To be sure, changes in American family structure have been fairly continuous since the first European settlements, but today thesechanges seem to be occurring so rapidly that the shift is no longer a simple extension of long-term trends. We have passed a genuine watershed: this is the first time in our history that the typical school-age child has a mother who works outside the home.

The myth of self-sufficiency blinds us to the workings of other forces in family life. For families are not now, nor were they ever, the self-sufficient building blocks of society, exclusively responsible, praiseworthy, and blamable for their own destiny. They are deeply influenced by broad social and economic forces over which they have little control.

Television thus illustrates the mixed blessings of technological change in American society. It is a new medium, promising extraordinary benefits: great educational potential, a broadening of experience, enrichment of daily life, entertainment for all. But it teaches children the uses of violence, offers material consumption as the answer to life's problems, sells harmful products, habituates viewers to constant stimulation, and undermines family interaction and other forms of learning such as play and reading.

In the past the intrinsic pleasures of parenthood for most American families were increased by the extrinsic economic return thatchildren brought. Today, parents have children despite their economic cost. This is a major, indeed a revolutionary, change.

Parents still have primary responsibility for raising children, but they must have the power to do so in ways consistent with their children's needs and their own values.... We must address ourselves less to the criticism and reform of parents themselves than to the criticism and reform of the institutions that sap their self-esteem and power.

Today's parents have little authority over those others with whom they share the task of raising their children. On the contrary,most parents deal with those others from a position of inferiority or helplessness. Teacher, doctors, social workers, or television producers possess more status than most parents.... As a result, the parent today isa maestro trying to conduct an orchestra of players who have never met and who play from a multitude of different scores, each in a notation the conductor cannot read.

Poor children live in a particularly dangerous world--an urban world of broken stair railings, of busy streets serving as playgrounds, of lead paint, rats and rat poisons, or a rural world where families do not enjoy the minimal levels of public health accepted as standard for nearly a century. Whether in city or country, this is a world where cavities go unfilled and ear infections threatening permanent deafness go untreated. It is world where even a small child learns to be ashamed of the way he or she lives.