Stephanie Coontz is fascinated by history — particularly the events that never happened.
Coontz, director of research and public education for the Council on Contemporary Families in Austin, Texas, has just updated her groundbreaking 1992 book, "The Way We Never Were." It's one of the few books I've carried with me through years and moves — because it's a welcome and hopeful reminder that families always have faced, and overcome, transitions and challenges.
In the revised book, Coontz offers an equally honest and upbeat review of the way things really are, despite dire predictions of a culture in crisis. Among her findings:
Juvenile crime has plummeted. Criminologists predicted "a bloodbath of violence" by morally impoverished juveniles in the early 1990s, largely due to rising rates of unwed births. But since 1994 juvenile crime has gone down by more than 60 percent, even though the number of children born of unwed mothers has risen to 40 percent. And sexual assaults and intimate partner violence dropped by more than 60 percent between 1993 and 2010.
Career women are hardly "outsourcing" their children's care. As women accepted more prestige jobs in the late 1990s, many experts predicted that the kids would never see Mom, which wasn't just sexist — it was inaccurate. Even as mothers' work hours increased, Coontz said, their child-centered hours increased, too. Today, both single and married working mothers spend more time with their children than married homemakers did in 1965. And fathers' child-care time has tripled. The upshot? Everybody's tired.
Teenage pregnancy has not ruined a generation of young people. Teen pregnancy has reached an all-time low.
No-fault divorce laws were the opposite of catastrophic. Most states adopted such laws in the 1980s and 1990s. And although no-fault divorce is now universal, divorce rates are actually falling.
Equality has not killed eroticism. Yes. Doomsayers were predicting that, too. In fact, couples married in the 1990s who shared housework and child care equally report the highest level of marital and sexual satisfaction, and the most frequent sex.
Not everything is hunky-dory, of course.
Coontz is concerned about the lessening of reproductive rights, the growth of economic inequality, the loss of middle-class jobs, the resegregation of many schools and communities, as well as the failure of government and business to make substantial progress in helping couples and parents find a work-family balance.
The key to fixing what is really broken, she said, is to focus on what's working and replicate it, instead of "cherry-picking our memories and history, and forgetting all the bad things.
"The point is to help people feel more confident about their ability to deal with change, to remind them of what others have done to overcome the obstacles and the injustices of the past," Coontz said. "It's to remember how those actions, and struggles, have improved their lives."
gail.rosenblum@startribune.com 612-673-7350 • Twitter: @grosenblum
