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I've written extensively on marriage and the Millennial generation (updated research post). However, I've left out the issue of family from this socioeconomic analysis. I recently interviewed Stephanie Coontz, who is the Director of Research and Public Education for the Council on Contemporary Families. A brief bio:
Stephanie Coontz teaches history and family studies at The Evergreen State College in Olympia, WA, and is Director of Research and Public Education for the Council on Contemporary Families. She wrote the book The Way We Never Were: American Families and the Nostalgia Trap. Her work has been translated into French, Spanish, Greek, German, Chinese, Norwegian, Swedish, and Japanese.Her work is not only helpful to us in order to understand family history, but also how families are evolving.
1. How have American families changed in the past century?
People tend to think that change has been linear, but that is not at all the case. 100 years ago, there was a sexual revolution going on every bit as shocking to contemporaries as anything in the past 20 years has been to modern Americans. There were also more immigrant families in America than today, and the divorce rate was rising precipitously, whereas today it has been falling for the past 30 years. And many more children spent some of their childhood in a single parent family, though that was more often a result of death than divorce. Eighty-two years ago, the US fell into the Great Depression. Divorce rates fell, but domestic violence, desertion, and abuse increased. Then came WWII, which led to a marriage and baby boom followed by a surge of divorce after the war. By 1946, 1 in 3 marriages was ending in divorce. The fact that so many marriages broke up so quickly is one of the reasons that divorce rates stayed fairly steady during the 1950s -- a lot of the shaky marriages had already ended in divorce. Most of us think of the 1950s as the era of the traditional family, but in fact the family arrangements of that day were very unusual. There were more male breadwinner families than than ever before or since. And the age of marriage reached an all-time low in 1960, with nearly half of all women married by age 20.
Still, taking all these variations into account, there have been some clear trends. The age of marriage has been rising steadily since the late 1960s and has now surpassed its previous historical high (which occurred in 1890). Premarital sex, cohabitation, and even having children out of wedlock are far more acceptable than in the past. And there have been interesting trade-offs: Men are doing much more childcare and housework in the past -- when they are present. But there are also more absent fathers then in the past. Successful marriages are fairer, more intimate, and more beneficial to all their members than in the past, but the same things that have made them so have also increased the alternatives to marriage and made an unsatisfying marriage seem less bearable to most people. And of course the increase in acceptance of same-sex couples has been stunningly rapid just in the past 20 years.
2. How would you address the claim made by some media that there's been a decline in family values?
If you look at the Pew Research Center polls on family life you will find that although Americans no longer believe that marriage is essential to a successful life, this does not mean they are giving up on marriage and other committed relationships. Most people say their family relationships are closer than those of their parents or grandparents. And millennials are more likely than older Americans to believe that adult children have the obligation to take in an aging parent if the parent needs assistance. Yes, there is more premarital sex than in the past, but sexual victimization rates have declined substantially in the past 20 years. So have domestic violence rates. Intergenerational relations are also closer. Even before the recession, we were seeing an increase in multigenerational households, partly because of economics, but partly because there has been a decline in generational mistrust, as a result of more democratic childrearing and more socializing between unmarried 20-somethings and their parents.
But of course, every time we solve one problem, we do create new challenges. The more freedom people gain to cultivate their own talents and pursue their own passions, the more possibility they have of going down dead-end streets or getting lost on an unmarked trail. The key is for us to try to figure out how to build on our new possibilities while minimizing our new vulnerabilities. One reason I volunteer my time at the Council on Contemporary Families is because this is an organization that does not waste time bemoaning what we have supposedly lost. Instead, CCF researchers and practitioners accept that family diversity is here to stay and try to get out the research and best-practice findings that will allow every family to build on its potential strengths and compensate for its weaknesses.
3. What major concerns do you see - if any - for the future of families in the United States, and how can we address these (if needed)?
One big concern is the widening gap between low-income, poorly educated Americans and highly-educated, more economically secure Americans in their access to stable, satisfying relationships. Research suggests that the answer lies not in promoting marriage per se but in working on two fronts at once: improving the economic prospects of men and women without a college degree and providing relationship support and training for couples, especially couples with children, whether married, cohabiting or apart. See this, for example.
For Americans who do have good jobs, there is quite a different concern. Increasingly, well-paid and challenging jobs require such intense work hours that it is very difficult for men and women to combine their family responsibilities with their professional ones. At all income levels, Americans need stricter limits on the work week, more generous and subsidized leaves such as those found in Europe and the Nordic countries, and affordable, reliable child care. Given the shortage of jobs, this would be a good time to consider the 35-hour work week, and of course we need to reform health care so that families have more flexibility to work part-time or some protections when they are laid off.
