Better to balance family and career than postpone the former to nurture the latter.
By SHMULEY BOTEACHthe palins 224.88 ap(photo credit: AP)
It took the pregnancy of a 17-year-old from Alaska to finally thrust the American family onto the political stage. Until now, you could be forgiven for believing that all America's problems could be solved with cash: high gas prices, a mortgage meltdown, unaffordable health care. You would have been shocked to discover that, in reality, America is experiencing not a material but a spiritual crisis: rampant divorce, uninspired teens, and lonely men and women. It's a land where, for the first time, single women outnumber married women and where three-quarters of all divorces are initiated by wives giving up on their husbands. A land where parents raise children with the superficial surrogates of TVs and iPods.
Last week an appearance of mine on Oprah's TV show brought hundreds of desperate people writing about their devastated personal lives. There was the woman who left her husband who drinks himself into a nightly stupor. There was the divorced man whose ex-wife turned the children against him and won't even return his phone calls. And there was the desperate teenager writing that her family has become so dysfunctional - parents at each other's throats, an older sister who lets her boyfriend feel her up in front of the younger siblings - that she is thinking of running away.
Meet the new American poor. They have food on their plates but little substance in their lives. They have a roof over their heads, but the chambers of their hearts are barren. They have some financial security but little emotional stability.
BARACK OBAMA's life was changed forever when his father abandoned his family, leaving his mother to raise him alone. John McCain's first marriage failed after he returned home from five and a half brutal years as a POW. And now we have the challenges facing the family of Gov. Sarah Palin, with a young daughter forced to skip essential stages of childhood and become a mom.
Forty years ago, in a campaign lasting only 82 days, Bobby Kennedy moved the nation by highlighting its destitute children. History will not soon forget his visit to the Lakota Sioux Indian reservation in Pine Ridge, South Dakota, where one-third of the teenagers were committing suicide out of despair, nor the tears that rolled down his cheeks as he discussed his visit to the Mississippi delta, where he found a two-year-old black girl whose face was disfigured by rat bites.
Which candidate will today highlight America's new poor? Who will make it his business to reduce America's divorce rate by half? Who will heal the pandemic of teen sexuality which is so harmful not only because of the possibility of sexually transmitted disease or an unexpected pregnancy, but because teenagers are simply not equipped to work through the deep emotions which sex evokes. Sex is the most potent human impulse, as overpowering as it is pleasurable. Do we really think that those in a rickety boat should be exposed to such a storm?
A study by the Heritage Foundation, based on the National Longitudinal Survey of Adolescent Health, links teen depression and even suicide to teen sexuality. About 25 percent of sexually active girls say they are depressed all, most or a lot of the time, while only 8% of girls who are not sexually active feel the same. And do teenagers really need the drama that comes from sex at a time when they are still in their formative years and need to focus on study?
IMAGINE THE example for the rest of the nation if our presidential candidates demonstrated, amid the biggest contest of their lives, that their families are still their first priority. Sen. Obama and Gov. Palin, both of whom have young children, should emulate the example set by Joseph Lieberman in the 2000 race, when he refused to campaign on the Sabbath and instead stayed home with his family. Parenting is not a responsibility that can be put on hold for months. Our candidates would lose no votes if they showed the nation that their families matter at least as much as the White House.
The vast majority of teenage girls who lose their virginity do so out of pressure from boyfriends. But when daughters are close to their parents - especially their fathers - they are lent a significant immunity to these pressures. They are not desperate for a boy's affection, and can say no because they already have the validation of a man in their life. In this sense, Bristol Palin's pregnancy is something that should cause her parents to reflect on how they can better balance professional and parenting obligations, even as they live in the public eye.
But this does not mean Sarah Palin should drop her professional aspirations, and it has been particularly unhelpful to see so many vicious attacks against Alaska's first female governor for accepting the vice presidential nod after having just had a baby. What would we prefer? Women who postpone having children to nurse their careers? Women who make the mistake that men have made for thousands of years, believing that fulfillment is found in money, power and fame rather than family, commitment and children?
Our daughters need more women like Sarah Palin, Hillary Clinton and Katie Couric, who balance being mothers and succeeding in their careers, to negate the toxic message that success comes from developing one's body rather than one's mind - the message promulgated by the likes of Paris Hilton. Sarah Palin has a crib in the governor's office and often breast-feeds her special-needs baby while at work. What a powerful challenge to the many misguided men who are heroes to everyone except the most important constituency of all: their own children.
The writer hosts a daily US national radio show on Oprah and Friends. His upcoming book is The Eros Effect.
www.shmuley.com
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