Is the Family Endangered or Merely Changing?

Some 90 percent of American men and women still think that marriage is the best way to live (Walsh, 1986). Given this sentiment, it is hardly sur­prising that a good many Americans have been concerned about the direc­tions in which family life has been moving in recent decades. But they tend to be of two minds. There are those who say that the family is time­less, rooted in our social and animal nature. But since the institutional structure of society is always changing, the family must change to reflect this fact. Accordingly, although a durable feature of the human experience, the family is said to be a resilient institu­tion (Bane, 1976; Waldrop, 1988). The other view holds that the family is in crisis, with decay and disintegration stalking it at every turn. This latter view is currently the most fashionable. The evidence in support of it seems dramatic and, on the surface, incon­trovertible (see Table A). Divorce rates have soared; birth rates have fallen; the proportion of unwed moth­ers has increased; single-parent house­holds have proliferated; mothers of young children have entered the labor force in large numbers; and the elderly are placing growing reliance on the government rather than the family for financial support (Fuchs, 1983; Davis, 1985; Gilder, 1987).

Laments about the current de­cline of the family imply that at an earlier time in history the family was more stable and harmonious than it currently is. Yet, despite massive re­search, historians have not located a golden age of the family (Flandrin, 1979; Degler, 1980; Cherlin, 1983). For instance, the marriages of seventeenth-century England and New England were based on family and property needs, not on affection. Loveless marriages, the tyranny of husbands, and the heating and abuse of children give us a grim picture (Shorter, 1975). And families were riddled by desertion and death. In­deed, because of fewer deaths, disrup­tions of marriage up through the com­pletion of childrearing have been declining in the United States since 1900 (Uhlenberg, 1980).

The notion that the family should consist of a breadwinner hus­band, a homemaker wife, and their dependent children is of recent origin. The rural, preindustrial family was a relatively self-sufficient unit that pro­duced most of what it consumed. Husbands, wives, children, and lodgers were all engaged in gainful work. With the onset of industrialization, more and more family members sought work for wages in factories and workshops. This trend led Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels to deplore the capitalists’ use of cheap female and child labor to run factory machines. They termed it “shameless” and “un­conscionable” that able-bodied men, their strength and skills no longer needed, should find themselves dis­missed or compelled to accept “chil­dren’s work at children’s wages.” Throughout the Western world, the nascent labor movement pressed for the establishment of a “living wage,” an income sufficient for a male bread­winner to support a wife and children in modest comfort.

It was during the nineteenth cen­tury that Americans culturally sorted jobs into male and female categories. Women’s jobs were deemed to be either of short duration until they married or a lifetime commitment of secular celibacy as nurses and schoolteachers. Women’s special place became defined as the “domes­tic sphere.” The restriction of large numbers of married women to domes­tic activities took place only after in­dustrialization was well established (Cherlin, 1983; Carlson, 1986).

Prior to the 1950s, family life tended to be relatively disorderly. Young adults were expected to post­pone leaving home or put off marriage to help the family face an unexpected economic crisis or a death in the fam­ily. At the turn of the century, young adults married relatively lute because they were often obligated to help sup­port parents and siblings. Hut with the economic prosperity that followed World War II, the average age at mar­riage dropped sharply. Today's young adults seem to have reversed the trend and are marrying at later ages (Cherlin, 1983). The emphasis on emo­tional satisfactions and the associated transformation of the family into a private institution did not become widespread beyond the middle class until this century. In the early 1900s, such trends as the decline in the boarding and lodging of nonfamily members, the growing tendency for unmarried adults to leave home, and the fall in fertility created the condi­tions for increasingly private and af­fectionate bonds within the small nuclear family (Laslett, 1973).

All in all, reports of the death of the American family are greatly exaggerated. Public opinion polls show that the vast majority of Americans – 97 percent – believe that when fami­lies are happy and healthy, the world is a better place. And nearly nine out often Americans regard their family as one of the most important facets of their lives. However, Americans now want a different kind of marriage. In 1974, half of women and 48 percent of men said that the most satisfying life­style was one where the husband worked and the wife stayed home and took care of the home and children. By 1985, only 37 percent of women and 43 percent of men thought this arrangement the best. Fifty-seven per­cent of women and 50 percent of men picked a marriage where the husband and wife share work, housekeeping, and child care. Seven in ten Ameri­cans also agree “strongly” that it is important for fathers to spend as much time with their children as mothers do, and an additional 20 per­cent agree “to some extent” (Public Opinion, 1986; Joe Schwartz, 1987). Concerns about the family have a long history (Greer, 1979; Demos, 1986). Educators of the European medieval and Enlightenment periods worried about the strength and char­acter of the family. In the American colonies the hand-wringing began scarcely two decades after the Puritans landed in Massachusetts, when com­munity elders deplored the decline of the family (Mintz and Kellogg, 1988). And in the nineteenth and early twen­tieth centuries worry about the family was cloaked in recurrent public hyste­ria regarding the “peril” posed to the nation’s Anglo-American institutions by the arrival of immigrant groups with “alien cultures.” So the “family question” is not new. Although we may think that the grindstones of so­cial change are pulverizing family organization, the family remains a vital, adaptive, resilient human institution. Given the lessons of history, families will continue to adapt and change in unforeseen ways. Doubtless those seized by nostalgia will continue to bemoan the family’s decline and per­haps even wistfully recall the “good old days” of the 1990s.

Table A SYNOPSIS OF THE CHANGING AMERICAN FAMILY

	1965	1980	1986
Working women (percentage of all women 16 and over)	36.7	51.1	55.0
Fertility rate (number of children the average woman will have at the end of her childbearing years)*	2.9	1.8	1.8
Marriage rate (number of marriages per 1,000 population)**	9.3	10.6	10.0
Median age at first marriage Men Women	22.8 20.6	24.7 22.0	25.7 23.1
Divorce rate (number of couples divorcing per 1,000 population)	2.5	5.2	4.8
Single-parent families (percentage of all families with children under 18)	10.1	19.5	24.0
Premarital births (percentage of all births)	7.7	18.4	22.1
Living alone (percentage of all households occupied by single person)	15.0	22.6	23.9
* A 2.1 rate is needed for the natural replacement of the population. ** Remarriages account for about one-third of the recent totals. Sources: US Census Bureau; National Center for Health Statistics; US Department of Labor.