Deeply ingrained in the American psyche is an image of the ideal family. It consists of the original mom and dad and two well behaved, if slightly mischievous children. That image was idealized in the 1950s with shows like "Leave it to Beaver" and "Father Knows Best." As a culture, we came to desire that traditional family and to believe it was "normal."
Historical evidence shows that the nuclear family reached its peak in the fifties, a unique decade in which the divorce rate fell for the first time in a hundred years, while marriage and fertility rates soared, says Stephanie Coontz, history professor at Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington and author of The Way We Never Were.
Coontz maintains that there has never been a model that truly represents the norm for American families. The prosperous nuclear family with a full-time homemaker wasn’t the norm for non-white cultures during the fifties and it wasn’t the norm for most of American history. Coontz says families have always been in a state of change.
Today’s families are a diverse mix of single-parent households, remarried families, nuclear families, unmarried couples, and couples without children. There is no prototype for the "normal" family. Data from the 2000 Census shows that married couples with children make up just 24 percent of all households, compared to 40 percent in 1970. In fact, there are slightly more single person households in America, 25 percent, than nuclear family households.
While the decline of the two-parent family may seem foreboding for children, in truth the number of children living with two parents is about 70 percent, and that number has remained fairly steady for the last few decades. And there is debate over whether the nuclear family truly is in decline, since the actual number of married with children households is up from the eighties and is at about the same number of households as in the seventies.
Researchers believe that the nuclear family is actually holding steady after two decades of decline. The percentage of nuclear families is down because other types of living arrangements are on the rise, including people living alone, single parents, and unmarried couples.
Single parent households continued to rise over the last decade. Single mother households now make up 7 percent of all households. Single father households doubled from 1990, from 1 percent to 2 percent.
While the birth rate for teenagers continued to decline, the birth rate for unmarried women increased 2 percent.
One of the biggest changes in household structure is the number of families headed by unmarried couples, which rose 71 percent in the last decade. Unmarried couples now account for at least 4.5 percent of all households, and there are children in one-third of those households. There are no census statistics available on the number of same sex couples.
Even within nuclear families, the model is changing. Families are getting smaller. The number of families with just one child has doubled since the seventies and now accounts for more than 20 percent of families. Meanwhile, families with four or more children decreased from 17 percent in 1970 to 6 percent in 2000.
In two parent families, it is likely that both parents work. There is also a strong possibility that one of the parents is a step parent.
These changes in family structure can be attributed to several factors. For one, people are marrying later. The average age for first marriage is now 26.8 for men and 25.1 for women. That means more adults spend at least some time living alone. Both later marriage and divorce lead to smaller families. Divorce also results in more single parent families, though some of those classified as single parents may actually be in co-parenting situations. Widespread affluence also results in more people living alone. Some choose not to remarry after divorce; others put off marriage.
Partially as a result of affluence, both single and married people tend to have higher expectations for a happy marriage and are less likely to stay in an unhappy marriage. As people become more isolated from community and extended family, they place more responsibility for their fulfillment on their marriage partner. "The family has become an overburdened life raft, often overwhelmed by the storms it encounters," says Steven Mintz, history professor at the University of Houston and member of the Council on Contemporary Families (CCF). The CCF is an organization which examines the underlying causes of changing families and aims to develop programs to address the stresses on today’s families.
Mintz says contemporary families are under severe stress. "Stress in turn can contribute to marital conflict, parent-child alienation, child abuse and neglect, and other tensions that affect children’s well- being." For single and divorced parents, much of the stress is economic. The family’s finances are strongly influenced by the number of parents in the home, according to the U.S. Census report on families. "Of the 12 million one-parent families, the 10 million maintained by women were more likely than the 2 million maintained by men to include more than one child. One-parent families maintained by women were also more likely to have family incomes below the poverty level," the report states.
Stephanie Coontz, co-chair of the CCF, places much of the blame for stress on the fact that in many marriages, both parents work full time. Yet she points out that women with "options" are more likely to be happy with their choices, whether pursuing a career or being a full-time homemaker, and she asserts that children are better off with satisfied mothers. She also points out that with more women in the workforce, men have taken a more active role in the lives of their children. She suggests that longer lifespans will allow children to be enriched by a relationship with a grandparent.
Coontz asserts that while divorce rates remain high, more non-custodial parents are staying in touch with their children and providing child support. She notes optimistically that the age of single mothers has risen and suggests that these older mothers are likely to be more mature and better educated — and better able to provide for their children — than single teens.
Above all, Mintz cautions against oversimplistic judgments about family life based on family composition. "The most profound difference between functional and dysfunctional families lies not in family structure, but in the nature and quality of relationships within individual homes," says Mintz.
Another way to look at changes in families is to consider the structure of the family, which has evolved considerably since the nineteenth century. Those changes are outlined by William J. Doherty, director of the Marriage and Family Therapy Program at the University of Minnesota in his book, The Intentional Family: How to Build Family Ties in Our Modern World.
We started the twentieth century with the Institutional Family, whose goal was stability and security. Happiness and individual freedom were less important for the Institutional Family. This family was a fitting model for farming communities and tight ethnic and religious communities. The Psychological Family slowly started to replace the Institutional Family in the 1920s. In the Psychological model, personal happiness and achievement became more important than community bonds. This was the reigning model in the 1950s and it is the model that is generally understood as the Traditional Family.
Doherty points out that the Psychological Family was considered radical when it replaced the Institutional Family. The notion that an individual’s personal happiness was more important than the family was a radically new idea.
"Although most Americans continue to assume that parents, especially mothers, should place family needs over personal needs while children are being raised, all bets are off for young people’s obligations to their parents and extended families. And the perceived absence of happiness in a marriage is a widely acceptable reason to divorce and try again for the kind of satisfying intimate relationship that has become a cultural birthright," says Doherty.
According to Doherty, the destruction of the Psychological Family as a model was the result of the sexual and feminist movements along with increased focus on the self during the 1970s. Divorce became more acceptable and individuals developed higher expectations of marriage. This led to greater diversity of family types, including single parenting, stepparenting, and creating blended families.
Doherty refers to the current model as the Pluralistic Family, which is focused on personal satisfaction as well as flexibility. "The Pluralistic Family ideal is to let a thousand family forms bloom as families creatively respond to the modern world," he says. It sounds good on paper, but with no clear model, the Pluralistic Family is left to struggle on its own. Going through life without a family plan, families tend to drift apart, and become Entropic Families. So it’s no surprise that half of all marriages end in divorce.
Doherty’s solution is for families to become Intentional, to build family connections through rituals. Rituals can include daily meals together (without the television); storytime for young children; the annual vacation; holiday, anniversary, and birthday celebrations; as well as community involvement. Such rituals provide children with predictability; they allow family members to connect, they provide the family with a sense of identity and values. "The idea of the Intentional Family is to encourage families to use their own values, histories, religions, and cultures to consciously plan their life together and in community," says Doherty.
Claudia M. Lenart is a free-lance writer/editor living in Antioch IL. She is the editor of Family Time magazine, a parenting magazine in Lake County.
Resources
Council for Contemporary Families
U.S. Census Bureau, Jason Fields and Lynne M. Casper, "America’s Families and Living Arrangements: March 2000"
American Association for Single People
The Intentional Family: How to Build Family Ties in Our Modern World, by William J. Doherty
The Way We Never Were, by Stephanie Coontz