Judith Warner: What the Great Recession Has Done to Family Life
[Judith Warner is the author, most recently, of “We’ve Got Issues: Children and Parents in the Age of Medication.”]
...This glass-half-full narrative, the popular trope that the Great Recession will ennoble us by purging us of our excesses, has, as its reference point, the Great Depression — or a certain idea of the Great Depression. After all, we’ve been told countless times, the Depression put an end to the libertine individualism of the flapper age: families stayed home and played Monopoly, finding strength and sustenance with one another. Missing from this rosy picture, however, historians point out, is the fact that, as Steven Mintz, a Columbia University historian puts it, “they had no choice.” The atmosphere was often pretty rotten in those times of togetherness, he says, and many kids reacted by getting away from their parents as quickly as possible: “Teenagers who were unhappy with their families created a separate culture, a teenage culture, for the first time. Their family lives were unpleasant — their fathers were depressed — these kids separated themselves.”
What the Great Depression was actually like — mostly wretched — and how we frequently choose to think of it — as ultimately redemptive — are two very different things. Our society didn’t fully come together over the New Deal; the opposition to it was fierce. What would bring Americans their strongest sense of unity, a powerful sense of purpose and energy — and ultimately, jobs and large-scale, life-bettering educational opportunities — was the cataclysm of World War II, according to the historian Glen Elder Jr., author of the classic “Children of the Great Depression.”
Our nostalgia for the Depression speaks volumes about how we feel not just about the past but also about our lives today. A craving for a simpler, slower, more centered life, one less consumed by the soul-emptying crush of getting and spending, runs deep within our culture right now. It was born of the boom, and not just because of the materialism of that era but also because of the work it took then to keep a family afloat, at a time of rising home prices and health care costs, frozen real wages and the pressures of an ever-widening income gap. As the recent Rockefeller report showed, for most families the miseries of the Great Recession don’t represent a break from the recent past, just a significant worsening of the stresses they’ve been under for years and years....
Read entire article at NYT
...This glass-half-full narrative, the popular trope that the Great Recession will ennoble us by purging us of our excesses, has, as its reference point, the Great Depression — or a certain idea of the Great Depression. After all, we’ve been told countless times, the Depression put an end to the libertine individualism of the flapper age: families stayed home and played Monopoly, finding strength and sustenance with one another. Missing from this rosy picture, however, historians point out, is the fact that, as Steven Mintz, a Columbia University historian puts it, “they had no choice.” The atmosphere was often pretty rotten in those times of togetherness, he says, and many kids reacted by getting away from their parents as quickly as possible: “Teenagers who were unhappy with their families created a separate culture, a teenage culture, for the first time. Their family lives were unpleasant — their fathers were depressed — these kids separated themselves.”
What the Great Depression was actually like — mostly wretched — and how we frequently choose to think of it — as ultimately redemptive — are two very different things. Our society didn’t fully come together over the New Deal; the opposition to it was fierce. What would bring Americans their strongest sense of unity, a powerful sense of purpose and energy — and ultimately, jobs and large-scale, life-bettering educational opportunities — was the cataclysm of World War II, according to the historian Glen Elder Jr., author of the classic “Children of the Great Depression.”
Our nostalgia for the Depression speaks volumes about how we feel not just about the past but also about our lives today. A craving for a simpler, slower, more centered life, one less consumed by the soul-emptying crush of getting and spending, runs deep within our culture right now. It was born of the boom, and not just because of the materialism of that era but also because of the work it took then to keep a family afloat, at a time of rising home prices and health care costs, frozen real wages and the pressures of an ever-widening income gap. As the recent Rockefeller report showed, for most families the miseries of the Great Recession don’t represent a break from the recent past, just a significant worsening of the stresses they’ve been under for years and years....