How Industry Can Do Its Share for American Society

The American family is in trouble. This is obvious. The figures speak for themselves. Not just the divorce rate, but the skyrocketing number of babies being born to unmarried women, 30% in the general population, 62% in the black community; and the exploding percentage of our children being raised in single-parent homes. According to the 1991 figures just released (“Traditional Family Nearly the Exception, Census Finds,” Part A, Aug. 30), almost 50% of American children are growing up without one or both of their parents. In no other society on the face of this planet has the percentage been so high.

Does it make any difference? According to the recent Carnegie study, it makes a huge difference. Children from single-parent homes are statistically much more likely to have problems in school, drop out before graduation, be abused and become abusers, run afoul of the criminal justice system, have serious psychological problems, attempt suicide, get hooked on drugs and alcohol, and, in later life, fail in love and work.

There is no denying we have a problem, a big one.

Some people point their fingers at those of us who work in the entertainment community and say it is our motion pictures and television shows that are the primary cause of the problem. I remain unconvinced. Too often it is true, we have copped out and catered to the lowest common denominator but I think the schools, the government, the churches and the business community must also accept their share of the responsibility.

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But if we producers, writers, directors and actors have not totally caused the problem, I do think there is much we can do to solve it. How?

* Sex: First, in our shows, we can present human sexuality as the beautiful and wholesome facet of the human personality that God made it to be. Sex is special. Important. Significant. It says something: It says, “I belong to you, only to you, forever.”

To perform that act and not mean what it says--to make love casually--without commitment, without deep caring--is to reduce one’s partner to an object. It’s to use and exploit that person.

The temptation for us in the industry is to tell our viewers what they want to hear rather than what they need to hear. What they need to hear is that good things are worth waiting for, that delaying gratification is the test of the maturely loving person, that self-giving rather than self-indulgence is the purpose of the sexual act.

* Relationship: Second, we can illumine and support in our shows those qualities that make marriage work--self-acceptance; realistic expectations; honesty and trust in communication; a readiness to grow, to transcend one’s ego and leave one’s narcissism behind.

Some people enter marriage thinking it a state of guaranteed intimacy. Automatically they think they will live happily ever after. That is an illusion we should not reinforce. The reality is marriage is a state where you struggle for intimacy and that struggle is a rigorous and scary one. The determination to hang in there, to build the relationship one brick at a time, in good times and in bad, in sickness and in health, to give and give and give until it hurts and then some, this is how you become a mature person, learn to love and make a marriage work. Our shows should make that clear.

* Parenting: Third, I think we can illumine and encourage the whole process of parenting. The kids need so much, emotionally as well as physically. It sometimes seems a bottomless pit.

And the pressures on parents are colossal. Economic pressures. Social pressures. Educational pressures. Media pressures. Pressures from the kids’ peers. Single parents have an especially tough time of it. I don’t know how some of them do it.

In our shows, I think we can help parents understand their kids and we can help kids understand their parents. We can help them realize that all relationships are two-way streets, that parents have needs too, that each side must be prepared to learn from the other, to give as well as receive. And we can celebrate the fulfillment that flows from good parenting and unconditionally affirm the selflessness that it entails.

It is not easy to be a good parent. But nothing is more important. The future of American society is in the hands of today’s parents.