Bethel Conference on the Family

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The White House Conference on Families will be based on testimony received from all the states. Information gathered from this region will become part of the positioned paper to present and be presented at the National Conference in Los Angeles in April. The last one will be sending nine delegates to that national conference. The task of the delegates will be to identify the major problems and issues facing American families and make recommendations to Congress and the President for policies, programs, and strategies that will help strengthen families and help deal with family problems and concerns. A state conference will be held prior to the National Conference, and all interested persons are encouraged to attend that state conference to be held in Anchorage on March 28th and 29th. At that time, the major concerns of each region will be identified and prioritized. Luckily, Jackie Ruman and Pat Barker are organizing testimony so that we can be sure that the concerns of the people of this region will be addressed. Tonight, we're presenting a panel discussion on this issue, along with testimony from

residents of the Bethel area. Our panelists this evening are Phyllis Marle, Diane Carpenter, and Daniel Bill. Phyllis, I understand that the first problem that has to be addressed is a question of definition. What exactly is a family? Well, this really is a problem because in every culture in the world, there is a different idea of what constitutes a family. There are also, in this country, there's also a legal definition of who constitutes your family. Every place in the world, people who are related to defines how you are going to deal with certain people. For example, in this area, traditionally, how you are related to someone defined whether you could or couldn't marry them, whether you could joke around with them, whether you had to respect them, and couldn't joke around with them, and who you supported and who supported you. Now, the network of relatives here is very large. It's much larger than a nuclear family. It's an extended family.

What happens when the legal definition of a family, which is based on only on who you're related to by blood or marriage, conflicts with the cultural definition of a family? For example, legally, all of your cousins are related to you in the same way. All of the children of your parents, brothers, and sisters. But here are some of your legal cousins are related to as brothers and sisters, and are called by the same name as brothers and sisters. Adoption also comes into play. Do you acknowledge someone as you're legally adopted air? The culture accepts the adopted status of a child, but legally, it's not accepted. You may also have, you may also have problems in deciding who legally is responsible for a child. For example, if you're a single parent and you have a child, the law may not want to give custody to you. But here, the child may actually be raised by your parents, your parents, other relatives,

although the parent may be single. I'm sure we're all aware that life has become increasingly complex in the last decade. Diane, what are some of the pressures that American families will be facing as we go into the 1980s? Well, it's evident, Corey, for many kinds of statistics that families today are undergoing to be expressed and also of changing in very radical ways, as far as they were redefining to consider what we even call a family. Most people today are basing their life decisions on other factors than just family tradition. They're having smaller families. They're living in ways that their families did not live in. And of course, when you have more choices, you also have more pressure on you and more confusion, more stress in making decisions when you have additional choices.

Our one change is occurring is that families are losing more and more their power. They're losing power to social services, to health care, to educational institutions, and some of these institutions, for better or for worse, have taken away some of the families most important roles as caregivers, as teachers, and as providing emotional support. And also our values under attack, it's a very hard day for a family to pass on its values to its children, television, peer pressure, and schools are becoming more important than the values of the families stronger in shaping the way a child will develop. And many parents are doing frustrating because they can neither influence nor control these institutions. One of the major problems facing families is the economic pressures of the past decade.

And these pressure don't seem to be moderating. Inflation, high energy costs, unemployment, and housing shortages had made it very difficult for family members to meet each other's needs. And they've caused additional stress. Women are returning to work to share and providing family income. Today, in fact, over half the women with children under 18 are in the labor force. But the needs of these women have not been addressed by society. Poverty is still a major issue, even with both partners working, and child abuse, family violence, and alcohol and drug problems have been shown to be more common where they're associated with poverty. In 1960, people were predicting the death of the family, but over the past ten years, there's been a new understanding of how important the family unit really is. And that it is the basis of American society.

But families must change in order to deal with these stressors. For example, women who work outside the home must have an equal share of the decision-making of the family and the economic decisions. They need to have child care that's adequate to meet their needs, and they need to have the household charge and family in childcare need to be shared if the wife is no longer a homemaker. Families aren't perfect, but they do seem to be the best alternative we have to deal with our support needs. And America, incidentally, is the only major industrial society that does not have a formal national family policy. And if this conference can help to develop a formal policy that will support the family, I think it will be well worthwhile.

Now, these problems that you've brought up are things that affect the daily lives of millions of people. Dan, can you discuss where it just moves with the effect that these problems have on the health and the functioning of family members, and just on the stability of family life in general? Well, for new people, especially that over the centuries, they have survived through support systems, and even before the listeners came, they supported each other in their daily survival. And I think the important thing that we have to focus on is to support families in terms of parents supporting parents, or the parents being supported by vice versa, by counseling parents, by schools and churches and other agencies. And basically, you come, because we'll take those ideas that have worked for Eskimos and we're enforcing those ideas.

A lot of problems can be solved by supporting families, especially in communities that don't have resources like Anchorage. We often forget that the most important resource we have available is support in the usual support to each other. And if we continue to give that support, I think a lot of problems, which results of ideas coming in, instead of will enforcing those ideas that have worked can be solved. Thank you, Dan. We've asked a number of residents of the Bethel area to give their opinions on the needs of families in this region, and their recommendations. Our time will only permit touching on some of these issues,

but we hope that their comments will stimulate your thinking and encourage you to send in your testimony for the state conference. I'll ask you to each of the members of the audience to just introduce themselves briefly before they give their testimony. I'm Blair Hippel, I'm a medical social worker in the area. I work at the hospital. It sort of ties in with what Daniel just got finished talking about as far as supporting people. The testimony I like to give, except I have to focus more towards the elderly or the disabled individuals. Frequently, we are still separating the individual from the family to become disabled, and it's difficult to provide care for them in their own home. This, for example, I go into a pioneer home. I need to meet a care facility or a skill nursing home, or a skill nursing care. Families that I've contacted express the wish that they would like to continue caring for the family member,

but a lot of times in a dilemma is to how they're going to accomplish them. And, of course, the individual who is disabled would like very much to be able to stay close to their own families. I think we need to support this strength. We need that we have those for home health care, more readily available, home health care services, as well as improved home-maker services. And besides that, availability of special equipment for the home that will allow the family and individual to care for themselves, or himself or herself within the household. Recommendation, I'd like to have considered, would be that, and a program be implemented for the individual to stay in the home or in the village.

And one of the possible final, one of the solutions might be to have a small household setting outside the home, but in the village, like a small pioneer home. My name's Joe Breden, and the treatment director for the Phillips Alcohol Treatment Center. And we feel that one of the biggest problems that families are having is the problem of alcohol abuse and alcoholism, being that it affects the total family, and as was mentioned, the families here are larger. They're extended families, cousins, knuckles, and ants all come into the immediate family. And because of this larger amounts of people in the families, the alcoholism is real difficult to deal with. And what we're recommending is that more community programs be sponsored as alternatives for the alcohol abuse,

that the community take more interest in the community's own problems, and that they provide the alternatives themselves for those times when people are most likely to abuse alcohol and other drugs, because they grow into child abuse, physical abuse, beatings, and so forth. All of these problems relate it directly to the abuse of alcohol. And that's the number one problem as we see it. My name is Nancy Bill, I'm health educator for YKHC. I like to talk about health issues facing families in this area. One thing that Diane touched upon is institutions and the impact it has on families. I feel that schools have, is an institution that has affected the people in this area.

Because of the changing lifestyle, the change of diets, you begin to see a lot of health problems as a result of changing a diet from high protein to refined foods. Today, you begin to see all kinds of health problems because of the changing lifestyles. So I feel my recommendation is that you need to have more control over what is tied in the schools in the area of health needs that is localized for this area. I'm George Bellman, a pediatrician in the area. My acquaintance with families comes through my relationship with children. As I see them in the office and in the hospital, their fellow IC families as a very child-centered unit in our society, and often view the stability of the family in reference to how children are affected by the stability of that unit. I think in keeping and in following what Diane Carpenter mentioned, there's a lot of fragmentation in our society, which is breaking and pulling apart this unit.

And anything that we can do to bring back a togetherness and put more strength back into the family will be a good thing. I believe also that one thing that's pulling the family apart in our society is a lack of economic security. And in the past, we have tended to try to solve these insecurities by just giving handouts. And it appears that this is just further fragmenting the family by doing this. So I think that one thing that the government and local communities can do is to somehow develop ways that the family can be more economically sound and secure, providing jobs for wage earners in the family. And this may be something that local native corporations may want to give attention to, how their funds can be used in our local area to provide more jobs for family wage earners.

My name is Alice Wardlow and I'm a parent of three children. I think the culture is changing so fast, it's affecting our nuclear unit families. There are no longer grandparents, uncles, and participating in a child reary. Parents are losing control over their children. Grandparents are feeling left out there because they no longer participate in this. And I would like to recommend that they be parenting classes using our senior citizens as resource people because they have a lot of knowledge and child rearing. And I think we can combine the always of raising the children and combining with the new ways. Also, there will be more support system for parents and also more counseling for the parents. I'm near your blue skin and I'm also a parent and I work for a social service agency.

And my contact is with families from zero to 78. And there's three areas that I'd like to kind of cover that are needed. And one like Jose says is alcohol is awareness. It's the number one thing that all of our violent crimes are related to alcohol. And most of our child abuse cases are derived from alcohol. We need more programs that deal with alcohol in the villages and with alcoholic parents or parents. And if the child wants to stay at home, you know, maybe work with the parents and the child that are willing to stay with the parent. That's one of the programs.

Although it's nutritional awareness, like Nancy was saying, we have so many of our parents that are coming in from you big foods to the refined foods. What are sweets doing to our kids? You know, we have a lot of hyperkinetic kids around in this area. And the more sweets you give them, the more hyper they get, you know, and some of the parents aren't aware of what sugar does to kids. The other is parenting programs for parents or teenagers or maybe high school age children or teenagers on how to deal with kids, you know, and their problems. Because like we keep on hearing is that the only way of raising children is not happening anymore. It's not working. We need to learn how to deal with our kids and their problems. My name is Vicki Malone and I'm director of BSS, which has two private child care centers in Bethel.

The problem that I'd like to talk to the group about is the problem of meeting the child care needs of young children, both in this state, this community, in this country. Right now, there are several smaller communities around Bethel that are trying to organize child care centers and Bethel has been fortunate enough to have child care centers here for a number of years. All of them throughout the state are floundering pretty badly financially. And so the general problem that I'm talking about is that what Diane addressed, that the family has changed. The largest percentage of families, both parents work in yet this country, is never the economic model has changed. And the country has never really addressed sufficiently the child care needs of young children. We've managed to touch on the needs of low income children in the Head Start programs, which have provided some very excellent models for child care, but we really haven't done anything to address the needs of the sort of the middle class working family. And those children have social, emotional, intellectual and physical medical needs that should be addressed.

I think the goal would be to make programs affordable to middle class parents and to make them have a quality and an environment in which we as parents would like to have our children placed. My recommendation is that the federal government go ahead and develop some method of supporting states so that they can develop better child care programs. They always get bogged down when they start to talk about standards. I would like to see the federal government allocate some money and let the states decide what is the best child care regulations that their state would like to see past. Other than the whole nation fighting over the regulations, let it be flexible enough that communities and states can participate in developing their own regulations. My name is Jackie Ruhman, and I'm director of Tundra Women's Coalition, the Resource Center and Crisis Shelter. And the problem I'd like to speak to is the problem of low cost housing, of transitional housing for women who for some reason need to leave their home and need a place for their family that is supportive and that they can afford.

I would like to recommend that the community support a transitional shelter for these women with their families. Also, I would like to recommend that we look into the problem of a shortage of low cost housing. I'd like to stress that these are only a few ideas that members of the audience have brought up to be hopeful stimuli you're thinking about family concerns. As this testimony has been given, Pat Barker has been making some notes for us, and I'd like to ask her now to give us a brief summary of some of the ideas that have come up in this testimony. On these sheets, I've attempted to list the things that our speakers have mentioned. I'll just go through them fairly quickly, but some of the problems which were brought up are the changing values we find in society.

The fact that families are losing their power to agencies who are making these decisions for them. The economics of families is becoming more and more difficult for them to deal with. This includes poverty, inflation, high energy costs, and a lack of economic security. A problem mentioned was child abuse which can be related to many different kinds of things. We also find problems of working mothers and the elderly and disabled folks who are taken from their families. Another large problem which covers many different areas is alcohol abuse and alcoholism, and then affecting the poor health of many families and children is again the changing lifestyle and changing diets. I mentioned again was the fact that the culture is changing very fast and this fits in with the changing values which was brought up at the first. Also child care needs of young children are becoming more and more evident, and we find a need in the area for transitional housing for women and families. Some of the recommendations which were made by our people. It was recommended that we support families through counseling and other programs and that we continually give support to families regardless of their problem.

That we keep the elderly and disabled people at home as much as possible and have those programs supported by home health care services or small pioneer homes within communities. We need more community programs as alternatives to alcohol abuse and we need people involved in these programs. More parental control over education and some of the decisions that are made for children. Develop ways to help families be economically secure. Parenting classes were mentioned several times and we could use senior citizens as a resource for these. More alcohol awareness within the community and also an increase in the nutritional awareness within the community and the total area. We need child care that is affordable and high quality with a support base from the government not necessarily in decisions but in some money to help get the program started.

And we also need support for low cost housing. These are a few of the recommendations that were made here today and I think Corey will let you now know what other kinds of things you can do to make recommendations and to make comments on the problems that you see in this area as they are affecting families. Not only your own but everyone's family. Corey? Nice. Okay. Well, that was a stimulating list of problems and recommendations that I know has gotten all of us thinking a little bit more about some of the concerns of families in this area. I know that Diane, you have one more thing that you'd like to add and I think it's very important. I think what we see here is different kinds of needs.

When one way we have things that government can or should do and other things that community members and family members can and should do, they could need to think about strategies. How do we bring about the kinds of improvements and doing with problems that we're looking for? I think that wherever people and communities can get together and do things on their own that this is the way to go. And where there is a role for government that it should be appropriate role and that it should not take over the concerns of the decision making for family members. Thank you. The committee is trying to get as much input as possible from as many people as possible in the short time available. People who are traveling to the villages are collecting testimony. And other committee members are talking to special groups in the Clean Eternal Home, the Senior Citizen Center, and at various bird meetings. You can be heard by calling KYUK right now. There are volunteers on duty to answer your calls and to record your testimony. That number is 543-3131.

If you prefer to send in your statement in writing, send it to Pat Barker at the Cooperative Extension Service and that's Box 556 in Bethel. Or to Jackie Ruman at the Tender Women's Coalition and that's Box 1034 in Bethel. The testimony should be in by February 29th. I'd like to thank our panelists and all our audience members as well as all our listeners for being with us. Thank you. Thank you.

Thank you.