These statistics, of course, represented only the peak of a slow‐
growing iceberg of childhood misery in our country. It took three
decades to create the crisis of youth we have, thirty years in which—
while the teenage population remained for the most part relatively
stable—arrests for violent crime among teenagers increased sixfold,
from 16,000 to over 96,000. During these same years teen suicide
climbed more than 200 percent to become the second leading cause
of adolescent deaths. Average SAT scores plummeted 80 points; and
the number of high school students achieving a verbal SAT score of
700 or higher fell 60 percent. The number of unmarried teenage
mothers tripled, from fifteen per one thousand in 1960 to forty-five
per one thousand in 1990.

Most disturbing, serious indications of social pathology were
cropping up among children. During the late 1980s, psychologists
noted previously unheard-of symptoms of mental psychosis in small
children. Preschoolers were committing murders. In 1991, 17,772
offenses could be traced to children under ten, including murder,
rape, robbery, car theft, aggravated assault, arson, burglary, and
11,663 thefts. ²

Taking all this into account, it is hardly surprising that the most
hotly debated subject of the 1992 presidential campaign turned out
to be sources of moral impoverishment in our youth. Nor is it sur-
prising that a volatile public debate ensued when, in a May 1992
campaign speech, then Vice President Dan Quayle charged that the
increasing desperation of inner-city youth had its roots in a crisis of
family values encouraged by the glorification of single-parent
lifestyles in popular culture. Television shows such as Murphy Brown,
Quayle claimed, might pretend that children didn't need fathers. But
the poorest and most disorderly American neighborhoods were
places where fathers had completely disappeared, and boys gleaned
models of manhood from gang leaders.

As a campaign gesture, it turned out highly impolitic for Quayle
to have picked on Murphy Brown, America's favorite situation com-
edy character. But as the opening volley in an honest public reap-
praisal of our most serious social problems, it was a perfect
attention-getter. No other icon of popular culture so perfectly
reflected the casual attitude toward single parenthood that had dom-
inated the American mind-set for more than a quarter of a century.
Indeed, Murphy Brown had been embraced by a cultural elite that

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