So How's the Family?. Arlie Russell Hochschild
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1960: married, working, and involved in the community. But life for their lower-class counterparts had greatly changed. The lower-class mother who was likely to be married in 1960 was very likely to be single in 2010. Three percent of upper-class children but 22 percent of lower-class ones in 2010 lived with their single moms.34 Women in the bottom 20 percent have become less likely to go to church, to volunteer in their schools or communities, to trust their neighbors, or to say they were happy than were their counterparts in 1960. Men have come to work shorter hours. Unemployed men passed up low-wage jobs and became absent to their children. In their new leisure, they did not take classes, do things with their kids, or help around the home. Instead, white men in the bottom 30 percent did two things more than either their counterparts of 1960 or their upscale contemporaries of 2010: they slept longer, and watched more television.
Although such men say they want to work hard and have strong families, Murray argues that they have lost the moral values they would need to achieve those ends. But that leads us to wonder why the bottom fifth in low-gap societies such as Norway and Finland do not fit this picture of the slacker. And we can wonder why even the rich appear to suffer when they become so much richer than the poor. In 2010, Murray found that the poorest 20 percent had come to distrust other people more, and to feel less supported and less happy than their counterparts from when America was a more equal society. But so, too, did people at the top.35 In the General Social Survey data Murray uses, rich as well as poor were asked, “Would you say that most of the time people try to be helpful, or that they are mostly just looking out for themselves?” “Do you think most people would try to take advantage of you if they got a chance, or would they try to be fair?” “Generally speaking, would you say that people can be trusted or that you can’t be too careful in dealing with people?” In their answers, both rich and poor were more distrustful in the more unequal America of 2010 than in the more equal era of 1960. When trust breaks down, Murray observes, it does so “across the board.”36
What Wilkerson and Pickett discovered in their cross-national survey, Murray confirmed for prime-age whites in America. While the two studies tell the same story, they propose very different remedies. The authors of the Spirit Level call on governments to do the progressive “Sven” thing and develop policies to reduce the troubling class gap. The author of Coming Apart accepts the widened class gap, rejects government solutions, and urges rich kids to get to know poor kids and to join the conservative Heritage Foundation.37
Missing from both accounts is the deeper emotional story of the prime-age, blue-collar man. Shorn of his way of life, at the bottom of the heap in the job and marriage markets, he has quietly sunk into a dead-end crisis. His sleep and his television watching suggest less a loss of morals than a loss of morale. What is he watching on television? Ads for high-end vacations, scuba diving in Belize, mountain climbing in Switzerland, and whizzing through the Arizona desert in a luxury car. The rich often isolate themselves from the poor, but the poor tune in on the lifestyles of the rich every day.
Unable to support a family on his own wage as his father and grandfather did, the blue-collar man finds himself at the bottom in a high-gap society. This descent is evocative of a story Valerie Walkerdine and Luis Jiminez describe in their book Gender, Work and Community after De-Industrialization, in which the honor, pride, and identity of men evaporated when iron and steel left a small town in southern Wales. They describe men in this former mining town in a form of “collective grief,” which passed from man to woman and father to son.38
The engines of much of this are American multinational companies that, faced with new competition for market share, have off-shored their assembly lines to cheaper labor pools in Mexico, China, and India.39 That is the U.S. poor man’s new competition. This economic shift has hit him harder—and earlier—than the middle-class Americans for whom this frightening trend is hitting now.40 Indeed, the blue-collar man has taken the hit for everyone else in America—and so has his family.
THE DEREGULATION EFFECT
If a freer market is the answer, what policies would enhance it, and what impact would they have on the family? Deregulation, as those who link the free-market with family values hold, encourages business, creates jobs, raises the national GDP and the average family’s income, and so strengthens families. Deregulation, the argument goes, helps families. But such a claim bears a closer look.
We can look at the television commercials for high-sugar, high-fat, high-salt foods—Cokes, candy bars, and chips—that target children and are unregulated in the United States. In her book Born to Buy, Juliet Schor documents the link between the troubles of American children and the “child industry,” as she calls it, based on the wide and increasing exposure of American children to advertising.41 Most advertising is still delivered to children through television, although television and the Internet are merging into a whole new interactive—and marketing—experience for youth. By the age of 6 years, Schor observes, the American child’s viewing time is just over two hours a day, and for 8- to 13-year-olds it rises to three and a half hours a day; a fifth of television air time is devoted to commercials.42 One study found that American children aged 3 to 5 years spent more time watching television (14 hours a week) than being in school (12 hours and 5 minutes), playing outdoors (37 minutes), or doing anything other than sleep.43 In 2004, the total advertising and marketing expenditures directed at children reached $15 billion.44 Such ads are aimed at children’s own piggy banks. Children aged 4 to 12 spent $30 billion of their own money in 2002, and a full third of that went for candy, soft drinks, and other products high in fat and sugar.45
Researchers have linked such ads to the rise in childhood obesity,46 which has, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, quadrupled for 6- to 11-year-olds and tripled for 2- to 5-year-olds since 1970.47 Children grow obese mainly through what they eat, of course; what has changed since 1970 includes the rise of convenience foods at home, restaurant dining, and scheduled passive pursuits, and the decline in school recess time and free roaming around the neighborhoods. But the main thing that changed is the increase in money invested in television and Internet advertisements for junk food. And on such child-targeted ads, there is no regulation.
Indeed, the junk food industry has aggressively pursued many strategies to get children to buy its products. Some companies enlist children to serve as “brand representatives” to other children. Companies fund school books—Amazon.com sells at least forty of them—that teach math and science using branded foods: the M&M’s Brand Counting Book or the Kellogg’s Froot Loops! Counting Fun Book.48 Some ads for junk food make it “cool” to be oppositional and defy parental advice about healthy eating. The restaurant and beverage companies founded and fund the Center for Consumer Freedom, which ridicules public health authorities who link obesity to disease and opposes efforts to curb childhood obesity as “anti-freedom.”49
With cuts in public funding, cash-strapped U.S. public school districts increasingly accept money in return for giving for-profit companies the right to place ads on public school buses and to create programming—including an ad for Coke—shown on Channel One television during compulsory assemblies at school. Nine states now allow ads on the outside of school buses, and some schools allow ads inside them.50 In return for corporate money, some school boards now also permit district school buses to carry radios that play ads. Other cash-strapped schools are exploring corporate sponsorship of school bands, sports teams, and the general fund. Some public schools have accepted corporate money to develop curricula such as the American Coal Foundation’s “The United States of Energy,” a fourth-grade curriculum favorable to coal, and Shell’s “Energize your Future” curriculum, which imagines the oil industry as a leader in alternative fuel production.51 Kohl’s department store’s “charitable” campaign offered $500,000 to the twenty schools with the most votes on Facebook; all voters were then placed on a Kohl’s promotional mailing list.52 As scholars at the National Education Policy Center argue, such curricula are prompted by a desire to boost company brands, not help kids think.53
Some nations permit more child-targeted advertising than others. One scholar, who analyzed twenty hours of commercial television aimed at children under the age of 12 in twelve