Why do American parents put up with the sorriest family support of any Western industrial nation -- no paid parental leave, guaranteed child care or health insurance; no family allowance; none of the programs common in other countries? And what if they stopped putting up with it and formed a 62 million-strong parents' movement to demand more support for child rearing? That's the premise of Sylvia Ann Hewlett and Cornel West's new book, "The War Against Parents: What We Can Do for America's Beleaguered Moms and Dads." A parents' voting bloc, West and Hewlett contend, could span the fault lines of American politics -- race, class, gender, geography -- and win programs that would ease the strains on families today. "The War Against Parents" is a nonpartisan jeremiad intended to break the ideological stalemate that West and Hewlett believe has blocked pro-family reform for three decades. There's something for everyone here, because they're trying to craft a big-tent family agenda. Being good liberals, they blame the usual suspects for the suffering of the American family: corporate downsizing, declining wages and government cutbacks, all of which they believe have eroded the social fabric that used to support families. But they also lend a sympathetic ear to conservative complaints -- about feminists who choose careers over motherhood and, later, sperm donors over fathers, bureaucrats who have built a foster care empire on exaggerated claims of child abuse, the cynical media that depicts parents as either oafs or monsters. Theirs is a dark, dysfunctional America of selfish feminists and besieged working-class moms, evil corporate moguls and heroic downsized dads, television constantly beaming anti-parent propaganda into unhappy homes across the land -- Beavis telling Butt-head, "Your mother is a slut" -- and neglected children everywhere. But the something-for-everybody solution they craft to address these problems is muddled, self-contradictory and ultimately unconvincing. First, a confession: These are my people -- good, left-leaning liberals with a contrarian, communitarian streak -- and my outsized disappointment with the book reflects a tribal frustration at the limits of contemporary liberalism to achieve crucial social reform. Liberalism faltered when it became a laundry list of gripes, with little to inspire voters to action. West and Hewlett's answer is to add conservative gripes, resulting in a longer list of grievances and requiring a sweeping social agenda that will no doubt accomplish their aim of uniting many liberals and conservatives -- in alarm and opposition. Hewlett and West have been at this work for a long time, and theirs is a potentially interesting collaboration. Hewlett is a mainstream Democrat who traces her moment of truth on family policy to the harrowing experience of being pregnant with twins and working frantically as a tenure-track economics professor at Barnard College in the 1970s, and miscarrying her babies in the process. She was denied tenure anyway, and she bitterly remembers faculty feminists as among the most resistant to her efforts to develop family-friendly policies at the university. Her 1985 book "A Lesser Life: The Myth of Women's Liberation" harshly and often correctly attacked feminism for failing to defend women as mothers as it attempted to liberate them from compulsory childbearing. West, a professor of religion and Afro-American studies at Harvard, is a socialist and a prolific scholar, the author of more than a dozen books, including the bestselling "Race Matters." He woke up to the way American policy thwarts family life when his wife divorced him and moved across the country with their 2-year-old son. He tried to block the move but found he had few rights, and he spent the boy's childhood trying to craft a strong father-son bond out of summertime visits and long-distance phone calls. Now he's trying to develop a fathers' rights agenda that limits the power of the legal system to deny men access to their children. Hewlett and West find common ground with the right in blaming feminism for elevating the rights of women above the rights of children, fathers and families. They air those private grievances in the first third of the book, which is set up as a dialogue alternating West's story with Hewlett's. West has used this kind of format reasonably well in two book-long "conversations," with Tikkun founder Michael Lerner on black-Jewish relations and with scholar bell hooks on gender and other divisions in the African-American community. This approach works when there's real dialogue and some difference of opinion. Both are missing in "The War Against Parents." The dialogue section reads like each spoke separately into a tape recorder and then tried to edit the results into a conversation. There's no difference, no conflict, no chemistry. The language alternates between overheated political rhetoric and the recovery movement's woundology. They talk over and over about our "parent-hurting" culture. "We parents are so used to being trampled on, sneered at, or just plain ignored that we often fail to understand how embattled we are" an early chapter explains. And I thought I was just tired.

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But the first section of the book begs a big question: Exactly who, besides feminists, has declared this so-called "war against parents"? The next section answers resoundingly: everybody. It's a mind-numbing recitation of all that's wrong with America. I've come to think that the book-writing left-liberal establishment has a secret software program that searches multiple databases for bad news and strings it together as prose. I've read all this before; in fact, I've written it -- the droning apocalyptic litany of what's wrong with American capitalism. Page after page of statistics about declining wages, rising male unemployment, single parenthood, child poverty, corporate downsizing, the lengthening work week, declining SAT scores, rising juvenile drug use and childhood obesity (yes, obesity). They all run together so that, after a while, no one fact seems more significant than any other.

Right-wing readers will enjoy their rants about the decline of pro-family America, their lament that Wally and Beaver have been replaced by Beavis and Butt-head in American living rooms everywhere. To break up the hard data they throw in news clips, pop culture samplings and bizarre anecdotes that prove we're all going to hell in a handbasket, in a tone reminiscent of conservative culture-cranks like William Bennett and Dinesh D'Souza. Breathlessly, and with an utter lack of humor or perspective, they describe the cultural war against parents: Did you know that on television, a character in "My So-Called Life" talked about wanting to kill her mother, while the parents on "Party of Five" are all conveniently dead, as are the moms on "Soul Man" and "The Gregory Hines Show"? The Oscar-winning movie "Shine" comes in for attack for exaggerating the demanding father's role in his son's mental illness, as do books like "Toxic Parents" and "How to Avoid Your Parents' Mistakes when You Raise Your Children" for preaching the myth of "parental incompetence and failure." In music, they're scandalized by the band Megadeth, which sings that "parents are dickheads," and Marilyn Manson, whose fans wear T-shirts reading "Kill Your Parents." But they praise Tupac Shakur's "Dear Mama," because even though he complains about his mother's crack addiction, he acknowledges how much she sacrificed for him.

I admire this earnest collaboration between a black man and a white woman, and I want to like their take on race, especially the way they resist tracing all social ills to the so-called black underclass. The problem is, as in the case of Tupac, many of their examples of African-American resistance to our "parent-hurting" culture are a little nutty. They blast white, celebrity single moms Madonna and Rosie O'Donnell as noxious role models, while praising black singers Whitney Houston and Snoop Doggy Dogg for staying in notoriously bad marriages. Why even go there? Their "Dan Quayle Was Right" reasoning, which equates the childbearing choices of wealthy, middle-aged white women and poor black teenagers, makes no sense except as a sop to the right. During the very time that Madonna, Rosie and Murphy Brown were choosing single motherhood, the black teen birth rate was actually falling, by 23 percent in the last five years. They don't explain that, or even acknowledge it, but then good news always discombobulates liberals.

And there are many such sops to the right. They blame welfare for vastly increasing illegitimacy in the black community, but their only footnote to prove it is a single, little-known study -- and better known research has found little or no link. (Later they attack welfare reform for threatening the connection between mothers and children.) They blame feminism and the media for "disabling dads" and portraying men as "redundant and expendable." They cite statistics showing that stepfathers are more likely to abuse children than natural fathers to conclude "a society that increasingly relies on substitute parents is one that veers increasingly toward violence." At the same time, they lambaste the child-welfare establishment for exaggerating the problem of child abuse, another example of the ideological schizophrenia that distinguishes "The War Against Parents."

Lost in all the handwringing and generalizing are a couple of interesting chapters. I know it's feminist heresy, but I enjoyed their examination of what draws men to groups like the Promise Keepers and the Nation of Islam (which they provocatively link), and I think they correctly diagnose a spiritual and psychological hunger that secular political and civic groups haven't addressed and probably can't. I was hoping the chapter would show how to help men find meaning in family life without restoring patriarchy, but that was too much to expect of these authors.

The book also features a helpful discussion about the ways public- and private-sector policy created the good life for so many American families in the 1950s and '60s. After World War II, tax reform created the mortgage-interest deduction -- opening home-ownership to a new strata of American families -- and increased the dependent deduction while reducing tax rates for married couples. Such moves deliberately privileged wage-earners with families, creating conditions that would allow couples to rely on one income to raise children. The private sector backed the notion of a "family wage" as well, signing generous contracts with American unions that traded high wages for labor peace and management control over production and investment decisions. Maybe the most important pro-family legislation of those years was the G.I. Bill, a windfall that made money available for returning soldiers to get an education, secure medical insurance and buy homes.

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Over time these benefits were withdrawn or eroded. Today a marriage "penalty" means many married couples pay higher taxes than they would if they were single, and the dependent deduction, which in the late '40s was worth $3,900 in current dollars, was recently doubled but still amounts to only $2,000. Add the very real problems of wage erosion and downsizing, the scarcity of affordable housing and health insurance and the fact that the United States provides so little in the way of child care, parental leave and other family support, and it's clear that public policy today does little to promote family stability, even if the notion of a "war against parents" is hyperbole.

Hewlett and West are also right to remind us that the social protections we take for granted today, from child labor laws to the eight-hour workday, were not the willing concessions of enlightened employers but the product of fierce political struggle and strategy. They correctly ask why American parents and workers have acquiesced in the rollback of support for family life and suggest that a modern social and political movement could win back some protection from government and employers.

But their proposal to create a parents' political constituency has two major flaws, which they grudgingly admit, albeit late in the book. Parents' concerns differ, in ways that often parallel the fault lines of American politics, and even if they voted alike, their numbers aren't large enough to make the parent vote anything close to a majority in this country. In 1956, 55 percent of eligible voters were parents; in 1996 only 35 percent were. And Hewlett and West note that parents today are much less likely than childless citizens to vote.

To deal with these obstacles to parent power, West and Hewlett propose a far-reaching "Parents' Bill of Rights," language they deliberately borrow from the G.I. Bill of Rights. And here is where the book completely falls apart. To deal with parents' declining electoral power, which undermines their political strategy, Hewlett and West propose giving parents the right to cast votes for their under-18 children. That would triple the size of the parent vote. It also makes them seem like crackpots. It's undemocratic and unworkable -- who gets to cast the votes, mom or dad? And why not extra votes for grandparents, or people who work with kids?

The rest of their "Bill of Rights" section makes one wonder why they spent so much time nodding to conservative critics earlier in the book. Because when it comes time for recommendations, they're good liberals: There's very little except rhetoric that would advance the right's family agenda. They support legal reform such as "covenant marriages" and a three-year waiting period to make divorce tougher, but other than that, their solutions are classically liberal: paid parental leave, subsidized child care organized by the schools, workplace rights to flextime and other family-friendly schedules, restoring welfare cuts and a public-private wage subsidy for low-paid workers with kids to bring them above the poverty line.

Even their attempt to build a fathers' rights agenda has little muscle behind it -- besides a proposal for a mandatory, compulsory 10-day paternity leave (that's right, compulsory) to give fathers time to bond with children, whether they want to or not. The fact that they have to make it compulsory will probably cheer skeptics of the fathers' rights movement, because it implicitly acknowledges that the vast majority of men don't take the parental leave provisions currently available to them.

In the end, the book is a case study of what happens when reformers attempt to please everybody: West and Hewlett's moral diagnosis will enrage liberals, their policy prescription will drive away conservatives and the book leaves us no closer to a family agenda than before they began. But the authors deserve credit for raising an important question even if they don't answer it: Why do American parents put up with the sorriest family support of any Western industrial nation?

One reason is that we find it hard to agree on what public family support should be. Just take child care, one critical issue that ought to unite parents around a solution but rarely does. Working parents rely on a broad range of child-care strategies, from split shifts that let them care for kids themselves to leaving children with grandparents and other relatives, hiring in-home nannies and patronizing unlicensed neighborhood "baby-sitters" as well as licensed family day-care homes and centers. A declining but still sizable minority chooses to keep one parent at home until kids are in school. So what should the government subsidize: a family allowance that would let more parents stay home, or work part time? Programs in schools or large licensed day-care centers, or those sponsored by churches and community-based associations that often provide care more affordably? What about expanded, refundable tax credits to maximize parents' choice of providers? No one has yet done the hard work of crafting a child-care agenda that would satisfy the largest number of parents while outraging the fewest, but this is a worthy subject for a movement.

Another problem is the fact that child care, parental leave and related concerns are pressing issues for only a limited number of years. After that, parents are more likely to identify politically as gun owners, environmentalists or businesspeople. The answer isn't to give parents additional votes, it's to increase the number of voters who care about children, whether they have them or not.

One obstacle to that goal is ideological: People disagree sharply on private issues like gay marriage, single motherhood, making divorce tougher and promoting fathers' rights. Pro-family reformers are wasting their time trying to forge consensus on such issues; today's children will be senior citizens before that happens. Instead, any movement should focus on children. Subsidized child care should be available for everybody, not just poor single mothers, and phased in to meet areas of highest need first. Education funding should be expanded, especially in the early years, accompanied by needed administrative reform to make sure money goes to effective programs. Community service and support programs should be provided for teenagers, who have literally outgrown the infantile social role we've assigned them.

But maybe the toughest barrier to forging pro-family or pro-child policies is race. It's no accident that the most racially diverse Western nation has the thinnest safety net on every issue, not just family policy. Racial divisions split the labor movement, blocking the formation of a constituency for an expanded welfare state. Later, they brought about the defeat of another so-called war, the War on Poverty. Today those divisions are reflected in the fact that most of the states with the most generous provisions for education have the most homogenous -- read white -- student populations. Certainly in California it's difficult not to notice that the state's ranking in per-capita education funding has plummeted as California's white population has declined. And while many groups of color have mobilized for programs and policies to help their children, almost no one is articulating a universalist vision for all children.

If there's a war against anyone in this country, it's a war against children, and until we figure out ways to make people care about kids who don't look like their own, conditions for American children will remain dire.