The Wisdom of Urie Bronfenbrenner
Learnings from a forgotten, 50 year old talk
Note: I’m not really sure what to say about the House-passed reconciliation bill that hasn’t already been said. There is no reasonable analysis by which it leaves American families (outside of the wealthy) better off; New America’s Aaron Loewenberg has a good summary here. No modest increase to the Child Tax Credit is worth the amount of pain and suffering it will inflict on parents, children, and communities. I can only hope the Senate embraces its role as “the saucer that cools the tea,” because what the House is sending over will scald millions.
When I started The Family Frontier, I joked that if you didn’t know Urie Bronfenbrenner, you would by the time I was finished. Well, here’s the start of that journey.
Before I get to the influential ideas of Bronfenbrenner, let’s talk about the man. Here’s some of the New York Times’ 2005 obituary:
Urie Bronfenbrenner was born in Moscow on April 29, 1917, and was 6 when his family came to the United States. His father, a neuropathologist, got a job at Letchworth Village, an institution for the developmentally disabled in Rockland County, N.Y.
His work there left a lasting impression on Urie, who recalled his father's despair when New York City courts sometimes consigned healthy children to the institution.
...In 1938, Dr. Bronfenbrenner earned a bachelor's degree from Cornell, majoring in music and psychology. He earned a master's in education from Harvard in 1940 and, in 1942, a doctorate in psychology from the University of Michigan. During World War II, he was a psychologist in the Army. After the war, he taught briefly at Michigan before joining the Cornell faculty in 1948.
Testifying before Congress on a proposed antipoverty bill in 1964, Dr. Bronfenbrenner argued that measures to prevent poverty should be directed in particular toward young children. His testimony produced an invitation to tea with the first lady, Lady Bird Johnson, to discuss the early-childhood programs he had seen abroad.
"There was clearly a gleam in Mrs. Johnson's eye and, as she told me on subsequent occasions, this was when her enthusiasm for something like Head Start was kindled," Dr. Bronfenbrenner told The Chicago Sun-Times in 1991.
By all accounts, Bronfenbrenner was one of the good ones, and a devoted family man to boot: he was married for 63 years and had six children.
The most important and lasting idea that Bronfenbrenner brought forth was how multiple forces in a child’s life combine, in a constant dialogue of interactions between a child and those around them, to profoundly shape child development.1 While that sentence may have provoked a shrug from you, it was revolutionary at the time. His “bioecological systems theory” looks something like this:
(By the by, you may also know Bronfenbrenner from perhaps his most famous quote, that “Every child needs at least one adult who is irrationally crazy about him or her.”)
This post, however, isn’t really about child development. It’s about some of Bronfenbrenner’s less remembered arguments about how society and the family should work together. I recently discovered, in trawling the University of Colorado-Denver’s library (yes, I am that guy), a fascinating volume from 1976 entitled The Family - Can It Be Saved? This isn’t a book so much as a compendium of talks from a major symposium of the same name held the year before. Bronfenbrenner was one of the speakers.
Entitled Who Cares for America’s Children?, Bronfenbrenner begins:
It is perhaps characteristic of our culture that discussions about the quality of life in the future are based almost entirely on technologic considerations. How the next generation of Americans will live, we are told, will be determined by the changes in our physical and natural environment. Whatever the predictions, they refer to the altered circumstances under which people will be living, not changes in people themselves. For the most part, our futurologists, scientific or otherwise, do not suggest that the new environment might produce a different kind of person. Our abilities, our character, apparently are expected to remain much the same. I do not share this expectation…
…As I see it, the competence and character of the next generation of Americans will depend … on changes in the human condition, specifically the circumstances in which the next generation of Americans is being raised and developed. I refer to the changes that have been taking place in the structure of the family and its position in society.
Bronfenbrenner then goes on to detail many of those changes, including (recall it was the mid-’70s), substantial rises in single parenthood, crime, the teen death rate, and so on. However, he doesn’t go where you might expect, where many of his contemporaries go: Bronfenbrenner does not blame societal ills on parents. Instead, while he points to “family disorganization” as a key driver of childhood challenges, he emphasizes that:
[T]he forces of disorganization arise primarily not from within the family but from the circumstances in which the family finds itself, and from the way of life that is imposed on it by those circumstances. Specifically, when those circumstances and the way of life they generate undermine relationships of trust and emotional security between family members, when they make it difficult for parents to care for, educate and enjoy their children, when there is no support or recognition from the outside world for one’s role as a parent, and when time spent with one’s family means frustration of career, personal fulfillment and peace of mind, the development of the child is adversely affected.
This, then, is a clarion call for a social and political order that supports the health, vitality, and stability of family life. I appreciate the idea that things go awry when the choices we make as a society inhibit parents from enjoying their children. It’s such a refreshing way of looking at things rather than zooming in on statistics about parental labor force participation; it suggests that the nature of work matters, in an affective sense: what does a parent have left in the tank at the end of the day? Similarly, instead of looking mainly at school readiness outcomes (which, like parental labor force participation rates, surely have a place!), we could ask whether we are needlessly imposing scarcity and precarity and stress on parents which then bleeds over into their relationships with their children.
And indeed, here again Bronfenbrenner zags where you might expect him to zig. Instead of bemoaning the shifting contours of modernity and yearning for an return to the (often imaginary) old ways, he offers that “the critical question thus becomes: Can our social institutions be changed—old ones modified and new ones introduced—so as to rebuild and revitalize the social context that families and children require for their effective function and growth?”
Take child care. Bronfenbrenner has no inherent problem with the idea of external child care—but he contrasts the idea of a child care edifice disconnected from family and community with one where child care is “designed, as it can be, to reinvolve and strengthen the family as the primary and proper agent for making human being human[.]”2
In fact, Bronfenbrenner—again, speaking in 1975, though with depressing relevance for today in terms of how far we still have to go—calls out three “fundamental…basic family support systems” that the U.S. lacks: universal health care for all families with young children; a guaranteed minimum income level for all families with young children3; and a “nationwide program of child care services” for all families with young children.
Bronfenbrenner also highlights three additional areas he thinks worthy of deep attention:
Ways to better support part-time workers: given that flexibility in work hours can often match up well with family needs and parental preferences, yet is often mismatched with the reality of American jobs, Bronfenbrenner brings up the idea of a Fair Part-Time Employment Practices Act, which would “prohibit discrimination in job opportunity, rate of pay, fringe benefits and status for parents who sought or engaged in part-time employment.”4
Enhancements to the status of women: noting the increasing isolation and lack of supports flowing to American mothers and women generally at the time of his talk (this was a few years after Nixon’s veto of the Comprehensive Child Development Act, for instance), Bronfenbrenner offers that “a major route to the rehabilitation of children and youth in American society lies in the enhancement of the status and power of women in all walks of life—in the home as well as on the job”
Work and responsibility: I won’t spend much time on this one because it feels perhaps further afield in today’s context (though perhaps not?), but Bronfenbrenner was a proponent of having children experience and even engage the working world of adults from an early age, not as vocational education but as a way for children to more fully appreciate what their parents are doing during the day and thus helping cultivate mutual understanding and appreciation.
Bronfenbrenner concludes his talk with a rousing appeal to look beyond both fears of communism and rank materialism in order to re-center the family at the societal core:
The future belongs to those nations that are prepared to make and fulfill a primary commitment to their families and their children. For only in this way will it be possible to counteract the alienation, distress and breakdown of a sense of community that follow in the wake of impersonal technology, materialism, urbanization and their unplanned, dehumanizing consequences. As a nation, we have not yet been willing to make that commitment. We have continued to measure the worth of our society, and of other countries as well, by the faceless criterion of the GNP—the gross national product.5 Up until now we continue, in the words of the great American psychologist William James, to “worship the [expletive] goddess Success.”
But today we are being confronted with what for us Americans is an unprecedented, unexpected and almost unnatural prospect: nothing less than the failure of success. With all the suffering this failure will bring, it may have some redeeming consequences. For, along with Watergate and Vietnam, it may help bring us to our senses; it may reawaken us to a concern with fundamental values. Among them, none should be more dear than a renewed commitment to the nation’s children and their families, a commitment to change the institutions that now determine and delimit how children and parents live, or who can obtain health care for his family, a habitable dwelling, an opportunity to spend time with one’s children, or receive help and encouragement from one’s community in the demanding and richly gratifying task of enabling the young to develop into competent and compassionate human beings.
I don’t have a whole lot to add: Bronfenbrenner mic drop.
I do just want to double-underline something in closing: think about how different Bronfenbrenner’s narrative is from the way we talk about families today. He is not leading with a set of technocratic policies about what percentage of income should be going to child care, nor is there a whiff of coercive pronatalism. This is fundamentally a values-laden vision of good, healthy family life, and of all the positive impacts that ripple out from that firm foundation. 50 years after Urie Bronfenbrenner spoke at a symposium on the family in Philadelphia, there is still much the man has to teach us.
We also are gaining an increasingly rich understanding of the ways in which the environment — such as climate change-enhanced hazards around heat and air quality — influence the ecosystem.
This is a topic for another day, but the best child care programs I know -- such as those highlighted in the documentary Make a Circle -- come alongside families and communities as partners in true, deep engagement and relationship, bolstering all involved. I’ll also note it’s a lot easier to run that sort of program in a healthy, well-funded system!
This may sound radical today but actually came very close to being enacted, by Richard Nixon of all people. Developed by Daniel Patrick Moynihan (DPM strikes again!) and certainly imperfect, Nixon’s proposed “Family Assistance Plan” would have provided a guaranteed minimum income for families with dependent children. I’ll also likely do a longer post on that another day, but it’s interesting to me that in some ways the vision and ambition around family policy was meaningfully higher in the late 1960s than it is today.
While not tied to parental status, a version of this idea has been proposed by Democratic Congresspeople in recent years as the Part-Time Workers Bill of Rights Act.
GNP is the OG Gross Domestic Product (GDP), so read them essentially as synonyms; the U.S. switched measures from GNP to GDP in 1991. Bronfenbrenner is also very much channeling Bobby Kennedy’s 1968 University of Kansas speech here: “Yet the gross national product does not allow for the health of our children, the quality of their education or the joy of their play. It does not include the beauty of our poetry or the strength of our marriages, the intelligence of our public debate or the integrity of our public officials. It measures neither our wit nor our courage, neither our wisdom nor our learning, neither our compassion nor our devotion to our country, it measures everything in short, except that which makes life worthwhile. And it can tell us everything about America except why we are proud that we are Americans.”