Families Past and Present

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You’re entitled to your opinion about what the best family structure is, and to argue for government policies that promote that structure, but be careful when using phrases like “family values.” There are many different kinds of family, and your family values may not be the same as your neighbor’s.

As I explain in Chapter 5, cultural change and structural change almost always go hand-in-hand, and it can be very difficult to sort out what caused what. There have certainly been some significant changes in cultural ideals regarding family life: Divorce, single parenting, and unmarried partnership are all more commonly accepted than they were five or six decades ago. Whether or not you regard this change as something bad, it’s important to be aware that there have been some real structural changes — that is, changes in basic social conditions — since the post-war era:

The economy is more turbulent, and it’s much more challenging for a single individual to secure and hold a job that will support a family over several decades. Many more families have to be dual-income families than was the case in the 50s.

Developments in law and corporate policies, some spurred by the efforts of same-sex couples unable to marry, have made it easier for unmarried couples to enjoy some of the practical benefits — insurance coverage, shared child custody — of marriage. (Still, however, it’s much more difficult for unmarried than married couples to access these benefits.)

Though sociologists of gender still see a “glass ceiling” (see Chapter 9), implicit and explicit discrimination against women in educational and professional settings have sharply declined, making it easier for women to pursue careers on the same terms as men. When women today choose to leave jobs to raise children, because women are making relatively more money today, that choice is likely to have economic consequences that are more significant for the average family than they would have been in the 1950s.

Advancements in contraceptive technology — most notably, the refinement and legalization of the birth control pill — have given men and women the option to be sexually active without conceiving children. Exercising this option is a personal choice, but previously, it was far more likely that sexual activity would result in pregnancy (with abortion being illegal and unsafe), so people were making choices about marriage and family life in a very different universe of possibilities.

So change in family life has definitely happened, for a number of reasons — but that said, the 1950s were not the idyllic time they may seem to have been. In her bestselling book The Way We Never Were, historian Stephanie Coontz deflates what she calls “the nostalgia trap”: a trap in which people assume that because family life was more homogeneous in the 1950s, things were better then.

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Among other things, Coontz points out that authorities often looked the other way in cases of spousal and child abuse, that it was not unusual for working fathers to spend a disproportionate amount of their income on luxuries for themselves, and same-sex relationships were almost entirely taboo. The divorce rate, though it’s risen since the 1950s in most countries, plateaued at about 40 percent and has now remained stable for many years. And marriages continue to happen at a high rate; in fact, it’s now more common for unmarried women in middle age and older to eventually marry (or, if they’re divorced, remarry) than it was in the past.

Coontz and other historians of the family also point out that in the big picture, the 1950s were a very unusual decade — probably for reasons having to do more with the economy and post-war social policy than with people’s values. The relatively low divorce rate in the 50s was just a temporary dip; in the United States, the divorce rate has been rising since the 1860s. Many changes in family life — from women’s increasing economic and social freedom to the removal of children from the workforce — that are often seen as originating in the 1960s actually began a century earlier, in the Industrial Revolution.

Going it alone: The challenges of single parenting

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Family life, like every aspect of social life, has always changed and will continue to change. Just as there’s no such thing as a “perfect family,” there’s no such thing as a perfect norm of family life. Each family is different, for better and for worse.

The family today

What is “the family today”? Sociologically speaking, a family is any group of people who live together in mutual economic and social support. Usually families are connected by blood ties as well as emotional and financial ties, but as the saying goes, family is as family does. In this section, I consider a few of the most important issues facing families today.

Work — at home and outside the home

The division of labor in families has been a topic of contention for as long as there have been families; in recent decades in particular, the growing number of two-career families have been struggling to figure out an efficient and equitable way of dividing the tasks that have to be done in the home and out of the home.

In her 1989 book The Second Shift, sociologist Arlie Hochschild put her finger on the challenge facing many two-career families: Both mother and father work full-time jobs outside the home, but after work it’s the mother who takes on the “second shift” of caring for the couple’s children and managing other household tasks. What especially frustrated many of the women Hochschild talked with was that their husbands nominally accepted the idea that household labor should be equitably divided . . . they just didn’t do their share.

Happily, evidence suggests that in the years since 1989, men have done a lot of catching up: Their household contributions now come closer to matching the work they admit they should do. Today, an unprecedented number of fathers are involved in tasks — from bathing children to sweeping floors to baking meatloaf — that most of their fathers and grandfathers could hardly have imagined taking routine responsibility for. Women still do the majority of household labor, but the gap is closing.

Men getting up off the couch has picked up some of the slack in the constant amount of household labor that needs to be accomplished in a shrinking amount of time . . . but getting things taken care of around the home is tough for any working family. Families that can afford to do so outsource housework and childcare, hiring nannies or housecleaners, many of whom

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travel from poorer neighborhoods (and even countries) in search of higher wages. Hochschild has written of the challenges faced by nannies who are mothers themselves, struggling to care for both their own children and their employers’ children. Wealthy countries are “exporting emotional labor,” says Hochschild. This will continue to be a challenge in the years and decades to come.

Kids today! They grow up so . . . slow?

Childbearing rates are falling in developed countries around the world, and no wonder! Kids are expensive, and they’re getting more expensive all the time. Just 200 years ago, most children contributed significantly to their family’s livelihood, often by helping out on the family farm or by taking paying work. Today, children are required to attend school well into their teenage years; most finish high school and many go on to attend college or even graduate school before beginning their careers in earnest.

Children in low-income families often still contribute significantly to their households by caring for younger siblings or by contributing income to the family, but most children in developed countries work only to earn experience and discretionary spending money. Parents who can afford to do so (including many who must stretch to do so) often find themselves entirely or partially supporting their children well into the children’s 20s.

As I note in the sidebar “Dad, can I take the car?”, the semi-autonomous state associated with adolescence is becoming increasingly the norm for children both young and old. Both because of technologies like the Internet and changing social norms, young children have more social autonomy than they’ve ever had; at the other end of the teenage years, young adults are remaining dependent on their parents for longer and longer. This is a big change in family structure, and families are still trying to figure out how to handle it.

Though child labor laws now limit the nature and extent of work that can be done by young people, teenagers normally seek some kind of employment — and in tough economic times, they may feel the pain even more acutely than mature workers. Having not completed their education, teenagers need to seek jobs that don’t require complex skills or training, and those jobs are often the first to dry up when the economy goes south.

Marriage: What’s in a ring?

The institution of marriage is not going away. A large majority of people, in societies around the world, still aspire to make a public lifelong commitment to a partner; most do marry, many more than once.

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That said, the meaning of marriage is changing. Marriage was once primarily a legal arrangement; now, the legal aspect of marriage is generally seen as secondary to its emotional aspect. A spouse is still, in a sense, a business partner; but he or she is also now expected to be a lifelong love and a best friend. That’s a tremendous amount of weight to put on a relationship. It works well for many couples, but the increased emotional expectation put upon marriage has surely been one of the factors leading to the increasing divorce rate over the past century.

Because the legal aspect of marriage is now seen as secondary, marriage is less universally seen as a necessary bond for loving couples. Out-of-wedlock births have been rising sharply in the past few years, and a big part of that growth has been accounted for by committed couples who begin families together without bothering to get married. That can create legal challenges for unmarried couples, but for various reasons people are increasingly using their growing freedom to live together and even raise children together without being married. Among them are millions of gay and lesbian couples who are not legally able to marry.

Again, though, marriage is not going away. Notably, older adults are increasingly marrying, whether for the first time or in the wake of divorce or widowhood. Life is getting longer, and many middle-aged and senior adults are finding new love in their later years — love that they’re celebrating by getting married. (Or remarried. Or re-remarried.)

A return to the extended family

Among the many unrealistic aspects of the Dick-and-Jane image of the family, perhaps the most unrealistic is the suggestion that the nuclear family is an island unto itself. It may or may not take a village to raise a child, but it’s absolutely true that every family draws on the support of extended family members including blood relatives, relatives by marriage, friends, coworkers, neighbors, and other community members. Dick and Jane’s parents couldn’t have done it by themselves, and neither could yours or mine.

That said, the mid-century nuclear family, in its own single-family home, was more independent than families before or since. Throughout history, families have lived together in compounds, houses, or apartment buildings. It’s long been routine for aged parents to live with their children, for married sisters to move in with their brothers, and for hired help and other people to be brought in to boot. The idea that a couple should live alone with their young children, support themselves financially, and do everything else themselves is relatively new, and it’s already crumbling.