Unrealistic family myths.

According to Stephanie Coontz, professor of history and human values, Evergreen State College; Olympia, Wash., and author of The Way We Really Are: Coming to Terms with America's Changing Families, the public's views of marriage, divorce, sex, and unwed mothers are distorted by longstanding myths.

Myth: A return to more traditional family values and gender roles would save many marriages and protect children.

Reality: Many problems usually blamed on the "breakdown of the traditional family" exist not because! we have changed too much, but because we haven't changed enough. The failure of men to share housework and child care with their partners, for example, is a primary source of overload for working mothers and a major cause of marital conflict.

Although having the wife quit work while the kids are young may have worked for couples in the 1950s, backsliding into traditional gender roles after the birth of a child tends to destabilize modern marriages, often sowing the seeds of a future divorce. Women get depressed, and men are cut off from crucial early experiences in becoming competent fathers. Men who accept traditional roles of male-breadwiner/female-nurtuer are the ones most likely to abandon children after divorce or remarriage. Fathers with egalitarian gender attitudes and a stronger identity as parents, by contrast, are more likely to maintain contact with their children following a divorce, and even after remarriage.

Myth: Families of the past didn't have problems like families do today.

Reality: Desertion. child abuse, spousal battering, and alcohol or drug addiction always have troubled significant numbers of families, and many of today's problems are in comparison with where we ought to be, not where we used to be. More students graduate from high school today than ever, and test scores have improved steadily since the 1950s. Yet, we haven't improved our curriculum and school effectiveness as much as most of our main rivals in the global economy Child poverty is lower today than in the 1950s, but it has been rising since 1973, and the U.S. now is in last place among 18 Western industrial nations in the percentage of children living in poverty It's also worth noting that the abuse of women and children once were legal rights of the household head Not until the end of the 19th century did courts reject the right of a husband to beat his wife and children.

Myth: The 1950s male-breadwinner family was the traditional form in...