and became absent to their children. In their new leisure, they did not take classes, do things with their kids, or help around the home. Instead, white men in the bottom 30 percent did two things more than either their counterparts of 1960 or their upscale contemporaries of 2010: they slept longer, and watched more television.

Although such men say they want to work hard and have strong families, Murray argues that they have lost the moral values they would need to achieve those ends. But that leads us to wonder why the bottom fifth in low-gap societies such as Norway and Finland do not fit this picture of the slacker. And we can wonder why even the rich appear to suffer when they become so much richer than the poor. In 2010, Murray found that the poorest 20 percent had come to distrust other people more, and to feel less supported and less happy than their counterparts from when America was a more equal society. But so, too, did people at the top.³⁵ In the General Social Survey data Murray uses, rich as well as poor were asked, “Would you say that most of the time people try to be helpful, or that they are mostly just looking out for themselves?” “Do you think most people would try to take advantage of you if they got a chance, or would they try to be fair?” “Generally speaking, would you say that people can be trusted or that you can’t be too careful in dealing with people?” In their answers, both rich and poor were more distrustful in the more unequal America of 2010 than in the more equal era of 1960. When trust breaks down, Murray observes, it does so “across the board.”³⁶

What Wilkerson and Pickett discovered in their cross-national survey, Murray confirmed for prime-age whites in America. While the two studies tell the same story, they propose very different remedies. The authors of the Spirit Level call on governments to do the progressive “Sven” thing and develop policies to reduce the troubling class gap. The author of Coming Apart accepts the widened class gap, rejects government solutions, and urges rich kids to get to know poor kids and to join the conservative Heritage Foundation.³⁷

Missing from both accounts is the deeper emotional story of the prime-age, blue-collar man. Shorn of his way of life, at the bottom of the heap in the job and marriage markets, he has quietly sunk into a dead-end crisis. His sleep and his television watching suggest less a loss of morals than a loss of morale. What is he watching on television? Ads for high-end vacations, scuba diving in Belize, mountain climbing in Switzerland, and whizzing through the Arizona desert in a luxury car. The rich often isolate themselves from the poor, but the poor tune in on the lifestyles of the rich every day.

Unable to support a family on his own wage as his father and grandfather did, the blue-collar man finds himself at the bottom in a high-gap society. This descent is evocative of a story Valerie Walkerdine and Luis Jiminez describe in their book Gender, Work and Community after De-Industrialization, in which the honor, pride, and identity of men evaporated when iron and steel left a small town in southern Wales. They describe men in this former mining town in a form of “collective grief,” which passed from man to woman and father to son.³⁸

The engines of much of this are American multinational companies that, faced with new competition for market share, have off-shored their assembly lines to cheaper labor pools in Mexico, China, and India.³⁹ That is the U.S. poor man’s new competition. This economic shift has hit him harder—and earlier—than the middle-class Americans for whom this frightening trend is hitting now.⁴⁰ Indeed, the blue-collar man has taken the hit for everyone else in America—and so has his family.

THE DEREGULATION EFFECT

If a freer market is the answer, what policies would enhance it, and what impact would they have on the family? Deregulation, as those who link the free-market with family values hold, encourages business, creates jobs, raises the national GDP and the average family’s income, and so strengthens families. Deregulation, the argument goes, helps families. But such a claim bears a closer look.

We can look at the television commercials for high-sugar, high-fat, high-salt foods—Cokes, candy bars, and chips—that target children and are unregulated in the United States. In her book Born to Buy, Juliet Schor documents the link between the troubles of American children and the “child industry,” as she calls it, based on the wide and increasing exposure of American children to advertising.⁴¹ Most advertising is still delivered to children through television, although television and the Internet are merging into a whole new interactive—and marketing—experience for youth. By the age of 6 years, Schor observes, the American child’s viewing time is just over two hours a day, and for 8- to 13-year-olds it rises to three and a half hours a day; a fifth of television air time is devoted to commercials.⁴² One study found that American children aged 3 to 5 years spent more time watching television (14 hours a week) than being in school (12 hours and 5 minutes), playing outdoors (37 minutes), or doing anything other than sleep.⁴³ In 2004, the total advertising and marketing expenditures directed at children reached $15 billion.⁴⁴ Such ads are aimed at children’s own piggy banks. Children aged 4 to 12 spent $30 billion of their own money in 2002, and a full third of that went for candy, soft drinks, and other products high in fat and sugar.⁴⁵

Researchers have linked such ads to the rise in childhood obesity,⁴⁶ which has, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, quadrupled for 6- to 11-year-olds and tripled for 2- to 5-year-olds since 1970.⁴⁷ Children grow obese mainly through what they eat, of course; what has changed since 1970 includes the rise of convenience foods at home, restaurant dining, and scheduled passive pursuits, and the decline in school recess time and free roaming around the neighborhoods. But the main thing that changed is the increase in money invested in television and Internet advertisements for junk food. And on such child-targeted ads, there is no regulation.

Indeed, the junk food industry has aggressively pursued many strategies to get children to buy its products. Some companies enlist children to serve as “brand representatives” to other children. Companies fund school books—Amazon.com sells at least forty of them—that teach math and science using branded foods: the M&M’s Brand Counting Book or the Kellogg’s Froot Loops! Counting Fun Book.⁴⁸ Some ads for junk food make it “cool” to be oppositional and defy parental advice about healthy eating. The restaurant and beverage companies founded and fund the Center for Consumer Freedom, which ridicules public health authorities who link obesity to disease and opposes efforts to curb childhood obesity as “anti-freedom.”⁴⁹

With cuts in public funding, cash-strapped U.S. public school districts increasingly accept money in return for giving for-profit companies the right to place ads on public school buses and to create programming—including an ad for Coke—shown on Channel One television during compulsory assemblies at school. Nine states now allow ads on the outside of school buses, and some schools allow ads inside them.⁵⁰ In return for corporate money, some school boards now also permit district school buses to carry radios that play ads. Other cash-strapped schools are exploring corporate sponsorship of school bands, sports teams, and the general fund. Some public schools have accepted corporate money to develop curricula such as the American Coal Foundation’s “The United States of Energy,” a fourth-grade curriculum favorable to coal, and Shell’s “Energize your Future” curriculum, which imagines the oil industry as a leader in alternative fuel production.⁵¹ Kohl’s department store’s “charitable” campaign offered $500,000 to the twenty schools with the most votes on Facebook; all voters were then placed on a Kohl’s promotional mailing list.⁵² As scholars at the National Education Policy Center argue, such curricula are prompted by a desire to boost company brands, not help kids think.⁵³

Some nations permit more child-targeted advertising than others. One scholar, who analyzed twenty hours of commercial television aimed at children under the age of 12 in twelve nations, found that the United States showed television ads for 11 minutes per hour while Norway and Sweden showed ads for 1 minute per hour.⁵⁴ In response to the obesity crisis in 2006, fifty-three European governments adopted the European Charter on Counteracting Obesity, which included a call to regulate the commercial promotion of “energy-dense foods,” particularly to children.⁵⁵ Countries responded to this call in different ways. The United Kingdom banned ads to children under 16 for foods high in fat, sugar, and salt. France required nutritional messages on all foods targeted to adults and children—a proposal to ban ads to children failed by one vote in 2009. Ireland banned the use of celebrities in children’s food ads and requires warnings on fast foods.⁵⁶ The U.S. Congress appropriated money in 2009 to set up a Working Group on Food Marketing to Children, and called for voluntary pledges by the food industry to regulate itself.⁵⁷ In his survey of children in twelve rich nations, the sociologist Tim Kasser found that nations allowing advertisers the freest hand in targeting children scored the lowest on a UNICEF ranking of child well-being.⁵⁸

The dark side of deregulation can be connected to a wide array of other problems that families absorb, too. With staff cuts in the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) or looser workplace safety regulations, workers go to jobs in riskier workplaces: a nurse is stuck with an unsafe needle, a construction worker steps on an unsafe scaffolding, a miner enters an unsafe mine. A less-protected environment produces diseased plants, animals, and potentially contaminated food. Seen in one light, these are unavoidable problems of a free-market system that people must deal with, one by one. Seen in another light, they are the preventable fallout of an under-regulated economy that harms all families.

THE SERVICE-LOSS EFFECT

A final “free-market and family values” proposal is to make large cuts in public services. Medicaid, food stamps, subsidized housing for the disabled, public school lunches, and Head Start help families who are poor or have special needs. Public libraries and parks serve all families, especially middle-class ones who tend to be their heaviest users.⁵⁹ The Nurse-Family Partnership program offers monthly visits over three years for poor—and often young and unmarried—mothers. According to the Coalition for Evidence-based Policy, the program has reduced child abuse, neglect, and injuries by anywhere from 20 to 50 percent.⁶⁰ It also has reduced the number of subsequent births and has motivated mothers to go back to school or get jobs. According to a 2005 RAND study, the Nurse-Family Partnership program saves $5.70 for every dollar it spends.⁶¹

Similarly, Success for All, a school-wide program in high-poverty elementary schools, offers daily 90-minute reading classes and other reading help and improves reading performance by 25 to 30 percent of a grade level.⁶² Career Academies, which set up learning communities that prepare students in urban, low-income high schools for jobs, have also had important success.⁶³ Head Start, which helps children improve their reading, writing, and vocabulary, aids in their emotional development as well, according to some studies.⁶⁴ Youth Opportunities Grants, before their defunding, also helped low-income youth.⁶⁵ Insofar as it is families that absorb the bad news of their members, such programs have greatly helped families.

The free-market family-values agenda creates a two-sided market squeeze. On one side, tax-induced inequality, deregulation, and service cuts put heavy strains on family life. On the other side, cuts in social services reduce the support for handling such strains. It is precisely this market squeeze that I believe accounts for the great difference between the United States and most of Europe in the well-being of families.

HOW TO MOVE FORWARD?

At the moment, the “mom is working, so how are the kids?” and the “work-family balance” folks are not thinking about taxes or deregulation, which seem to them far removed from family life. And the “free-market family values” conversation is turning a blind eye to the dark side of the free market. Meanwhile, we have become a far more unequal society—and, at least after the late 1990s boom, curiously more tolerant of it.⁶⁶

So how do we move forward? By starting with the right premises. Added up, all this research suggests that families are creatures of their context. Those who link free-market policies to family values herald the importance of “free choice.” To be sure, parents and children do make “free choices.” But they do so within contexts which constrain those choices. Obesity, physical illness, mental illness, teen pregnancy, violence, and social distrust—all these involve individual choice. A small child watches TV ads for junk food, gains weight, and becomes diabetic. He may have chosen to eat three bags of M&Ms, but not to have become fat and ill.

Meanwhile, a child’s individual choice becomes a family matter. His mother takes the morning off from work to take him to the doctor. She learns how to give him insulin shots, and now she worries about the medical bills. The child made an “individual choice” to eat the candy, but a powerful industry made its free choice to put billions of dollars into making him want to do that. Should we blame the child, the parents, or the industry?

A painter falls from a scaffolding. He is taken to the hospital with a broken back. The family cannot afford the medical bill, so his stay-at-home wife gets a low-paid job, but she cannot pay both the house note and hospital bill. We can ask whether the painter was careful enough as he walked out on the scaffolding, or we can ask when the safety inspector last checked it.

A family cancels a lakeside camping trip because a public park has closed. We can ask why Mom and Dad were not working hard enough to foot the bill for a week at the Holiday Inn, or we can ask why the public camping ground is not open.⁶⁷

People live in families, and families live in contexts. For Americans today, an increasingly powerful context is the market: large and small companies in our version of a free-enterprise system. Companies offer us much of what is good and necessary in life, but as systems they are also inherently designed to uphold the values—and free choices—of stockholders, not the value of families. To expand the power of companies and contract the power of everything else (the government, non-profits, and community), as “free-market family values” advocates wish us to do, is to adopt a stockholder’s view of family life.

Some conservative leaders even behold the family through stockholder eyes. In an astonishing speech on work-family balance given to Harvard Business School students, for example, a young Mitt Romney, the 2012 Republican candidate for U.S. president, spoke of children as investments. “Your children [will not show] any evidence of achievement for 20 years,” Romney warned, but if parents do not invest enough time and energy, their families could end up as “dogs”—which is “consultant-speak,” a New York Times reporter explained, for the unprofitable parts of a corporation, “sucking energy, time and happiness” from the family.⁶⁸

So how’s the family doing? In America, not so well. This is not because Mom and Dad are at the office, and it is not because Americans do not value families. It is because we have yet to open a third conversation, built on studies such as these, about what can help. Holding ourselves open to this evidence has everything to do with the “moral zoning” we apply to our empathy maps (chapter 3). These empathy maps will determine how many children—in the country or world—we think of as our own. When we set out to vote, we will need to ask what a good government would do and how to get ours to be a good one.⁶⁹ And we will need to work for more socially responsible corporations, more imaginative nonprofits, and more vital communities. In the end, Americans need not fly off to Norway in search of a better family life. We can find our own examples in the low-gap, higher-well-being states that Wilkinson and Pickett discovered right here in the United States. So the next time someone asks “How’s the American family?” we can proudly answer “Couldn’t be better.”