That the Great Recession could then bring hope for a major recalibration \u201d\u201d a resetting of all the clocks \u201d\u201d is not surprising. Unfortunately, though, it\u2019s not happening in any meaningful way. The poor are getting poorer, and the rich, despite stock-market setbacks, are still comparatively rich. The most devastating losses in household wealth over the past two years have been suffered by the middle class. And families are fraying at the seams. The Pew poll showed nearly half of people who had been unemployed for more than six months saying their family relationships had become strained, and a New York Times\/CBS poll of unemployed adults last winter found about 40 percent saying they believed their joblessness was causing behavioral change in their children.<\/p>\n
Parents who have jobs are working longer hours than ever. Mothers are taking shorter maternity leaves. The birth rate is on the decline. The divorce rate is declining, too \u201d\u201d it\u2019s too expensive for people to break up their households \u201d\u201d but that\u2019s not necessarily a family-friendly thing, as a report from the Council on Contemporary Families noted in April: \u201cWe know from the experience of the Great Depression of the 1930s that divorce rates can fall while family conflict and domestic violence rates rise.\u201d\u009d<\/p>\n
What came out of the combined experience of the Great Depression and World War II \u201d\u201d broad measures of quality-of-life equalization like a sharply progressive tax policy with rates on the wealthy unimaginable today, the G.I. Bill, government-subsidized home mortgages for veterans \u201d\u201d permitted the easier, less-frenzied middle class family life that older Americans remember from the 1950s and \u201960s and that younger Americans dream of. In other words, it wasn\u2019t individual families that reformed themselves after the crucible of the Depression. It was our society.<\/p>\n