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Quote by Kenneth Keniston

“One current reaction to change in families, for example, is the proposal for more "education for parenthood," on the theory that this training will not only teach specific skills such as how to change diapers or how to play responsively with toddlers, but will raise parents' self-confidence at the same time. The proposed cure, in short, is to reform and educate the people with the problem.”

Quote by Kenneth Keniston

Author

Kenneth Keniston

Kenneth Keniston, born on January 6, 1930, is an individual whose profession and category are unknown. His life story and contributions are not well-documented, and further research is needed to understand his background and achievements. more

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“Parents still have primary responsibility for raising children, but they must have the power to do so in ways consistent with their children's needs and their own values.... We must address ourselves less to the criticism and reform of parents themselves than to the criticism and reform of the institutions that sap their self-esteem and power.”

Way Needs Children Stills Self Values Parent Responsibility Self Esteem Criticism Institutions Esteem Reform Primaries Addresses Consistent Raising Children Sap

Book:All Our Children: The American Family Under Pressure

Source: All Our Children: The American Family Under Pressure

“Within forty years of their arrival in the Plymouth colony, the first white settlers were afraid their children had lost the dedication and religious conviction of the founding generation. Ever since, Americans have looked to the next generation not only with love and solicitude but with a good measure of anxiety, worrying whether they themselves were good parents, fearful that their children would not turn out well.”

Source: All Our Children: The American Family Under Pressure

“Mothers work outside the home for many reasons; one of them is almost always because their families need their income to live up to their standards for their children.”

Needs Children Reason Home Mother Family Standards Economics Work Out Income

Book:All Our Children: The American Family Under Pressure

Source: All Our Children: The American Family Under Pressure

“In the early nineteenth century, the doctrine of self-sufficiency came to apply to families as well as individuals.... The familybecame a special protected place, the repository of tender, pure, and generous feelings (embodied by the mother) and a bulwark and bastion against the raw, competitive, aggressive, and selfish world of commerce (embodied by the father).... In performing this protective task, the good family was to be as self-sufficient as the good man.”

“It is misleading to discuss recent changes in family life without emphasizing the fact that for generations some Americans have had to raise children under particularly appalling pressures. Although much of what is worrying American parents is shared by them all, the most grievous problems are those that especially afflict a large minority--the poor, the nonwhite and, in various ways, the parents of handicapped children.”

Way Children Facts Problem Parent Poor Worry Generations Pressure Raises Various Minorities Family Life Mislead Handicapped

Book:All Our Children: The American Family Under Pressure

Source: All Our Children: The American Family Under Pressure

“Today's parents have little authority over those others with whom they share the task of raising their children. On the contrary,most parents deal with those others from a position of inferiority or helplessness. Teacher, doctors, social workers, or television producers possess more status than most parents.... As a result, the parent today isa maestro trying to conduct an orchestra of players who have never met and who play from a multitude of different scores, each in a notation the conductor cannot read.”

“The myth of the self-sufficient individual and of the self-sufficient, protected, and protective familytells us that those who need help are ultimately inadequate. And it tells us that for a family to need help--or at least to admit it publicly--is to confess failure. Similarly, to give help, however generously, is to acknowledge the inadequacy of the recipients and indirectly to condemn them, to stigmatize them, and even to weaken what impulse they have toward self-sufficiency.”

Needs Giving Self Helping Individual Myth Impulse Acknowledge Sufficient Protected Protective Inadequate Need Help Inadequacy Self Sufficiency Sufficiency Self Sufficient

Author:Kenneth Keniston

“In brief, we have no explicit family policy but instead have a haphazard patchwork of institutions and programs designed mostly under crisis conditions, whether the crisis is national in scope (such as a recession ) or personal (such as a break-up of a particular family).”

Family Break Conditions Policy Particular Broken Program Crisis Institutions Scope Recessions Explicit Haphazard Patchwork

Book:All Our Children: The American Family Under Pressure

Source: All Our Children: The American Family Under Pressure

“Despite the long-term reduction in familial roles and functions, we believe that parents are still the world's greatest experts about the needs of their own children. Virtually any private or public program that supports parents, effectively supports children. This principle of supporting family vitality seems to us preferable to any policy that would have the state provide children directly with what it thinks they need.”

Source: All Our Children: The American Family Under Pressure

“The most important difference between these early American families and our own is that early families constituted economic unitsin which all members, from young children on up, played important productive roles within the household. The prosperity of the whole family depended on how well husband, wife, and children could manage and cultivate the land. Children were essential to this family enterprise from age six or so until their twenties, when they left home.”

Source: All Our Children: The American Family Under Pressure