Test 2
Families then and now
Family decline vs. family change
About [percentage needs verification] percent of Americans [wording needs verification] current trends toward the postmodern family.
About the same proportion [likely supports/accepts] new family forms.
Another 37 percent accepts some aspects of family change but are ambivalent about others.
The “Golden Age” of families
The 1950s
Growing and strong economy
Most white men could earn a family wage.
This led to an increase in people marrying younger and having larger families.
This kind of prosperous nuclear family unit has neither existed before nor since this time period.
A changing social institution
Beginning in the 1960s (consolidating into the 1980s)
Family formation became less and less standardized.
Demographers noted dramatic social changes.
Desire to marry
Marriage is important to Americans—but not to the extent it was sixty years ago.
58 percent of never-married adults say they want to marry someday.
Twenty-seven percent are unsure.
Another 14 percent do not want to get married.
Age at marriage
Young people are delaying marriage.
In 2021, median age at first marriage: 28 for women and 30 for men.
In 1970: about 21 for women and 23 for men.
Today’s average age at marriage is the highest recorded since the 1890 census.
Cohabitation
Cohabitation has become an acceptable family form.
Opposite-sex cohabiting adults increased more than tenfold since 1970.
About one-quarter of cohabiting couples have children under age 18.
Cohabitation trends
More than 50 percent of first marriages are preceded by cohabitation.
Cohabitators are older now, more racially and ethnically diverse, more highly educated, and higher income.
For adults aged 18–24, living with an unmarried partner is more common than living with a spouse.
Fertility
Fertility has declined.
TFR means Total Fertility Rate — the average number of children a woman will have during her lifetime.
The TFR has generally been below replacement level over the past several years.
In 2021, the U.S. TFR was approximately 1.66.
A society requires a TFR of at least 2.1 for the population to numerically replace itself.
The current TFR is below replacement level.
Postponement of parenthood
Particularly among college-educated women, parenthood is often postponed.
Average age at first birth in 2021: 27 (27.3 to be exact).
Highly educated women wait longer to have children.
Married women today wait longer after their wedding to conceive than in the past.
Births outside of marriage
The nonmarital birthrate is increasing. (The trend wording may need checking against the slide.)
About 40 percent of all U.S. births today are to unmarried mothers.
Compared with 4 percent in 1950.
A larger proportion of nonmarital births today occur to cohabiting couples.
This marks a major shift.
Prevalence of same-sex couples
Same-sex couple households increased (substantially).
From roughly half a million in 2008 to about 1.4 million by 2024.
It is difficult to know how many same-sex-couple households really exist.
In 2021, the number exceeded 1 million.
Dropping divorce rates
The divorce rate is declining.
After it increased sharply between 1965 and 1980, the U.S. divorce rate began to decline steadily.
The current divorce rate is approximately 2.4 per 1,000 people.
Today, the figure is closer to one-third of marriages ending in divorce.
Fewer Americans are getting divorced.
Those who divorce tend to be more highly educated and have high incomes, a category that has traditionally had lower divorce rates.
Importance of grandparents
Children are more likely to live with a grandparent today than in the past.
In 1970, 3 percent of children lived in a household headed by a grandparent.
By 2015, that rate had reached about 6 percent.
In about one-quarter of cases, grandparents had primary responsibility for raising the child.
The rest were members of extended families.
Rise of foreign-born parents
A growing number of U.S. children have a foreign-born parent.
The percentage of children under 18 living with at least one foreign-born parent rose from 18 percent in 1994.
To 25 percent in 2018.
About one-quarter of all U.S. children live with one foreign-born parent.
In 2016, 23 percent of children ages 5–17 spoke a language other than English at home.
Family decline perspective
Family-decline perspective
Cultural shifts toward excessive individualism hurt relationships.
Led to higher divorce rates and undermined responsible parenting.
Fewer family households contain children.
This has weakened the child-centeredness of our nation and contributed to the decline of marriage.
Marriage and families as social institutions
Americans can be strongly opinionated about family change.
Social institutions are established and largely stable ways of thinking and behaving.
Beliefs, values, attitudes, and norms are organized around patterns of group life and serve essential social functions.
Social institutions meet people’s basic needs and enable society to function.
Marital “decline” perspective
People no longer wish to be hampered with obligations to others.
Commitment to traditional institutions such as marriage has declined.
People are no longer willing to remain married through difficult times.
Commitment lasts only as long as people feel their needs are being met.
Family “change” perspective
Family change, but not decline.
Family-change perspective.
Family changes can be for the better.
Longer life expectancy can mean more overlapping years with parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents.
Functional parent-child relationships
Courts and lawmakers recognize the importance of these non-biological parent-child relationships.
Almost two-thirds of states have de facto parent doctrines.
These treat someone as a parent based on the functional parent-child bond, even if they lack a biological or adoptive tie.
Family change perspective
Greater access to divorce offers alternatives to enduring domestic abuse.
Greater tolerance for interracial unions means mixed-race families are more likely to experience less hostile communities.
Family flexibility can be functional in times of economic hardship as extended families expand to take in needy relatives.
The Nuclear Family
Slide 3 — The “Golden” Decade
The 1950s
The 1950s were the ideal for the American family.
[Exact percentage not provided in the slides] of Americans chose the 1950s as the best time for children to grow up.
Older voters between ages 50 and 64 chose that decade overwhelmingly.
All age groups of younger voters agreed that another decade was better than the 1950s.
Slide 4 — Why the “Ideal” Decade?
To a decade people grew more in any single year than in the eight years of the 1980s combined.
An average 30-year-old man could buy a median-priced home on only 15 percent of his salary. (The exact percentage should be checked against the original slide.)
Slide 5 — Why the “Ideal” Decade?
But it’s more than just a financial issue.
There were less complicated choices for kids or parents to grapple with.
There was more consistency in how people formed and maintained families.
Slide 6 — Why the “Ideal” Decade?
A coherent moral order served as a reference point for family norms.
Even people who found that moral order grossly unfair or oppressive often had something concrete to push against.
Slide 7 — Nostalgia, not duplication?
Heterosexual, male breadwinner, multiple children, stay-at-home mother.
Or even the parenting styles.
Slide 8 — Nostalgia, not duplication?
The feeling that the 1950s provided a family-friendly economic and social environment.
An easier social climate for kids to grow up in.
A feeling of security for a family’s long-term future.
The contrast between the optimism of the fifties and current misgivings about the future is key to contemporary nostalgia.
Life before and during the postwar boom
Slide 9 — Where did this hope and optimism come from?
Partly from families who were young adults in the 1950s.
They compared it to their often bleak, uncomfortable childhoods, especially the decades before.
Slide 10 — Pre-1950s family challenges
In the 1920s, after two centuries of child labor and income inequality,
For the first time in American history,
A majority of children started to live in families with a male breadwinner and a female homemaker.
This was soon undermined by the stock market crash of 1929 and the Great Depression.
Slide 11 — The Great Depression
Domestic violence increased.
While divorce rates were low, marital separations increased.
Birthrates plummeted.
Suicide rates were higher in the mid-1930s than in the 1980s.
Families were disrupted as thousands of people left home to search for work.
Slide 12 — World War II
World War II brought about the beginning of economic recovery.
BUT prosperity was still beyond people’s reach.
Women often faced being fired from their wartime jobs.
Veterans found it difficult to readjust to their prewar lives.
Slide 13 — Pre-1950s family challenges
By 1946, one in every three marriages was ending in divorce.
There was an acute housing shortage, forcing relatives or friends to live together.
Slide 14 — The 1950s postwar economic boom
The 1950s was the first time that a majority of Americans could even dream of creating a comfortable life with their immediate nuclear families.
One major reason was access to economic opportunity.
By 1960, a majority of the population had climbed to the middle-income range.
Slide 15 — Postwar economic boom
High school graduation rates were much lower than today.
There were jobs for people who dropped out of high school.
Or even graduated without significant reading skills.
Jobs were stable and had a future.
They would be the first generation to have a good chance at reaching middle-class status.
Without the benefit of a postsecondary education.
Slide 16 — Postwar economic boom
Millions of men from working-class, rural, or poorly educated family backgrounds.
Found employment in expanding steel, auto, appliance, construction, and shipping industries.
College education costs were low enough that more men went further in college than in decades before.
This enabled them to move into white-collar work.
Slide 17 — Postwar optimism
The experience of shared sacrifices during the Depression and World War II helped create belief in government’s ability to improve life.
People had confidence in institutions like government, business, and the economy.
Education was on the rise.
This general optimism affected people’s experiences.
Modern Americans yearn for the same kind of optimism, conflating it with the predominant family model.
Government support and economic security
Slide 18 — The socialistic underpinning of the 1950s boom
The 1950s had government social welfare programs that were more generous and widespread than now.
They were a major source of social mobility for young families.
Slide 19 — Government programs
The post-WWII GI Bill was an ambitious affirmative-action program.
About 40% of young men were eligible for veterans’ benefits.
The GI Bill paid most tuition costs for veterans who attended college.
It doubled the percentage of college attendees from prewar levels.
The government regularly mandated increases in the minimum wage to keep pace with inflation.
Slide 20 — Minimum wage
- An individual working full time all year earned above the poverty line for a family of three.
Slide 21 — Home ownership
The government reorganized mortgage lending, underwriting low down payments and long-term mortgages.
It offered subsidies to people who bought homes.
The government was essentially rewarding people for their investments in homes and education.
Slide 22 — Employment and work
Most corporations had promotion-from-within practices, keeping their original hires.
The 1950s was a less hurried age.
There were also limits to the work week.
The average worker was working a shorter workday than today.
Gender norms and family values
Slide 23 — Demographic change in the 1950s
The divorce rate had been declining steadily since the 1890s — plummeted after World War II.
The cost of marriage fell to a 100-year low.
Women who had worked during the Depression or WWII left their jobs.
Others left as soon as they became pregnant.
Fewer women remained employed compared with previous decades.
Nearly 60% of all children in the country were born in the 1950s to male-breadwinner and female-homemaker families. (The last statistic's wording is uncertain.)
Slide 24 — Gender norms in the 1950s
[Percentage not provided] of all children lived in two-parent homes.
Young mothers were likely to have young children close together in age.
This led to specializations in child care.
Slide 25 — Gender norms in the 1950s
The wage gap between young middle-class men and women increased.
Job segregation between the sexes increased.
Reduced the participation of women in paid employment.
Family and gender roles became much more predictable, orderly, and settled.
Slide 26 — Women's labor force participation before and after WWII
WWII boosted women's labor participation significantly.
World War II prompted one of the largest shifts in female labor supply in U.S. history.
Roughly six million additional women went to work during the war.
This increased the female labor force by 50 percent in a few short years.
Slide 27 — Women's labor force participation
Many new entrants worked in previously male-dominated jobs.
Manufacturing alone accounted for more than three million additional female workers between 1940 and March 1944.
The arrival of peace ended the wartime boom in female employment almost as quickly as it began.
Slide 28 — Gender norms in the 1950s
Divorce rates were relatively low.
The percentage of children living with both biological parents was higher than in earlier prewar decades or today.
Slide 29 — Family values in the 1950s
Special emphasis on the importance of home as an investment.
Investing both time and money in the nuclear family.
Led to a decline in neighborhood ties and extended kinship ties.
Young couples moved farther away from parents and kin, thereby weakening ties to extended kin networks.
The nuclear family, built on the relationship between husband and wife, was the foundation of modern society.
Slide 30 — Family values in the 1950s
We see the growth in family education specialists, marriage counselors, and columns in government pamphlets.
And overt or covert social pressure.
TV shows were reinforcing commitment to the newly formed nuclear family unit.
Media, myth-making, and what was hidden
Slide 31 — Media-induced family values
These TV shows were not reflective of the way families really lived.
People did not watch those shows to see their lives reflected back at them.
They watched to see how families were supposed to behave.
They also wanted reassurance that they were moving in the correct direction.
These sitcoms were simultaneously entertainment, instructional manuals, and moral lessons for a better way of organizing marriage and family.
They suggested there were right answers and surefire ways to raise children.
Slide 32 — Who was targeted by the media?
The 1950s sitcoms were aimed at:
Young couples who had married young.
Women who had to give up financial freedom and jobs after WWII.
Veterans whose kids resisted attempts to reassert parental authority.
Individuals threatened by the changing racial and ethnic mix of suburban America.
Slide 33 — Media-induced family values
Media created an image of a perfect oasis.
Lovely homes and technologically advanced appliances.
Happy families following the paterfamilias model, where mothers are never bored or irritated.
Kids were expected to have dinner with the family while getting their latest dose of moral instruction.
Slide 34 — Media-induced family values
Couples could construct marriages that were much happier than their parents' marriages.
They could devote far more time to their children.
Parents could offer educational opportunities that increased their children's satisfaction in life.
Slide 35 — What was left hidden in the 1950s?
There was a lack of media coverage and acknowledgment of abuse and domestic violence.
There may have been a systematic underreporting of these issues.
Victims of child abuse, incest, alcoholism, spousal rape, and domestic abuse had few resources or no place to turn.
Until well into the 1970s.
Slide 36 — What was left hidden in the 1950s?
There was intolerance toward people defined as outsiders based on race, ethnicity, religion, sexuality, and the “red menace.”
Family stability and community life did depend on discrimination against women, gay people, and political dissidents.
Almost all married-couple families were racially homogeneous.
Living in homogeneous neighborhoods and similar family patterns allowed people to feel a sense of belonging.
Slide 37 — What was left hidden in the 1950s?
Women were unable to take out loans or even credit cards in their own names.
They were excluded from juries in many states.
A lack of equality in marriage led some women to remain in unhappy marriages.
Slide 38 — The 1950s nostalgia trap
As nuclear families moved into suburbs,
They moved away from social networks.
But they formed new relationships with people who had children of similar ages.
They became involved in PTA, joined bridge clubs, and went bowling.
There was a strong sense of community, even though it was a product of exclusion or repression.
The final question asks who pays the price for the image of a mythologized, homogeneous society, and whether that price is too high.