Atlantic laments the change in family structures

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We’ve made life freer for individuals and more unstable for families. We’ve made life better for adults but worse for children. We’ve moved from big, interconnected, and extended families, which helped protect the most vulnerable people in society from the shocks of life, to smaller, detached nuclear families (a married couple and their children), which give the most privileged people in society room to maximize their talents and expand their options.

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Over the past two generations, families have also gotten a lot smaller. The general American birth rate is half of what it was in 1960. In 2012, most American family households had no children. There are more American homes with pets than with kids. In 1970, about 20 percent of households had five or more people. As of 2012, only 9.6 percent did.

We’re likely living through the most rapid change in family structure in human history. The causes are economic, cultural, and institutional all at once.

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But on average, children of single parents or unmarried cohabiting parents tend to have worse health outcomes, worse mental-health outcomes, less academic success, more behavioral problems, and higher truancy rates than do children living with their two married biological parents.

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But on average, children of single parents or unmarried cohabiting parents tend to have worse health outcomes, worse mental-health outcomes, less academic success, more behavioral problems, and higher truancy rates than do children living with their two married biological parents.

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reeniebessagain
tons of people live in rosy views of the past, and the extended family myth. Anyone who has read Dickens or many other realistic books about the past KNOW how badly many many adults, elders and children were actually treated!

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For a time, it all seemed to work. From 1950 to 1965, divorce rates dropped, fertility rates rose, and the American nuclear family seemed to be in wonderful shape. And most people seemed prosperous and happy. In these years, a kind of cult formed around this type of family—what McCall’s, the leading women’s magazine of the day, called “togetherness.” Healthy people lived in two-parent families. In a 1957 survey, more than half of the respondents said that unmarried people were “sick,” “immoral,” or “neurotic."

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For one thing, most women were relegated to the home. Many corporations, well into the mid-20th century, barred married women from employment: Companies would hire single women, but if those women got married, they would have to quit. Demeaning and disempowering treatment of women was rampant. Women spent enormous numbers of hours trapped inside the home under the headship of their husband, raising children.

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During this period, a certain family ideal became engraved in our minds: a married couple with 2.5 kids. When we think of the American family, many of us still revert to this ideal. When we have debates about how to strengthen the family, we are thinking of the two-parent nuclear family, with one or two kids, probably living in some detached family home on some suburban street. We take it as the norm, even though this wasn’t the way most humans lived during the tens of thousands of years before 1950, and it isn’t the way most humans have lived during the 55 years since 1965.

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bell_flower

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*Note about Dr. Whora: I get it that if a family is going to have kids, both parents should stick around and raise them. I just don't understand why being mawied and childed is revered over other states. Why does the U.S. tax code keep giving money to fambilees and married people? Being single is just as legitimate of a choice as being mawied. it's not as if there is a brat shortage right now.

There is a shortage of WHITE brats. And if you sell women into slavory, that makes half the USA's population easy to control. The other problem population, the disabled and elderly will be (if possible) simply neglected until they are rotting somewhere.

+++++++++++++

Passive Aggressive
Master Of Anti-brat
Excuses!

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randomcfchick
Wowza, what a bunch of bullshit-spackled rose colored glasses stuff! To paraphrase Billy Joel, the good ol' days weren't always good and tomorrow ain't as bad as it seems.

I'd argue that life for adults AND kids has improved....in the US at least...can't speak for other places. 100 years ago, far fewer adults were finishing high school, women had JUST barely gotten the right to vote, kids were abused and exploited and there were no child abuse or child labor laws, and people of all ages were at far greater risk of death from accidents and disease because safety and risk mansgement kind of weren't a thing, especially compared to today. There was no minimum wage.

Kids weren't necessarily being raised by this entire tribe of benevolent adults. They were more likely to have their moms dead from childbirth, their dads scarpered off (no child support enforcement back then; abandonment was "poor man's divorce"), and be raised by whatever relative would take them in.

Living nearly family had some positive sides, but that's under the assumption that the family was functional. Many weren't. Many aren't today. BUT...people are more likely to be able to get away from those family members that aren't. Women were fucking stuck, as domestic violence laws did not exist and they could not even have a bank account. So yeah, if they didn't fucking die in childbirth they were more likely to raise those kids near family because leaving was HARD.