What is a family?
It would seem the simplest of questions. After all, the family is the cornerstone of civilization and the nursery of society’s values and beliefs – and the place, above all others, where love and care can be found. Yet, in the United States, at the dawn of the 21st Century, the answer to the question is far from simple.
The temptation is to take the easy way out and fall back on the Ozzie-and-Harriet stereotype: Mom, Dad and their young kids. But that ignores the millions of families headed by single mothers, and by single fathers, and by grandparents, and by gay couple’s, and by unmarried heterosexual couples. And it ignores the millions of stepfamilies, and the hundreds of thousands of couples and individuals with adopted children.
The stereotype also implies that a family must be living together. But, under that way of thinking, the 26 million Americans who live alone aren’t members of any family – although, of course, the vast majority are. They’re sons and daughters. They have brothers and sisters, and cousins, and nieces and nephews, and grandchildren.
And many men and women, living apart from blood relations, view their friends as a form of extended family.
The reality is that the American family has undergone radical change. During the last four decades, family life has become more complicated, more free-form, less locked into traditional roles. More mothers are breadwinners today; more fathers are taking part in nurturing their children. Housewives are few and far between.
Americans know this, or at least how it plays out in their own lives. And, by fits and starts, U.S. society is coming to grips with the heightened complexity.
Schools, for example, are beginning to recognize that, because of divorce and remarriage, a student may have four parents (two biological parents and two stepparents), eight grandparents and an unorthodox collection of siblings — all of which has an impact on such mundane matters as invitations to school plays and parent-teacher conferences.
In Hawaii, where voters recently rejected the concept of same-sex marriage, legislators have nonetheless recognized gay couples as a sort of family, granting to them some of the same rights and benefits as married couples.
The increasing complexity of the American family is the result of a wide array of social factors, the most significant of which has been the emergence of women as full participants in the world outside the home.
Women today are truck drivers, CEOs, mayors, basketball players, airplane pilots, lawyers, accountants, sewer workers, firefighters — the list is endless, and would have been inconceivable to Americans in the first half of this century. Women have redefined themselves as first-class citizens and, in doing so, have redefined American society and the family in America.
Among other elements of this social shift have been the sexual revolution, the rise of individualism, the civil rights movement, improvements in birth control and greater life expectancies. Always a pluralistic society, the U.S. became even more so during the last half century — and the diversity in family forms echoes this demographic and social diversity.
Yet these changes raise many issues. How will the children who come from families that don’t fit the traditional family pattern — from the sorts of families that were once called “broken homes” — be as adults? What are the implications of the decision of entire generations of young American adults to delay marriage? Are stepfamilies as strong and solid as biological families?
And, perhaps the most important question, to what extent should society and government favor one sort of family over another?
Today, despite all the changes in the U.S. social landscape, the nation’s laws, policies, procedures and regulations still tend to be written with the 1950s, or traditional, model of family in mind. It’s simpler that way for bureaucrats and legislators, but it causes endless problems for people in real life.
An adult son can’t include his mother on the medical insurance policy provided at his job because, even though they share a home, the mother isn’t a spouse or a child. Department store deliveries are made only between 9 a.m. and 5 p.m. when the “housewife” is expected to be at home. A single mother has to scrape by on low pay and rely on inadequate and often convoluted child-care arrangements because legislators have refused to acknowledge her needs.
“Society has got its head in the sand,” says Jeannett Lofas, founder of the New York-based Stepfamily Foundation, a counseling and information service. “America needs to psychologically retool its thinking about the family.”
In the face of so much change, there has been another temptation as well — the temptation to argue that the many complexities and problems associated with all these forms of American families could be solved if everyone would just go back to living the 1950s ideal.
But it was the Ozzie-and-Harriet era that was the anomaly, the product of “a very unusual configuration of events,” notes historian Steven Mintz, the author, with Susan Kellogg, of “Domestic Revolutions: A Social History of American Family Life” (Free Press, $13.95). Never before in American history had a single type of family — the stand-alone nuclear family — been so prevalent. And likely never again.
Indeed, Mintz says that, even if they wanted to, there’s no way that individual families — or society, for that matter — could re-create the era. Too much has changed. “On my block, I believe there are five children now,” he says. “There were literally 100 children on that block in the 1950s.”
One problem in all this is a lack of perspective. The Baby Boom generation, which dominates national debate about families and virtually all other topics through sheer weight of numbers, grew up in the 1950s when traditional nuclear families far outnumbered other forms — and seemed, in the public mind and the national culture, to be the only acceptable family type. The whole tone and thrust of society was that this was the way every family was and should be.
Yet, throughout U.S. history, the nature of the American family has evolved, just as, from culture to culture, and from age to age, families have been seen with vastly different eyes.
“There is no objective and universal definition of family,” says family historian Stephanie Coontz. “If you look throughout history and cross-culturally, the definitions of family are widely different. In Tibet, for example, two brothers marry the same wife. In many societies, the family is the extended family. There’s this tremendous variety.”
And it’s variety that’s the rule today when it comes to U.S. families.
Sixty years ago, 9 out of 10 American households were families, as defined by the U.S. Census Bureau — that is, groups of people who were related by blood or marriage. Today, families account for just 69 percent of households.
This rise in the percentage of non-family households can be — and has been — taken as a sign of the deterioration of the American family. But the situation is more complicated than it appears.
The vast majority of those non-family households (83 percent) are the 26 million men and women who live alone. And an analysis of that group gives a hint of how changes in society’s attitudes have resulted in changes in the nature of the family.
For example, some 10 million of these live-alone people are elderly. (Women in this group outnumber the men 3 to 1 because of their greater longevity.) In the first half of this century, relatively few of these older folks would have reached the age of 65. But many of those who did would have been living with their children and grandchildren.
So the numbers indicate that something has been gained and something has been lost.
Because they live alone, the grandfathers and grandmothers in this group aren’t able to help in the raising of their grandchildren, and they don’t get the day-in, day-out infusion of exuberance that often comes from sharing life with youngsters.
But because they live longer, these elderly people have more choices. In the 1950s, a key element of the traditional family model was that Mom, Dad and the kids didn’t have to share their home with a raft of aunts, cousins and grandparents. There was a sense of freedom in this for a generation of young people who had grown up in overcrowded apartments and homes during the Depression.
This was an expression of individuality that has remained as a major part of U.S. life down to the present. Indeed, a goodly number of elderly people living alone have chosen that way of life, moving to a retirement community in their home city or in another one, often in the Sun Belt, far away from their relatives.
Also exercising their individuality are many of the young adults among the 16 million Americans under the age of 65 who are living alone. In the 1950s, they most likely would have stayed at home until they got married, usually at a young age. Today, they’re delaying marriage (or choosing not to marry) but still feel the desire, like their parents and grandparents, to strike out on their own.
What this means is that they’re not rushing into marriage as teenagers — which is good. But, given the increased sexual activity throughout society, it also means a greater potential for women to become pregnant outside of marriage. And that, from the economic standpoint of the single mother and her child, if nothing else, is bad.
This points to the reality that’s often overlooked when changes in family life are bemoaned. “Things are both better and worse today,” Mintz points out.
Of course, not every young adult moves out. Between 1970 and 1998, the number of adult children, ages 18 to 34, who were living with their parents rose 43 percent to 17.9 million. What that means for the families involved is a renegotiation of relationships. Instead of a household in which decisions are made by one or two grown-ups, it’s a family with several adults, each with an individual take on how things should operate and what needs to be done.
And then there are those grandparents who are helping to care for — or are the primary caretakers of — their grandchildren. Today, 4 million American children are being reared in their grandparents’ homes, nearly double the figure of 1970. And for 1.4 million of those youngsters, neither parent is present; the grandparents carry the entire load.
The U.S. Census Bureau estimates that there are 4.2 million households today where two people, unrelated by blood or marriage, share the same home, and another 1.1 million households of three or more unrelated people.
Technically, under census definitions, these aren’t families. But, in fact, many are an informal sort of family — couples, gay or straight, who have chosen to weave their lives together, at least to the extent of sharing the same refrigerator and phone.
Traditionalists would argue, correctly, that the ties binding such couples often aren’t as strong as those between married couples. But for a gay couple, marriage, as a public legal commitment to each other, isn’t yet permitted. And even for a heterosexual couple, the simple act of moving in together is an announcement of a deeper level of commitment — and familial connection.
Many of these informal relationships also involve the children of one or both partners. This creates highly complex situations, but with two partners, there’s the likelihood of two salaries and the possibility of shared responsibility for the upbringing of the youngsters.
The situation is much different in a single-parent family — and that’s what’s so worrisome about the rising numbers of such households. With only one wage-earner, a single-parent family often has a difficult time keeping out of poverty. This is especially true when the one parent is a woman and, given the wage patterns of American business, is less likely to make as much money as a man.
And, of course, the emotional, physical and psychological drain that parenting entails is exponentially greater when there is only a mother or father available to carry the load.
Between 1970 and 1998, the number of familes headed by women with children under the age of 18 jumped 169 percent to 7.7 million. For families headed by men, the rise was even larger, 427 percent, but the numbers are smaller, just 1.8 million.
It’s such gains that have fed anxieties over the future of the American family. If more and more children are being raised by over-stressed single parents, what does the future hold? Yet the changes aren’t as drastic as they seem.
For one thing, such large numbers of single-parent families aren’t unprecedented. “In 1900, there was a higher percentage of single-parent households than there is today,” Mintz notes. “The life expectancy was 47, and an awful lot of families were without a father or mother.”
For another, the sharp rise in such families occurred during the 1970s and 1980s. The trend leveled off in the 1990s.
And, finally, even with those gains, single-parent families account for 27 percent of all families with children under the age of 18.
In other words, roughly three of every four American children are growing up in two-parent households. They have two parents to turn to for food, clothing, advice, encouragement and love. Maybe those parents aren’t Ozzie and Harriet. Maybe both work outside the home. But it certainly helps in carrying the load and paying the bills that there are two of them.
Many of those two-parent families, of course, are stepfamilies or, to use the buzzword, blended families. These look like the old 1950s model but have their own complexities.
It’s not just two adults who have to negotiate the often-bumpy getting-to-know-you period of the marriage, but the children as well. And that complicates everything.
“The kids, in my case, were all pals with me until I actually married their father,” says Lofas of the Stepfamily Foundation. But then the battles began. “I was right there in the way of their relationship with their dad.”
The U.S. Census Bureau says that more than 5 million children, or about 8 percent of all American youngsters, live in stepfamilies. But Lofas and other experts argue that those figures severely underassess the situation.
For instance, sociologist Larry Bumpass of the University of Wisconsin at Madison estimates that, when unmarried live-in relationships are included, about 39 percent of all American women and 30 percent of all children are likely to spend some time in a stepfamily.
Those figures are yet another reminder that the old 1950s stereotype of the American family doesn’t fit anymore.
What is a family? Each day, Americans answer that question in myriad ways. Yet, all of the forms have at their heart the same thing — love. It was always so.
