Perhaps one of the most important findings of Cootz is that there's the feeling that married couples today just aren't as happy as they were in the golden age of the 1950's. Here, she doesn't do a great job of refuting this supposed myth. She did find data that more couples reported their marriages to be happy in the late 1970s than did so in 1957. but, the use of data this old simply shows that Cootz lacks appropriate evidence to support her argument. At least she does admit that between the late 1970s and late 1980s, marital happiness did decline in the United States. When dealing the higher deaths rates of our present generation, Cootz does a poor job of putting these numbers in an unbiased contextual perspective. Cootz explains how many marriages in the past were terminated by the death of a partner rather than divorce which she infers is the modern-day equivalent of death in marriage. This is a ridiculous inference. There's absolutely no way to prove that if the partners in the marriage had lived longer they would have gotten a divorce. To her credit, Cootz does acknowledge that while many men have learned to be better fathers and spend more time with their children, more fathers are walking out on their families than ever before.
Cootz is more credible when she talks about putting data on youngsters in context with the historical times. She points out that the proportion of youngsters receiving psychological assistance role by eighty percent between 1981 and 1988 and that child abuse reports increased by 225% between 1976 and 1987. Cootz convincingly argues that these increases may just as likely represented heightened consciousness about these problems rather than actual increases in occurrences.
Finished with describing where families have come from, Cootz turns her attention to...
On this matter, she says "Lack of perspective on where families have come from and how their evolution connects to other social trends tends to encourage contradictory claims and wild exaggerations about where families are going." (18) Polls today reveal that women are increasingly dissatisfied with the failure of employers, schools and government to come up with ways that would make it easier to combine work and family life. Two-thirds of women responding to one national poll said they wanted more traditional standards of family life. At the same time, women rejected the idea that "women should return to their traditional role." (21) the results of these polls do seem to indicate that women do have a perspective of where families have come from, perhaps it's just not the same perspective that Cootz has.
Cootz concludes with her own solution for the modern-day family,
The problem is not to berate people for abandoning past family values, nor to exhort them to adopt better values in the future -- the problem is to build the institutions and social support networks that allow people to act on their best values rather than on their worst ones. We need to get past abstract nostalgia for traditional family values and develop a clearer sense of how past families actually worked and what the different consequences of various family behaviors and values have been." (22)
Ironically, Cootz had just spent time arguing that the modern-day family still has great support networks and erosion from the 1950's is a myth. This is just one more example of logical flaws that exist throughout Cootz's chapter. Still, Cootz does a good job of making the reader think about the historical and environmental contexts of the family and to question supposed facts that are likely…
