Obama family values

Yesterday I reflected on how, during the first Clinton Inaugural, I leaned out the window of my fourth-floor row-house apartment on East Capitol Street on the Hill and watched the helicopter carrying former President and Mrs. Bush take off from the Capitol and rise above our neighborhood. Behind me, sleeping on the futon sofa, was my friend Douglas Coupland, the "Generation X" author, who was crashing with me while in town for Clinton inaugural festivities. And now, we have our first Gen X president.

Take a look at this interesting essay by Joel Kotkin about the Obama family's values. Excerpts:

When it came to family, the last Democratic White House residents - the highly entertaining but also obviously dysfunctional Clintons - embodied persistent conflicts among baby boomers over sex and social roles. Remember Hillary's resentful comments about "baking cookies"?

By contrast, the focused and disciplined Obamas epitomize the aspirations most Americans hold for their own personal lives: caring fathers, strong mothers and an involved extended family.

These ideals may be particularly appealing for Americans under 40, whose support has been instrumental in the president's rise to power. Younger Americans are proving to be more family-oriented, in part because close to half come from divorced homes.

Surveys reveal that people born between 1968 and 1979 place a considerably higher value on family, and a lower value on work, than their baby-boomer counterparts. Women in the former age cohort are actually having more children than their predecessors and, particularly among the college-educated, they appear to be working somewhat less.

And this family-friendly shift is likely to continue throughout the next wave of child-rearers. As Morley Winograd and Michael Hais suggest in their book, Millennial Makeover, the Millennial generation, born after 1983 and twice as numerous as Generation X, also enthusiastically embraces the notion of a strong family.

More:

Yet even if family values are in ascendance, how they are expressed sharply diverges from the norms and attitudes typically associated with the Religious Right. In fact, on a host of issues - including gay rights, interracial dating and stem cell research - millennials trend more toward liberal views than earlier generations, Winograd says.

"They are more tolerant as well as more conventional," he notes. "They follow the social rules - they don't want to be rebellious. They want a basically conventional suburban family life."

Attitudes concerning religion - the other critical part of the "values" issue - reveal a similar fusion of conventionality and pragmatism. Like other Americans, Millennials are far more religiously oriented than their counterparts in other advanced countries. Fully one-fourth of Americans in their 20s and 30s, observes Princeton sociologist Robert Wurthnow, consider themselves "very spiritual," even if they rarely attend church. A 2003 UCLA study found roughly three out of four college students deem their spiritual or religious views important, but most see their (older) professors as largely indifferent to such concerns.

Yet this spiritual orientation does not imply a shift toward any retrograde "moral majority" conservatism. Upward mobility among evangelicals and fundamentalists, as well as the increased racial integration within churches, has lessened the once-glaring gaps between conservative Protestants, particularly in the South, and the rest of American society. This liberalization is particularly acute when it comes to issues like homosexuality and censorship, but also extends to the role of women and the teaching of religion in public schools.

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