Family Re-Union

United States Senate
WASHINGTON, DC 20510-4202

Remarks of
SEN. AL GORE

The Family Re-Union Conference
April 25, 1992
Nashville, Tennessee

When we talk about the problems facing the family, those of you here know exactly what I'm talking about because each of you find the same strength and the same struggles in your families that everyone does. And, in addition, every day, many of you come face to face with families and children in crisis, with families that have broken down and stopped working and have reached out for help, families that are creating more pain than support, more resentment than love. No one has to tell you how difficult it is to put the pieces back together; to rebuild a family, to reassure a child, to strengthen a parent.

But, how can we do a better job understanding what the problems are and how to solve them? I think we can and so do you because that's what this conference is all about. I am so grateful to you for your commitment of this weekend, for your interest, for your time and energy and for what I know will be a weekend of intense and worthwhile work, one which I hope will be characterized by breakthroughs in understanding in the sense that some of us have already made efforts to understand these issues from our individual perspectives. But there are so many different perspectives here, so many different individualized experiences, that I expect we will learn a great deal from the way each separate discipline approaches these issues.

I said at the beginning that I hoped we would create a shared vocabulary, a new vocabulary, a way of describing these problems, these issues, and these opportunities that make the insight and understanding that many of you have long since reached accessible to people who are not familiar with the specialized language and shorthand, the way of describing what you know, which necessarily becomes a part of the professional discipline. I'm looking forward to it.

I want to also express my thanks to those who have made this conference happen. Those of you who have been involved in conferences before know quite well that something like this does not simply happen and there are a few people I would like to especially thank here at the beginning: Charlotte Hayes and Joe Baum, Colleen Crenshaw, Holly Dodge and Bob Corney, all who have worked directly with me. Nancy Hoit, Elliott Moore, Kathy Woods-Dobbins, Dennis Douglas, Sarah Lewis, Lance Lawrence, Anne Peretz, Karen Edwards, Andy Shookhoff, May Shayne, and Trudy Trivers. There are others who should be mentioned, but I want to single these individuals out because they have really put in an incredible number of hours and days and nights making this conference possible. Their tireless work, boundless enthusiasm, experience, insight, ideas, and ability have made an immeasurable difference to every aspect and every detail of this conference, and we all owe them a great deal. I personally owe them an extra debt of gratitude for shaping my own thinking and my understanding of the problems and pressures facing American families and children.

You can open a newspaper almost any day of the week and find reports of a new study focusing on American families and the threats faced by American families. We've gotten to a point where our eyes sometimes glaze over. We've come to accept bad news. It seems like a relentless torrent of facts and figures. We value our families more--I saw one recent study indicating that four out of five Americans in responding to one of these current public opinion polls (how they come up with them, I don't know) said they wouldn't trade Thanksgiving Dinner with their family for $1,000 -- this is not a bad indication, I guess -- but at the same time, we are valuing time with our families more. We know that our families are facing much greater pressure. In another study, 87% of parents surveyed said they have a hard time making ends meet, that they worry a lot about their families. Specifically, families worry that their children will get pregnant, get addicted, get AIDs or get shot. And many have decided to simply forget about getting ahead.

You can't blame them. One out of five adolescents in our country needs mental health counseling and only 20 percent of that group are actually getting it. Then if you look at the group getting treatment, they often get less than they need. The annual suicide rate for teenagers between ages 15 and 19 has tripled in just the last twenty-five years. Births to unwed mothers rose from 5 percent of all births to 26 percent of all births in the last twenty-five years. The divorce rate has more than doubled, and the percent of children in single parent families increased from 5.5 percent in 1960 to 29 percent in 1991.

One in eight children are hungry and one quarter of American children will suffer food shortages by the time they're 12 years old. Children in rural areas are more likely to be poor and less likely to find help from any kind of anti-poverty programs: benefits there are likely to be about half of the level in urban areas.

As I say, we hear these statistics and facts and figures, and we grow numb to them. But then sometimes an event will occur which shakes us into realizing that all of this adds up. The pieces of the puzzle do fit together and when we read of a nine-year-old girl being raped in school by a thirteen-year-old boy, we think this is incredible. When we read about students fearing guns in the classroom, we think that this is something that represents a brand new reality compared to the one we thought characterized American families.

In New York City today, part of the news is about the pattern of youths in the subways setting homeless people on fire for entertainment. I read an interview with the grandmother of one of the young teenage boys who had doused a homeless person in lighter fluid and struck a match. "He's a good boy," she said. She attempted to explain what he was really like as a person. "There's nothing wrong with him. Sometimes he comes under bad influences," she said. I thought of that boy when we heard the excerpt from Marian Wright Edelman's book on how the extended family in the community used to keep people from straying. That doesn't happen in the same way it once did. And it doesn't happen from the earliest days of a child's life.

Another recent study tells us that at least one third of our students are struggling from their first day of school because of problems that could have easily been prevented: health problems, for example, or challenges we could have prevented before they ever entered a classroom. Here in Tennessee, the study found that 39 percent of kindergarten students on the first day were not ready for kindergarten--39 percent.

On any given night, on any given night, there are a quarter of a million homeless children in our country. A 1990 study found a half-million children were runaways or throwaways, with 60 percent reporting that they had been physically or sexually abused by their parents. I visited last week a shelter in Morristown, called a YES shelter - some of you from that part of the state know it well. It is heartbreaking to hear of the stories describing what these children have been through. It makes you stand back and feel sorry for them and ask yourself what is happening. How can such horrors and tragedies unfold here in Tennessee and throughout the United States of America? Well, that has to be matched with this steady torrent of statistics and studies describing what Liz Schorr said last night was the deterioration of our social infrastructure.

The deterioration of all the support mechanisms doesn't make it possible for families to survive and to do well. We're going to look at many of them during this conference in more detail. We're going to try to isolate some of the factors that are most important and look at the ways in which we know from experience they can be successfully addressed.

Louis Sullivan, the Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services, says, for example, that the absence of fathers is the greatest family issue of our era. Children without fathers at home are five times more likely to be poor, twice as likely to drop out of school, and 20 to 40 percent more likely to suffer from health problems. And yet when we seek to support families in need and crisis, our policies punish the presence of the father in the home. We've known for at least two or three generations how idiotic that policy is, but we have not had the courage to change it, because as soon as we started to change it, we were confronted with the uncomfortable truth that it will cost some money to change it on the front end. And so they say, let's just leave it the way it is and wait for ten or fifteen years and spend ten times as much money in order to deal with the consequences of our intellectual and moral cowardice in being unwilling to address that issue on the front end. That's only one example. You know the other horror stories quite well because many of you live with them in your daily work. You see the patterns that run through generations -- the abusive parent who was an abused child, the alcoholic child of an alcoholic parent, the unwed mother who is the daughter of an unwed mother -- and you see the inter-generational cycle of tragedy and search for ways to break that cycle. But what of the patterns we don't see? The problems we can't recognize, much less solve?

What about the broader influences of our communities and our society? What role do they play in strengthening and supporting our families and our children?

As we have learned to recognize inter-generational cycles in families that don't work, problems and patterns that repeat themselves in each separate generation, we are less prepared as yet to recognize the repeating patterns in each generation of the community, in each generation of our society as a whole. We make the same mistakes and pass them down and because we don't interrupt the cycle, in the community or in society, we are doomed to repeat that cycle in the next generation. And in each turn of the cycle, the descent toward chaos grows more threatening, unless we intervene.

There is an old African proverb that says, "it takes a whole village to raise a child." Today, it takes a healthy family, a responsive community, and a supportive society to raise a child, every child, in every neighborhood; rich or poor; urban or rural.

Throughout history, in many cultures, people have understood that strong family life is fundamental to the well-being of every individual and to society as a whole. We're all aware that the complex structure of these individual, one-to-one relationships across generations -- between mother and daughter, for example, or between daughter and grandmother -- these relationships weave a pattern that determines the future of each member of a family. We're learning that the patterns of community life and the climate set by society are also critical to those individuals' life patterns.

At a time when the pressure of our daily lives seems to be constantly increasing, demanding more of our time, taking directly from those relationships, when technology seems to be controlling more and more aspects of our existence, when world events seem too large to grasp, we look to our families for support, for comfort, for understanding, and for love. In these times, if we don't find that solace, we become even more sensitive to the painful pattern of destruction that has been created.

The age-old tension between family and work, for example, is not new. Our ancestors, living in agrarian communities, knew the wisdom of having Grandmother rock the cradle while Mother and Father tended to the fields and the shore. The new approach is communities that artificially segregate the elderly away from the rest of the generations that make up our families, while we wonder why their lives lack purpose and there are not enough people to care for our children.

I was recently in Chattanooga visiting the Senior Neighbors program, one of two such programs in the country (the other is in Massachusetts), which brings grandparents who are lonely into the schools to work one-on-one with young students who don't get one-on one attention because the teacher is so overburdened. This is one example of an opportunity for healing. What do we do when both work? What do we do in single-parent families in communities that are fragmented by alienation more than joined by a sense of purpose? We search for new patterns that might promote a feeling of belonging. This is especially difficult at this stage in the history of our country because our civilization is going through a wrenching transformation. The industrial model is not working and we don't seem to have a clear sense of where we are headed.

There is an ecological model, which has to do with much more than simply the environment. This model emphasizes connection between children and family, between families and communities, between generations within communities, among communities and between communities and our nation, as a focal point for healing.

The family structure provides a context for the intellectual, emotional, and physical acculturation process, or development process. We need to understand this structure, this system, this contest and the connections which make it work. We cannot assume that programs originating in Washington are going to provide for the needs of the country. We have to have, and have to develop a better understanding of how the connections here in our own communities work.

Washington can help, and we're going to talk about that in this workshop as well. But in order to do so, in order to find the answers, we've got to listen to the families telling us what they need in order to succeed. Unfortunately, instead of working to help entire families function well as working systems, we have been singling out the most troubled individual family members, labeling them with the narrowest diagnosis and then handing them off to specialists who have studied that particular problem. Meanwhile the troubled family, the family from which that individual was pulled and to which that individual will return, is still floundering. As a result, we're still floundering too, without being able to describe the problem accurately, much less offer meaningful solutions.

We move individuals into groups. We can't deal with them one-by-one, so we pull them all together into groups that are defined by the individual problems that the person manifests: substance abuse, sexual abuse, mental illness, poverty. Instead of trying to address the problems one at a time, we are dealing with groups. But they are artificial groups defined by the pathology and the label that we put on the individual who has been ripped out of the family with which they live.

We provide services to individuals: the battered wife, the abused child, the unemployed worker. We are encouraged to do that by policy guidelines, funding restrictions, bureaucracies, and every hoop we have to jump through to get programs funded, accredited or licensed. This process stalls progress and blocks creative thinking.

We have to move beyond the one-problem, one-symptom approach and recognize that none of us lives in a vacuum -- not in our homes, our jobs, our churches or our synagogues, nor as parents, providers, or professionals. We are, each of us, part of a family, a community, and a society.

We need to move beyond specialization and scientific analysis. They have their place but they are not gods to worship and they are not magic in their ability to provide solutions. Too frequently they have failed. We need to recognize that we are all part of a team committed to the same victory. We cannot work separately or speak in specialized languages or jargon. We are trying to find ways to deal with the consequences of specialization, even as we appreciate and learn from the insight that has come from specialization. And one place to start on this task is by listening to families tell us what they need to succeed. By studying communities that do respond well, we need to reach deeper in our understanding of each individual and at the same time recognize that what we learn in that effort can have broader application to families and communities. We have to work with families and recognize that they have a place in communities and in society as a whole.

Our conference is organized around the contexts of family and the individual, family and community, family and society. Our goal this weekend is to find a new way to look at problems and a new way to describe them and express what we see and hear and feel. We need a plain language that recognizes the breadth and context of our lives, extends across disciplines, hurdles the bureaucratic obstacles, and distinguishes between symptoms and causes.

The labels we currently apply -- violence, drugs, child abuse -- are gross, unwieldy categories with a single focus and no depth and no descriptive capacity. These labels tell us nothing about the potential for success in the various approaches that have in some cases proven successful. They are simply blunt instruments. We need better, more delicate tools.

We need to recognize the inter-generational patterns: behaviors that are passed from parent to child just as surely as genes are passed from parents to children. What are the patterns, the symptoms, the essential elements and how do we address them?

How do we address the causes and not the symptoms? For example, how do we treat child abuse without looking at the fact that 90 percent of all criminal offenders were themselves abused as children? Doesn't that tell us something about the inter-generational character of these problems? What's behind a problem that is defined in those terms? What policies are effective in dealing with an inter-generational pattern? How do we perceive it as a society, recognize it, respond to it as communities, and as individuals and as a society?

How do we learn to recognize and interpret such patterns? How do we distinguish between the symptoms and causes when we encounter such a pattern? How do we develop holistic responses? How do we coordinate resources and responses from a variety of different sources? How do we become more effective in our responses?

There is increased interest in the adult children of alcoholics which illustrates the same need to arrive at a new way of defining these problems. There are inner realities that are continually denied in these family systems. Everyone buys into the secret and people are forced to live their whole lives on the basis of an outward facade which serves to allow the community and the society to deny the problem as well. We need to create a completely different kind of awareness.

We need to understand why families are in crisis. We cannot overlook the fact that families are a resource for solutions, not just problems. And we need to do a better job defining the universe of problems affecting families, recognizing that old models often don't acknowledge current realities. In today's families, both parents are working; there are more single parents and no extended family to provide constancy and continuity.

Our schools are still designed as though we were operating on a planting and harvest cycle of an agricultural society. They still are organized as if sweet sixteen was the age of puberty, when in fact it occurs at a tumultuous thirteen years. Our institutions, like the patterns of a dysfunctional family, remain locked in the past and resistant to change.

Our goal this weekend is to begin the difficult job of discovering a language that can be used to describe the problems and the solutions so that all providers, teachers, judges, pediatricians, child care workers, therapists, social workers and even politicians can learn to speak with each other and with the families they are trying to help.

Our goal is to remove the mystery and replace it with recognizable and effective policy. When the average person on the street can describe these problems in accessible language all of us will be able to confront policy makers at every level of government and say, "I can understand it. Why can't you understand it? We see it. Why can't you see it? You're not saving money, you're costing us money. We need to plan for the future, not strip-mine the future."

If we can create this language and this jargon, if we can move beyond specialization and rigid adherence to the constraints of particular disciplines, we may find a path to collaboration and flexibility and the creation of new, effective programs and policy. For political leaders, there's a responsibility to introduce just such a discussion into all these decisions, to redesign programs so that they don't just deal with individuals but also with the underlying problems in families, communities, and our society.

But how do we start?

We need to recognize that people are complex individuals -- not just the embodiment of a problem or series of problems -- that they interact, affect and are affected by the people to whom they are closest. A better framework within which to see people collectively is their natural, healthy, social organization: their families and their social networks and communities.

We must search for the 'hidden life' -- the root causes of the symptoms and of both positive and negative behavior. Also, we must recognize where our policy fails. Lisbeth Schorr says "all the major attributes of effective services are fundamentally at odds with the dominant ways that most large institutions are funded and the way they assure accountability, quality, and equity."

The federal government, just to take one example, spends $9 billion each year reimbursing states for half the cost of children in placement, providing an incentive to break up their families. Some states, like Tennessee, have indeed had the courage to step forward with family preservation and reunification programs with very positive results. Tennessee's Home Ties program provides intensive support to keep families together and teach them the skills that help them succeed.

That's what we ought to be doing. But it's rarely easy to accomplish. Every one of you has thought of many good solutions to the problems of families with whom you come into contact, solutions you've created or you're aware of programs that are really effective and you understand how to go about it, what resources are needed. But how many of the solutions you know about are easy to fund? How many times have you had to rewrite a proposal to make it fit guidelines that are themselves dysfunctional? How many times have you had to change the design of a program because it didn't "fit" the formula for accreditation? How many times have you had to change or narrow a diagnosis to get reimbursement? How may great educational ideas have been lost because they don't fit into the syllabus? And how many times has common sense lost out to regulations?

There are lots of examples.

Does it make sense to encourage dependent women to stay dependent? No, but we do just that, by taking away benefits if there is a man in the household or if the woman gets a job. Worse yet, we also cancel her children's Medicaid benefits. Does it make sense? Of course it doesn't. They're terrified their kids will get sick and they're encouraged to stay dependent.

Does it make sense to withhold additional food until a child is so malnourished that we can see it, until that child's intellectual potential is forever compromised, and then, when we do provide help, fail to provide enough to keep that child from starving two or three days a month? No, but we do just that. Bureaucracy directs policy, and not need.

The failures are all too familiar, but the successes are remarkable. You are Tennessee's leaders in working with families. From many different backgrounds and disciplines in this room, throughout this weekend, is a wealth of knowledge based on practical experience. All of you can tell horror stories of your best efforts blocked by short-sighted policies and narrow bureaucracies. I hope in the next couple of days we can learn from each other and forge new ways to work together, create that new vocabulary and then describe the policies that are really needed.

We need to take the risks this weekend in stripping away the barriers created by the narrow and rigid definitions. The elements of a successful "Re-Union" are here in this room. Because you represent all the disciplines that interact with families in Tennessee, and all the institutions that are seeking to serve families in our state, we have a great opportunity to work collaboratively now, and in the future, to solve these problems.

We recognize a healthy community when we see it. A healthy community provides:

• Access to health care for families;
• Adequate clothing, shelter and good nutrition;
• Quality child care for all families who need it and community support for family development and parent education
• Cultural, social, and religious activities for all family members;
• Employers who value and support their workers as family members;
• Families and schools working together to educate children;
• Services to support the entire family and a legal system which enhances family responsibility and provides a safe environment;
• Networks of friends to share each parent's interest in child rearing and support for strong families through the generations and extended.

We also know what society must offer:

• Economic policies which respect the role of parents;
• A shared sense of responsibility for the well being of all children;
• Psychological and financial rewards for professionals in nurturing fields such as teaching and counseling;
• Reasons for families to be optimistic and confident about their children's future;
• An education that enhances the intellectual growth of every member of society at every age;
• Messages communicated by entertainment -- by television, movies and music -- that support healthy families and their devotion to children;
• Policies related to housing, assistance and social services designed to encourage family cohesion and strength;
• Attitudes that celebrate concern, compassion, and community involvement and discourage violence, division, and abuse;
• Opportunities and choices for every individual.

These things are not impossible. This conference is a start. An effort to change our thinking and begin this work.

We will meet in this large group and in smaller working groups. We will hear from those whose thinking already is sparking a revolution. And, we will hear from three Tennessee families who provide inspiration, hope, and an urgent message for change.

-- Mary Baldwin, at age 34, is a single, working mother of seven children. She and her children live in Memphis. By every classification, they are poor and yet, her children spoke of their concern for those who are in even greater need: the homeless. They spoke of what makes their family work in a neighborhood that feeds fear more than hope. We'll hear from them. They're with us here this weekend.

-- Corey and Gloria Foster live in Maryville with their two young children, struggling with unemployment in a tight job market and working together to build their marriage and their life independent of their parents. Their daughter, Erica, was born before they were married and the couple provides wise advice for their peers and for policy makers. Gloria and Corey are here as well.

-- Gene and Marsha Forehand are the parents of three children. They live here in Nashville. Gene works days as a school teacher and nights in telemarketing; he must, the night job is the one that provides health insurance. His absence from the family creates stresses the entire family is facing together.

I'm grateful to these families for sharing their lives and their concerns with me and with you. I am grateful for their honesty, their candor, their openness and willingness to help us understand the difficult problems they face. I am honored that Mary and Gloria and Corey and Mary's children are here with us this weekend.

Our work is clear:

• To define the issues confronting American families in a way that makes them clear to all who deal with them;
• To examine the barriers and the catalysts to healthy family life within families, within communities and within our society;
• To begin a conversation among families, community leaders and policy makers which will enable all of us to more effectively meet the needs of families; and
• To plan for the future, so that we can help create communities and ultimately the society that will for this generation and those to come, support family life.

I am convinced that this Family Reunion is the beginning of a process that will lead to really positive change. A beginning, not an end. Our work together will not stop when this conference ends on Sunday. I look forward to learning your opinions and ideas not only when we meet in the concluding session tomorrow and when you complete your conference evaluation, but also in the days and months ahead as we together work to apply this new vocabulary to the task of crafting more effective policies.

In this fragmented society, if we really believe in the strength of our families, we must find ways to keep them together; to reunite each family member with the others, across generations; to reunite each family with the community in which the family lives; to reunite each family with our society. This is about their future and about our future as a nation.