The good old days are now: what today's families are doing right.

School shootings, the movie American Beauty, and scores of television documentaries have highlighted the deplorable state of the American family. We are painful aware of what families are doing wrong, but who's talking about what our families are doing right?

We're led to believe that the mythical happy family of the past led a life where major problems involved squabbles over the car or Barbie's lack of a prom date. Not so. Never was.

But for some perverse reason we want to enshrine this image of the idealized family and use it as the yardstick against which we measured the health of today's family. Whenever reality is measured against the idealized, reality is going to come out the loser.

"I'm glad I'm not raising kids today" is a familiar refrain from the grandparent generation. Yet when today's younger parents are asked if they would rather be parenting a generation or two ago, they respond with an equally emphatic no. Why the dichotomy?

The family is a product of its time and culture, so it is always changing to meet the challenges of rearing kids in a childhood culture different from that of the parents' own. It's understandable that grandparents throughout history have said, "I'm glad I'm not raising kids today," because they're a culture or two away from the skills needed today.

Cultural shifts demand new attitudes and skills. The skills required to cope with immigration differed dramatically from those of the Great Depression, World War II, and Vietnam.

Today's parents are blessedly free of the stresses of such historic eras, but they face other challenges: drugs, affluence, a sex-and violence-laden media, political and religious divisions and scandals, job insecurity, school shootings, and shifting gender roles. And they're doing a pretty good job of meeting these challenges.

In addition to developing new parenting strategies, today's parents--children of an introspective generation--are more honestly evaluating their own family of origin and devising means of avoiding what they perceive as weaknesses in the parenting they received.

Paradoxically, many fault their parents for the very skills required earlier in maintaining a strong family. Shared parenting is one such example. Today's parents who are critical of their parents' strict role divisions don't realize that if their parents had stepped out of traditional roles, the family would have been ostracized and isolated, the children exposed to censure and ridicule. Surely there were couples who desired reverse roles in earlier eras but sacrificed them for the sake of the children. We can't judge yesterday's parents with today's lenses.

Nonetheless, empathetic or critical, modern parents seem bent on not repeating attitudes and behaviors that influenced their own childhood negatively. We're seeing the same reaction toward schools, church, and other institutions.

One family specialist sees the family in a constant pendulum of parenting styles, so that each generation repeats that of its grandparents. Children of rigidity often become permissive parents whose children swing back to rigidity in parenting. I question suck a sweeping generalization, but we appear to be moving toward a healthier balance between the two.

While the final results of modern-day parenting are not in, there are several obvious positives that vocal family doomsayers ignore. Bent on pointing out what's wrong with today's family, they fail to acknowledge what's right. Such a stance may get viewers and votes but is hardly reassuring to parents who need society's affirmation for what they're doing right.

Let's examine a few of the positives.

Two-parent families

Recent census data show that 71 percent of today's children are being reared in two-parent families. Highlighting this figure, rather than the repeated statistic that one in four children lives in a single-parent home, presents a different perspective.

The irony is that this statistic correlates with that of a hundred years ago, the difference being that single parents then were widowed instead of divorced.

The positive side is that today's mothers are better equipped to parent alone than their equivalents a century ago. They've been in the workplace. They can drive, manage money, and deal with the myriad of red tape that's part of our lives today but was alien to their predecessors.

While it is not easy to juggle job and single parenthood, millions of parents are accomplishing the feat adequately. They aren't forced to put their kids in orphanages or with relatives while they work in the mills or take in laundry, as were widows of yore.

Shared parenting

Among parent educators, this is the most significant change noted in just one generation. Because of changing gender roles--and because of the pain men experienced with emotionally distant fathers--dads are becoming active parents, involved more intimately than just playing with their sons. They recognize that good fathering involves more than baseball and that their daughters need them, too.

Today one finds men attending parenting workshops, unheard of 30 years ago, and instead of being mocked for caring for their children, they are widely respected and often envied by women in more traditional-role marriages.

The same older generations of women who say they're glad they're not rearing kids today express envy at this shared parenting, often adding a statement of gratitude that their grandchildren have caring, involved dads.

Communication

When asked how they compare their marriage and parenting with that of their parents, today's parents are apt to reply that their communication and Conflict resolution techniques are superior.

"My parents went into a prolonged cold war, speaking to each other only through us kids when they couldn't agree," one woman said. "It was frightening. My husband and I have our disagreements--lots of them--but we talk until we work them out. No long, cold silences permitted here."

Many men report that their dad simply walked out the door at the sign of conflict, an acceptable male way of handling unpleasantness in earlier times. This behavior sent the message to a wife that an issue was not to be discussed. In many families issues like money disagreements were never satisfactorily settled.

Today's healthy couples are not content with such behavior. They work toward consensus, partnership, and a balance of power. The highest divorce rate is among couples who do not achieve this balance.

Intimacy

The explosion of books, workshops, and movements like Marriage Encounter indicate the value today's couples place on achieving intimacy over roles in their relationship. A family researcher once studied 26 marriage manuals of the 1950s. He discovered that while most of them carefully spelled out the roles of wives and husbands--cooking, mowing lawns, etc.--only two mentioned relationship and intimacy.

Many of today's couples who rate their parents as good mothers and fathers have observed a loneliness in their parents' marriage once the children leave home, a pattern they don't want to repeat.

Markedly this new generation of parents, born during the sexual revolution, recognizes the fallacy of equating sex with intimacy. In this area, in fact, they have been instrumental in leading the church into an understanding of intimacy that is broader than simply sex and procreation. And they are working hard to ensure that their relationship endures during and after the child-rearing years.

Institutional accountability

While the above shifts take place within families, parenting concerns have also manifested themselves publicly in calls for changes in education, church, the marketplace, and the workplace.

No longer do parents mutely turn children over to the schools. They monitor curriculum, methodology, and environment, forcing districts to adopt open enrollment plans enabling parents to choose schools best suited for their children. The explosion in private and home schooling indicates widespread dissatisfaction with available public education.

Parents are also searching out family-friendly parishes, those with preschools, supervised Sunday nurseries, parenting support groups like MOMS, after-school care, good parochial and CCD education, and active youth ministry. They're willing to step over traditional parish boundaries to find such parishes.

In spite of dire hand-wringing over disaffiliation of boomer Catholics, today's parents make up the majority at most large parishes. These parents are looking for a family spirituality that meets the agendas and needs of their family life. The greatly increased sales of books related to family faith indicate this interest, but they want more than just a rehash of pre-Vatican II devotions.

Evangelical megachurches successfully target today's parents by offering a veritable university of family support systems. One in our neighborhood no longer calls itself a church but a "Family Worship Center."

Today's parents have also become savvy consumers in the marketplace, demanding safer toys, healthier foods, and more wholesome video games, television, and activities for children. Modern advertising, aware of this trend, makes a direct appeal to these parents by promoting the safety and wholesomeness of its products.

In the workplace, we find parents turning down promotions if the new job carries a negative impact on the family. In the spring of 2001 the Secretary of the Army issued the startling command that, unless there's a national emergency, future transfers of soldiers take place in the summer so the children's schooling not be interrupted. He explained that highly trained soldiers are leaving the service in droves because of family concerns, adding that many of these stresses can be minimized if the Army takes some simple steps like eliminating year-round transfers.

Corporations and businesses are likewise becoming more sensitive to family needs, recognizing that this will allow them to retain loyal and productive workers.

Thus, in just one generation, we have seen the emergence of flex time so parents can stay home with a sick child or attend an important school event, telecommuting, shared jobs, maternity leave, and flexible work hours--all considered laughable in earlier times.

These institutional shifts didn't just happen but are the result of today's parents' determination to have a voice in the institutions set up to serve them. The helpless acceptance of past parents has given way to a generation of parents who exhibit responsibility for assuming some control over cultural impacts on family life.

Who can argue that this is anything but positive?

In spite of these obvious strides in healthy family life, the media, older generations, and, yes, even churches, continue to portray today's family as pathological. Admittedly, we have families with severe problems and we have problem families, but we've always had them. The high number of elderly who admit to physical, emotional, and sexual abuse in childhood attests to this well-concealed fact.

Alcoholism, mental illness, spouse abuse, and even tuberculosis were carefully hidden away in those "good" families of the past--ironically the families we now idealize and hope to reproduce.

Returning to such good old days is a foolish wish, captured in the remark of a disgruntled politician, "To heck with the future. Let's get on with the past."

Today's parents don't want to get on with the past. They want to enjoy the present with their families while preparing children to face the challenges of their future. Thus it has always been and will be in strong families. They're glad they're raising their kids today, just as their parents were glad a generation ago when the demise of the family was also predicted.

It seems to be God's plan, as Carl Sandburg understood when he wrote, "A baby is God's idea that the world should go on."