essay about an nuclear family

Nuclear Family Functions In Sociology

Charlotte Nickerson

Research Assistant at Harvard University

Undergraduate at Harvard University

Charlotte Nickerson is a student at Harvard University obsessed with the intersection of mental health, productivity, and design.

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Saul Mcleod, PhD

Editor-in-Chief for Simply Psychology

BSc (Hons) Psychology, MRes, PhD, University of Manchester

Saul Mcleod, PhD., is a qualified psychology teacher with over 18 years of experience in further and higher education. He has been published in peer-reviewed journals, including the Journal of Clinical Psychology.

Olivia Guy-Evans, MSc

Associate Editor for Simply Psychology

BSc (Hons) Psychology, MSc Psychology of Education

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A nuclear family is a family unit consisting of an adult male and female and dependent children. It is regarded by some sociologists (in particular functionalists) as the basic universal form of family structure.

The (white) nuclear family is sometimes referred to as the cereal packet family, because of its frequent portrayal by advertisers as the norm.

The concept of the nuclear family is thought to have arisen in the Western world during the Industrial Revolution, when families left farms and moved to small towns and cities for work. During this time, young people began to delay marriage and childbearing, living instead with their parents until they had established a career.

Functionalists such as Parsons suggest that the nuclear family replaced the extended family as the dominant form in industrial societies because it provided a better “fit”, and more closely matched the needs of society.

Despite the fact that by 2000 only 21% of all house holds consisted of a married or cohabiting couple with dependent children, the notion of the nuclear family remains central to family ideology.

Sociologists and politicians of the New Right frequently suggest that many social problems in Britain stem from the fact that not enough children are being brought up in stable, two-parent families.

Key Takeaways

• A nuclear family is a family consisting of of 2 generations, husband and wife and immature children who constitute a unit from the rest of the community.
• The term “nuclear family” is commonly used in the United States, where it was first coined by the sociologist Talcott Parsons in 1955. It has been suggested that the nuclear family is a universal human social grouping.
• Nuclear family is not universal, the structure of the family changes as the needs of the society changes. Pre-industrial families were extended families with multiple generations living together, where as post industrial families needed to be
• However, some scholars argue that the nuclear family is not a natural or inevitable human institution but rather a product of specific historical and cultural circumstances.
• In sociology, the nuclear family has been historically treated as the basic unit of social organization, but this has come into question over the past several decades, as the structure of families has become more and more diverse.

Functions of the Nuclear Family

Marxists believe that the family is a tool of capitalism and its main function is to maintain capitalism and reinforce social inequalities.

According to Marxism, the monogamous nuclear family emerged with capitalism. Before capitalism, traditional and tribal societies were classless and did not have private property.

Instead, property was collectively owned, and this was reflected in family structures.

An isolated nuclear family means that men can confirm whether a child belongs to them and ensure that wealth remains in the family through private inheritance.

Ultimately, however, this arrangement served to reproduce inequality. As the children of the rich grew into wealth, the children of the poor remained. Thus, the nuclear family served to benefit the bourgeois more than the proletariat.

A nuclear family system, one in which nuclear families live by themselves independent from the families they grew up in, is thought to be particularly well adopted to the needs of the American, and many other western economies, for a fluid and mobile labor market (Sussman, 1958).

Patriarchal Ideology

Feminists are critical of the family as a social institutions. They believe that the family is a tool of female oppression and in particular the nuclear family serves the needs of men rather than women.

This is through issues such as unequal division of domestic labour and domestic violence.

Some feminists view the function of the nuclear family as a place where patriarchal values are learned by individuals, which in turn add to the patriarchal society .

Young girls may be socialized to believe that inequality and oppression is a normal part of being a woman and boys are socialized to believe that they are superior and have authority over women.

Feminists often believe that the nuclear family teaches children gender roles which translate to gender roles in wider society.

For instance, girls may learn to accept that being a housewife is the only possible or acceptable role for women. Some feminists also believe that the division of labor is unequal in nuclear families, with women and girls accepting subservient roles in the household.

Murdock: Four Universal Residual Functions

Murdock (1949) claimed that the nuclear family performs four functions that benefit society because they reduce the potential for chaos and conflict and consequently bring about relatively well ordered, structured and predictable societies

Socialization : The family is the primary socializing agent for children. Parents teach their children the norms and values of society.

Economic stability : The family provides economic stability for its members. In many families, both parents work to earn an income.

Reproductive/Procreative : The nuclear family provides new members of society, without which society would cease to exist.

Sexual relationships : The family as an institution also regulates sexual behavior. Many societies, for example, have historically forbidden sex outside the family-creating bond of marriage.

Primary Socialization

According to Parsons (1951), although the nuclear family performs functions that are reduced in comparison to what it did in the past, it is still the only institution that can perform the core functions of primary socialization and the stabilization of adult personalities.

Primary socialization refers to the early period in a person”s life where they learn and develop themselves through interactions and experiences around them. This results in a child learning the attitudes, values, and actions appropriate to individuals as members of a particular culture.

The Stabilization of Adult Personalities

The stabilization of adult personalities, otherwise known as “warm bath theory,” emphasizes the emotional security found within marital relationships.

This stabilization serves to balance out the stresses and strains of life faced by most adults.

In addition, the stabilization of adult personalities within marriage allows adults to act on the child-like dimension of their personality by playing with their children, using their toys, and so forth (Parsons, 1951).

Another factor that aids the stabilization of adult personalities is the sexual division of labor within nuclear families.

Within isolated nuclear families, people are allocated particular roles in order to allow the unit to function correctly. There are the aforementioned expressive and instrumental roles (Parsons, 1951).

Instrumental and Expressive Roles

Murdock argued that nuclear families consist of instrumental and expressive roles . Instrumental roles provide financial support and establish family status, while expressive roles involve providing emotional support and physical care.

In a 20th-century view of the nuclear family, the father is typically the head of the household and is responsible for providing for the family financially. The mother is typically responsible for taking care of the home and raising the children.

Parsons suggested that children needed to grow up in a family in which the instrumental and expressive roles are performed by the respective parents if the children were to develop “stable adult personalities”.

Parsons’ understanding of expressive and instrumental roles was derived from, and constituted a reflection of, middle-class American society in the 1950s.

Disadvantages of the Nuclear Family

Postmodernists have called the nuclear family an inherently fragile structure, prosporous only in a time marked by especially easy to come by home ownership and economic progress during the post-war boom.

Proponents of this view argue that the nuclear family is beset by a number of serious problems. They point to high rates of divorce and single parenthood, as well as to the difficulty many families have in maintaining close relationships (Bengtson, 2001).

Even dynamics as common as sibling rivalry and parent-child differences can place tension on a small family with little contact with other members of an extended family. The lack of a support network can make it difficult for nuclear families to deal with problems, leading to further isolation and feelings of loneliness or helplessness (Bengtson, 2001).

For children in particular, growing up in a nuclear family can be quite difficult. With both parents working full-time, many kids feel neglected or abandoned. In some cases, this can lead to serious behavioral problems.

However, not all families are functional. Some families may be considered dysfunctional due to a variety of factors such as alcoholism, drug addiction, mental illness, physical abuse, or simply a lack of love and communication.

When a family is dysfunctional, it can have a negative impact on the individuals involved as well as on society as a whole. Children from dysfunctional families are more likely to experience problems in school, mental health issues, and substance abuse problems. They may also be more likely to engage in criminal activity (Bertrand, 1962).

Additionally, children in nuclear families often don not have the benefit of learning from extended family members such as grandparents or cousins. They also miss out on the opportunity to develop close relationships with those relatives.

Researchers have denied the functionality of the nuclear family – in the sense of being isolated and socially mobile – since the 1960s (Cervantes, 1965).

Indeed, the family is not an isolated unit but one that is linked to other families through marriage, blood ties, and friendship networks. The family functions within a community of kin and neighbors where information, cultural values, and material resources are exchanged (Friedlander, 1963).

Even though the nuclear family has its own private domain – the home – its members cannot avoid interacting with people outside the immediate family. In reality, then, the nuclear family is embedded in a web of social relations.

The structure of the nuclear family has also been critiqued on economic grounds. Critics argue that the nuclear family is an inefficient way to organize society because it requires duplicating services that could be provided more efficiently by the government or businesses.

For example, instead of each family having its own washing machine, all the families in a neighborhood could share a laundromat. Similarly, daycare, eldercare, and schooling could be provided more efficiently on a community-wide basis rather than by individual families.

The nuclear family is also criticized for being too small to meet all an individual”s needs. In particular, it is argued that the nuclear family cannot provide the same level of emotional support as a larger extended family.

Additionally, because the nuclear family is so small, it is often unable to provide adequate financial support to its members during times of need. This can lead to feelings of insecurity and anxiety, particularly among children and older adults (Bengtson, 2001).

The nuclear family has been declining in prevalence since the late 20th century as a result of factors such as increased divorce rates, cohabitation, single-parent households, and same-sex marriage.

Economic stressors  such as the Great Recession, stagnating wages, and the inflation of housing prices have also contributed to the decline of the nuclear family through reducing access to isolated housing.

Multigenerational, non-nuclear households are on the rise as a way to reduce costs and the burden of childcare distributed to one person in the household.

The rise of women in the workforce has also lessened a need for defined nuclear family roles, as there is less need for a husband to be the sole breadwinner. Another explanation is that people are delaying marriage and childbearing until later  in life, allowing them to develop deeper ties within their birth families and communities. The median age of first marriage in the United States has risen from 20 for women and 23 for men in 1950 to 27 for women and 29 for men in 2018 (Hemez, 2020).

Alternative Family Structures

Non-nuclear families can take on many different forms, including single-parent households, same-sex parents, adoptive parents, childless couples, blended families, and more.

There are a variety of reasons why a family may not be considered nuclear. In some cases, one or both parents may be absent due to death, divorce, or other circumstances. In other instances, the family may simply choose not to live together in a traditional nuclear arrangement.

There are many advantages to non-nuclear families. For example, single-parent households often provide a more nurturing and supportive environment for children than two-parent homes, especially in cases where the family would have otherwise been affected by abuse.

Same-sex parents can provide role models of healthy relationships for their children, and adoptive parents often create tightly-knit bonds with their children that are just as strong as any biological connection.

One historical example of a non-nuclear family is the extensive nuclear family, which is common in many cultures around the world. In an extended family, grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins all live together in one household.

This arrangement provides support and stability for all members of the family, and offers a built-in network of caretakers for children. Increasingly over the past few decades, a new family structure is taking shape: grandparents raising their grandchildren.

This may be necessary when parents are not available to care for their children, such as by mental or medical or substance abuse issues.

Althusser, L., & Balibar, E. (1970). Reading Capital (B. Brewster, Trans.). London: New Left. (Original work published 1968) Brown, H. (2012). Marx on gender and the family: A critical study (Vol. 39). Brill.

Bales, R. F., & Parsons, T. (2014). Family: Socialization and interaction process. Routledge.

Bell, N. W. and E. F. Vogel (eds.) (1968). A Modern Introduction to the Family. Glencoe: Free Press.

Bengtson, V. L. (2001). Beyond the nuclear family: the increasing importance of multigenerational bonds: the burgess award lecture. Journal of marriage and family, 63 (1), 1-16.

Bertrand, A. L. (1962). School attendance and attainment: Function and dysfunction of school and family social systems. Social Forces, 40 (3), 228-233.

Cervantes, L. F. (1965). Family background, primary relationships, and the high school dropout. Journal of Marriage and the Family , 218-223.

Della Porta, D., & Diani, M. (2014). Introduction: The field of social movement studies.

Friedlander, F. (1963). Underlying sources of job satisfaction. Journal of Applied Psychology, 47 (4), 246.

Gamache, S. J. (1997). Confronting nuclear family bias in stepfamily research. Marriage & Family Review, 26 (1-2), 41-69.

Hemez, P. (2020). Distributions of age at first marriage, 1960-2018. Family Profiles, FP-20, 9.

Murdock, G. P. (1949). Social Structure . Macmillan.

Parsons, T. (1943). The kinship system of the contemporary United States. American anthropologist, 45 (1), 22-38.

Parsons, T. (1959). The Social Structure of the Family, in Ruth Anshen (ed.), The Family:Its Functions and Destiny . Harper.

Stern, B. J. (1948). Engels on the Family. Science & Society , 42-64.

Sussman, M. B. (1958). The isolated nuclear family: Fact or fiction. Soc. Probs. , 6, 333.

Zelditch, M. (1955). Role differentiation in the nuclear family: A comparative study. Family, Socialization and Interaction Process, 307-351.

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The Nuclear Family Was No Mistake: A Response to David Brooks

We're growing more disconnected, but the nuclear familly isn't at fault..

Posted February 27, 2020 | Reviewed by Matt Huston

In a thought-provoking article covering an array of societal challenges, David Brooks declares that “ The Nuclear Family was a Mistake .” I share many of the concerns he articulates about social fragmentation, but I believe he errs by implying that—in a maelstrom of change and growing disconnection—the nuclear family is the villain in our story.

From the standpoint of biology, sociology, psychology, or of different faiths, it is widely accepted that little humans have advantages if they are looked after by two adults sharing a bond. Although scholars can argue the reasons why, and there are plenty of exceptions to the general case, a strong commitment between two parents is a fundamental good. That will often take the form of a nuclear family, which may or may not be further connected in a community. Further, I believe there is substantial evidence that the nuclear family has been around a lot longer than implied in Brook’s piece (e.g., see this brief overview by European historian, Peter Laslett). The nuclear family is one of the fundamental building blocks of family, extended families, and communities.

Brooks acknowledges the benefits of two-parent families and of marriage , refining his focus from the sweeping accusation of the title to detached nuclear families. Disconnection and isolation are his real targets, and those are deeply important problems. But, in his article, the nuclear family seems like a passenger along for the ride in a car leaving the scene of the crimes Brooks describes—when the car is driven by us. By us, I mean most all of us, motivated by our desires for autonomy and freedom.

In fact, Brooks states, “We’ve made life freer for individuals and more unstable for families.” That is a profound truth, and it describes what gets too little attention from Brooks. He says the market wants us to live in greater isolation, but maybe it’s us doing the wanting. He is especially disturbed that autonomy and separated living is so clearly displayed in countries with the most concentrated wealth. A lot of the problems we see may be caused by what most people want—even if those things also have downsides for individuals and society.

I remember being in a room of scholars 20 or more years ago when family historian Barbara Dafoe Whitehead argued that much of the increase in family fragmentation then observed was driven by growing affluence. She was not referring to wealth inequality but to the growing affluence across America that gave wings to autonomy.

Brooks gives the example of how many fewer elderly Americans now live with kin than in the past. An unasked question is, how many elderly Americans want to have less autonomy and live with their kin? Many elderly adults in America are isolated and at increased risk. More than a few want increased connection with family and a growing number simply have no kin . But many others cling to their autonomy and will fight to keep it until reality forces them to do otherwise. In the past, few people had the option to preserve autonomy in this way. Some forms of living that Brooks extols as better in the past were quite likely, and largely, driven by poverty, fear , and necessity.

I am not arguing that there is virtue in isolation and atomization. I do think we are losing, or letting go of, common spaces for connection in our lives. Many of us want what may not actually be best for us or those around us. Paul Amato and colleagues wrote an insightful book on the growing trend for couples to isolate and be Alone Together . It’s Bowling Alone for two. This trend toward isolation has many causes, and, as Brooks notes, the consequences are different for those with and without means. As Sarah Halpern-Meekin has written, those in poverty are not merely suffering from economic poverty but also from Social Poverty . She suggests this is a growing problem for all, with particular challenges for those struggling with economic hardship.

What do people seem to want? You can infer the most about what people truly desire when they have more options and fewer constraints. As a group, those with higher education and incomes—those with the most options—are now over-represented among those with stable marriages and nuclear families. Although it might have changed since they first wrote on the subject, Katherine Edin and Maria Kefalas found that the desire to marry exists among the poor despite barriers in reaching that goal. People have preferences, the expression of which is affected by their quality of opportunity.

Not only are those with more education choosing marriage, they are increasingly sorting into two-parent families with the best odds for a stable family life. Many scholars, including Andrew Cherlin and Brad Wilcox and Wendy Wang , have remarked on the resulting chasm between the haves and have nots. Not everyone wants marriage, and fewer adults than ever before desire to be parents, but those with the best options seem to be the most likely to choose a marriage-based, nuclear family. As Cherlin suggests and Brooks implies, this fact is becoming a multiplier of income and wealth inequality, but I do not think having fewer nuclear families is going to lead to having more extended families with connections. Brooks errs in making the nuclear family the fall guy for very real and complex problems in family inequality and individual opportunity.

I strongly agree with Brooks that isolation is winning out over community. Along with detailing various types of government efforts that he believes may help in the broader context, he brings his essay home by focusing on ways we can work toward creating more social connection, partly by forged families. This is, in part, the province of commitment on a personal level, where we can choose to connect and share our lives with others. While we naturally eschew constraints in favor of freedom, commitment is making a choice to give up some choices—it is choosing to be constrained for something better. There is more than one way to forge connectedness rooted in commitment.

Note: This essay is adapted slightly from one that was published as part of a series of article organized by the Institute of Family Studies in reaction to the article by Brooks.

Scott Stanley, Ph.D. , is a psychologist and a research professor at the University of Denver, where he conducts studies on marriage, cohabitation, and commitment.

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The Nuclear Family Was a Mistake

The family structure we’ve held up as the cultural ideal for the past half century has been a catastrophe for many. It’s time to figure out better ways to live together.

T he scene is one many of us have somewhere in our family history: Dozens of people celebrating Thanksgiving or some other holiday around a makeshift stretch of family tables—siblings, cousins, aunts, uncles, great-aunts. The grandparents are telling the old family stories for the 37th time. “It was the most beautiful place you’ve ever seen in your life,” says one, remembering his first day in America. “There were lights everywhere … It was a celebration of light! I thought they were for me.”

The oldsters start squabbling about whose memory is better. “It was cold that day,” one says about some faraway memory. “What are you talking about? It was May, late May,” says another. The young children sit wide-eyed, absorbing family lore and trying to piece together the plotline of the generations.

After the meal, there are piles of plates in the sink, squads of children conspiring mischievously in the basement. Groups of young parents huddle in a hallway, making plans. The old men nap on couches, waiting for dessert. It’s the extended family in all its tangled, loving, exhausting glory.

This particular family is the one depicted in Barry Levinson’s 1990 film, Avalon , based on his own childhood in Baltimore. Five brothers came to America from Eastern Europe around the time of World War I and built a wallpaper business. For a while they did everything together, like in the old country. But as the movie goes along, the extended family begins to split apart. Some members move to the suburbs for more privacy and space. One leaves for a job in a different state. The big blowup comes over something that seems trivial but isn’t: The eldest of the brothers arrives late to a Thanksgiving dinner to find that the family has begun the meal without him.

“You cut the turkey without me?” he cries. “Your own flesh and blood! … You cut the turkey?” The pace of life is speeding up. Convenience, privacy, and mobility are more important than family loyalty. “The idea that they would eat before the brother arrived was a sign of disrespect,” Levinson told me recently when I asked him about that scene. “That was the real crack in the family. When you violate the protocol, the whole family structure begins to collapse.”

As the years go by in the movie, the extended family plays a smaller and smaller role. By the 1960s, there’s no extended family at Thanksgiving. It’s just a young father and mother and their son and daughter, eating turkey off trays in front of the television. In the final scene, the main character is living alone in a nursing home, wondering what happened. “In the end, you spend everything you’ve ever saved, sell everything you’ve ever owned, just to exist in a place like this.”

“In my childhood,” Levinson told me, “you’d gather around the grandparents and they would tell the family stories … Now individuals sit around the TV, watching other families’ stories.” The main theme of Avalon , he said, is “the decentralization of the family. And that has continued even further today. Once, families at least gathered around the television. Now each person has their own screen.”

This is the story of our times—the story of the family, once a dense cluster of many siblings and extended kin, fragmenting into ever smaller and more fragile forms. The initial result of that fragmentation, the nuclear family, didn’t seem so bad. But then, because the nuclear family is so brittle, the fragmentation continued. In many sectors of society, nuclear families fragmented into single-parent families, single-parent families into chaotic families or no families.

If you want to summarize the changes in family structure over the past century, the truest thing to say is this: 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. The shift from bigger and interconnected extended families to smaller and detached nuclear families ultimately led to a familial system that liberates the rich and ravages the working-class and the poor.

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This article is about that process, and the devastation it has wrought—and about how Americans are now groping to build new kinds of family and find better ways to live.

The Era of Extended Clans

Through the early parts of American history, most people lived in what, by today’s standards, were big, sprawling households. In 1800, three-quarters of American workers were farmers. Most of the other quarter worked in small family businesses, like dry-goods stores. People needed a lot of labor to run these enterprises. It was not uncommon for married couples to have seven or eight children. In addition, there might be stray aunts, uncles, and cousins, as well as unrelated servants, apprentices, and farmhands. (On some southern farms, of course, enslaved African Americans were also an integral part of production and work life.)

Steven Ruggles, a professor of history and population studies at the University of Minnesota, calls these “corporate families”—social units organized around a family business. According to Ruggles, in 1800, 90 percent of American families were corporate families. Until 1850, roughly three-quarters of Americans older than 65 lived with their kids and grandkids. Nuclear families existed, but they were surrounded by extended or corporate families.

Read: What number of kids makes parents happiest?

Extended families have two great strengths. The first is resilience. An extended family is one or more families in a supporting web. Your spouse and children come first, but there are also cousins, in-laws, grandparents—a complex web of relationships among, say, seven, 10, or 20 people. If a mother dies, siblings, uncles, aunts, and grandparents are there to step in. If a relationship between a father and a child ruptures, others can fill the breach. Extended families have more people to share the unexpected burdens—when a kid gets sick in the middle of the day or when an adult unexpectedly loses a job.

A detached nuclear family, by contrast, is an intense set of relationships among, say, four people. If one relationship breaks, there are no shock absorbers. In a nuclear family, the end of the marriage means the end of the family as it was previously understood.

The second great strength of extended families is their socializing force. Multiple adults teach children right from wrong, how to behave toward others, how to be kind. Over the course of the 18th and 19th centuries, industrialization and cultural change began to threaten traditional ways of life. Many people in Britain and the United States doubled down on the extended family in order to create a moral haven in a heartless world. According to Ruggles, the prevalence of extended families living together roughly doubled from 1750 to 1900 , and this way of life was more common than at any time before or since.

During the Victorian era, the idea of “hearth and home” became a cultural ideal. The home “is a sacred place, a vestal temple, a temple of the hearth watched over by Household Gods, before whose faces none may come but those whom they can receive with love,” the great Victorian social critic John Ruskin wrote. This shift was led by the upper-middle class, which was coming to see the family less as an economic unit and more as an emotional and moral unit, a rectory for the formation of hearts and souls.

But while extended families have strengths, they can also be exhausting and stifling. They allow little privacy; you are forced to be in daily intimate contact with people you didn’t choose. There’s more stability but less mobility. Family bonds are thicker, but individual choice is diminished. You have less space to make your own way in life. In the Victorian era, families were patriarchal, favoring men in general and first-born sons in particular.

As factories opened in the big U.S. cities, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, young men and women left their extended families to chase the American dream. These young people married as soon as they could. A young man on a farm might wait until 26 to get married; in the lonely city, men married at 22 or 23. From 1890 to 1960, the average age of first marriage dropped by 3.6 years for men and 2.2 years for women.

From September 2019: Daniel Markovits on how life became an endless, terrible competition

The families they started were nuclear families. The decline of multigenerational cohabiting families exactly mirrors the decline in farm employment. Children were no longer raised to assume economic roles—they were raised so that at adolescence they could fly from the nest, become independent, and seek partners of their own. They were raised not for embeddedness but for autonomy. By the 1920s, the nuclear family with a male breadwinner had replaced the corporate family as the dominant family form. By 1960, 77.5 percent of all children were living with their two parents, who were married, and apart from their extended family.

The Short, Happy Life of the Nuclear Family

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.”

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.

Today, only a minority of American households are traditional two-parent nuclear families and only one-third of American individuals live in this kind of family. That 1950–65 window was not normal. It was a freakish historical moment when all of society conspired, wittingly and not, to obscure the essential fragility of the nuclear family.

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.

For another thing, nuclear families in this era were much more connected to other nuclear families than they are today—constituting a “ modified extended family ,” as the sociologist Eugene Litwak calls it, “a coalition of nuclear families in a state of mutual dependence.” Even as late as the 1950s, before television and air-conditioning had fully caught on, people continued to live on one another’s front porches and were part of one another’s lives. Friends felt free to discipline one another’s children.

In his book The Lost City , the journalist Alan Ehrenhalt describes life in mid-century Chicago and its suburbs:

To be a young homeowner in a suburb like Elmhurst in the 1950s was to participate in a communal enterprise that only the most determined loner could escape: barbecues, coffee klatches, volleyball games, baby-sitting co-ops and constant bartering of household goods, child rearing by the nearest parents who happened to be around, neighbors wandering through the door at any hour without knocking—all these were devices by which young adults who had been set down in a wilderness of tract homes made a community. It was a life lived in public.

Finally, conditions in the wider society were ideal for family stability. The postwar period was a high-water mark of church attendance, unionization, social trust, and mass prosperity—all things that correlate with family cohesion. A man could relatively easily find a job that would allow him to be the breadwinner for a single-income family. By 1961, the median American man age 25 to 29 was earning nearly 400 percent more than his father had earned at about the same age.

In short, the period from 1950 to 1965 demonstrated that a stable society can be built around nuclear families—so long as women are relegated to the household, nuclear families are so intertwined that they are basically extended families by another name, and every economic and sociological condition in society is working together to support the institution.

Video: How the Nuclear Family Broke Down

Disintegration

But these conditions did not last. The constellation of forces that had briefly shored up the nuclear family began to fall away, and the sheltered family of the 1950s was supplanted by the stressed family of every decade since. Some of the strains were economic. Starting in the mid-’70s, young men’s wages declined, putting pressure on working-class families in particular. The major strains were cultural. Society became more individualistic and more self-oriented. People put greater value on privacy and autonomy. A rising feminist movement helped endow women with greater freedom to live and work as they chose.

Read: Gen-X women are caught in a generational tug-of-war

A study of women’s magazines by the sociologists Francesca Cancian and Steven L. Gordon found that from 1900 to 1979, themes of putting family before self dominated in the 1950s: “Love means self-sacrifice and compromise.” In the 1960s and ’70s, putting self before family was prominent: “Love means self-expression and individuality.” Men absorbed these cultural themes, too. The master trend in Baby Boomer culture generally was liberation—“Free Bird,” “Born to Run,” “Ramblin’ Man.”

Eli Finkel, a psychologist and marriage scholar at Northwestern University, has argued that since the 1960s, the dominant family culture has been the “self-expressive marriage.” “Americans,” he has written , “now look to marriage increasingly for self-discovery, self-esteem and personal growth.” Marriage, according to the sociologists Kathryn Edin and Maria Kefalas , “is no longer primarily about childbearing and childrearing. Now marriage is primarily about adult fulfillment.”

Read: An interview with Eli Finkel on how we expect too much from our romantic partners

This cultural shift was very good for some adults, but it was not so good for families generally. Fewer relatives are around in times of stress to help a couple work through them. If you married for love, staying together made less sense when the love died. This attenuation of marital ties may have begun during the late 1800s: The number of divorces increased about fifteenfold from 1870 to 1920, and then climbed more or less continuously through the first several decades of the nuclear-family era. As the intellectual historian Christopher Lasch noted in the late 1970s , the American family didn’t start coming apart in the 1960s; it had been “coming apart for more than 100 years.”

Americans today have less family than ever before. From 1970 to 2012, the share of households consisting of married couples with kids has been cut in half. In 1960, according to census data, just 13 percent of all households were single-person households. In 2018, that figure was 28 percent. In 1850, 75 percent of Americans older than 65 lived with relatives; by 1990, only 18 percent did.

Over the past two generations, people have spent less and less time in marriage—they are marrying later, if at all, and divorcing more. In 1950, 27 percent of marriages ended in divorce; today, about 45 percent do. In 1960, 72 percent of American adults were married. In 2017, nearly half of American adults were single. According to a 2014 report from the Urban Institute, roughly 90 percent of Baby Boomer women and 80 percent of Gen X women married by age 40, while only about 70 percent of late-Millennial women were expected to do so—the lowest rate in U.S. history. And while more than four-fifths of American adults in a 2019 Pew Research Center survey said that getting married is not essential to living a fulfilling life, it’s not just the institution of marriage they’re eschewing: In 2004, 33 percent of Americans ages 18 to 34 were living without a romantic partner, according to the General Social Survey; by 2018, that number was up to 51 percent.

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.

Over the past two generations, the physical space separating nuclear families has widened. Before, sisters-in-law shouted greetings across the street at each other from their porches. Kids would dash from home to home and eat out of whoever’s fridge was closest by. But lawns have grown more expansive and porch life has declined, creating a buffer of space that separates the house and family from anyone else. As Mandy Len Catron recently noted in The Atlantic , married people are less likely to visit parents and siblings, and less inclined to help them do chores or offer emotional support. A code of family self-sufficiency prevails: Mom, Dad, and the kids are on their own, with a barrier around their island home.

Finally, over the past two generations, families have grown more unequal. America now has two entirely different family regimes. Among the highly educated, family patterns are almost as stable as they were in the 1950s; among the less fortunate, family life is often utter chaos. There’s a reason for that divide: Affluent people have the resources to effectively buy extended family, in order to shore themselves up. Think of all the child-rearing labor affluent parents now buy that used to be done by extended kin: babysitting, professional child care, tutoring, coaching, therapy, expensive after-school programs. (For that matter, think of how the affluent can hire therapists and life coaches for themselves, as replacement for kin or close friends.) These expensive tools and services not only support children’s development and help prepare them to compete in the meritocracy; by reducing stress and time commitments for parents, they preserve the amity of marriage. Affluent conservatives often pat themselves on the back for having stable nuclear families. They preach that everybody else should build stable families too. But then they ignore one of the main reasons their own families are stable: They can afford to purchase the support that extended family used to provide—and that the people they preach at, further down the income scale, cannot.

Read: ‘Intensive’ parenting is a strategy for an age of inequality

In 1970, the family structures of the rich and poor did not differ that greatly. Now there is a chasm between them. As of 2005, 85 percent of children born to upper-middle-class families were living with both biological parents when the mom was 40. Among working-class families, only 30 percent were. According to a 2012 report from the National Center for Health Statistics, college-educated women ages 22 to 44 have a 78 percent chance of having their first marriage last at least 20 years. Women in the same age range with a high-school degree or less have only about a 40 percent chance. Among Americans ages 18 to 55, only 26 percent of the poor and 39 percent of the working class are currently married. In her book Generation Unbound , Isabel Sawhill, an economist at the Brookings Institution, cited research indicating that differences in family structure have “increased income inequality by 25 percent.” If the U.S. returned to the marriage rates of 1970, child poverty would be 20 percent lower. As Andrew Cherlin, a sociologist at Johns Hopkins University, once put it, “It is the privileged Americans who are marrying, and marrying helps them stay privileged.”

When you put everything together, 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. People who grow up in a nuclear family tend to have a more individualistic mind-set than people who grow up in a multigenerational extended clan. People with an individualistic mind-set tend to be less willing to sacrifice self for the sake of the family, and the result is more family disruption. People who grow up in disrupted families have more trouble getting the education they need to have prosperous careers. People who don’t have prosperous careers have trouble building stable families, because of financial challenges and other stressors. The children in those families become more isolated and more traumatized.

Read: The working-to-afford-child-care conundrum

Many people growing up in this era have no secure base from which to launch themselves and no well-defined pathway to adulthood. For those who have the human capital to explore, fall down, and have their fall cushioned, that means great freedom and opportunity—and for those who lack those resources, it tends to mean great confusion, drift, and pain.

Over the past 50 years, federal and state governments have tried to mitigate the deleterious effects of these trends. They’ve tried to increase marriage rates, push down divorce rates, boost fertility, and all the rest. The focus has always been on strengthening the nuclear family, not the extended family. Occasionally, a discrete program will yield some positive results, but the widening of family inequality continues unabated.

The people who suffer the most from the decline in family support are the vulnerable—especially children. In 1960, roughly 5 percent of children were born to unmarried women. Now about 40 percent are. The Pew Research Center reported that 11 percent of children lived apart from their father in 1960. In 2010, 27 percent did. Now about half of American children will spend their childhood with both biological parents. Twenty percent of young adults have no contact at all with their father (though in some cases that’s because the father is deceased). American children are more likely to live in a single-parent household than children from any other country.

Read: The divorce gap

We all know stable and loving single-parent families. 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. According to work by Richard V. Reeves , a co-director of the Center on Children and Families at the Brookings Institution, if you are born into poverty and raised by your married parents, you have an 80 percent chance of climbing out of it. If you are born into poverty and raised by an unmarried mother, you have a 50 percent chance of remaining stuck.

It’s not just the lack of relationships that hurts children; it’s the churn. According to a 2003 study that Andrew Cherlin cites , 12 percent of American kids had lived in at least three “parental partnerships” before they turned 15. The transition moments, when mom’s old partner moves out or her new partner moves in, are the hardest on kids, Cherlin shows.

While children are the vulnerable group most obviously affected by recent changes in family structure, they are not the only one.

Consider single men. Extended families provided men with the fortifying influences of male bonding and female companionship. Today many American males spend the first 20 years of their life without a father and the next 15 without a spouse. Kay Hymowitz of the Manhattan Institute has spent a good chunk of her career examining the wreckage caused by the decline of the American family , and cites evidence showing that, in the absence of the connection and meaning that family provides, unmarried men are less healthy—alcohol and drug abuse are common—earn less, and die sooner than married men.

For women, the nuclear-family structure imposes different pressures. Though women have benefited greatly from the loosening of traditional family structures—they have more freedom to choose the lives they want—many mothers who decide to raise their young children without extended family nearby find that they have chosen a lifestyle that is brutally hard and isolating. The situation is exacerbated by the fact that women still spend significantly more time on housework and child care than men do, according to recent data. Thus, the reality we see around us: stressed, tired mothers trying to balance work and parenting, and having to reschedule work when family life gets messy.

Read: The loneliness of early parenthood

Without extended families, older Americans have also suffered. According to the AARP, 35 percent of Americans over 45 say they are chronically lonely . Many older people are now “elder orphans,” with no close relatives or friends to take care of them. In 2015, The New York Times ran an article called “ The Lonely Death of George Bell ,” about a family-less 72-year-old man who died alone and rotted in his Queens apartment for so long that by the time police found him, his body was unrecognizable.

Finally, because groups that have endured greater levels of discrimination tend to have more fragile families, African Americans have suffered disproportionately in the era of the detached nuclear family. Nearly half of black families are led by an unmarried single woman, compared with less than one-sixth of white families. (The high rate of black incarceration guarantees a shortage of available men to be husbands or caretakers of children.) According to census data from 2010, 25 percent of black women over 35 have never been married, compared with 8 percent of white women. Two-thirds of African American children lived in single-parent families in 2018, compared with a quarter of white children. Black single-parent families are most concentrated in precisely those parts of the country in which slavery was most prevalent. Research by John Iceland, a professor of sociology and demography at Penn State, suggests that the differences between white and black family structure explain 30 percent of the affluence gap between the two groups.

In 2004, the journalist and urbanist Jane Jacobs published her final book , an assessment of North American society called Dark Age Ahead . At the core of her argument was the idea that families are “rigged to fail.” The structures that once supported the family no longer exist, she wrote. Jacobs was too pessimistic about many things, but for millions of people, the shift from big and/or extended families to detached nuclear families has indeed been a disaster.

As the social structures that support the family have decayed, the debate about it has taken on a mythical quality. Social conservatives insist that we can bring the nuclear family back. But the conditions that made for stable nuclear families in the 1950s are never returning. Conservatives have nothing to say to the kid whose dad has split, whose mom has had three other kids with different dads; “go live in a nuclear family” is really not relevant advice. If only a minority of households are traditional nuclear families, that means the majority are something else: single parents, never-married parents, blended families, grandparent-headed families, serial partnerships, and so on. Conservative ideas have not caught up with this reality.

Read: How politics in Trump’s America divides families

Progressives, meanwhile, still talk like self-expressive individualists of the 1970s: People should have the freedom to pick whatever family form works for them. And, of course, they should. But many of the new family forms do not work well for most people—and while progressive elites say that all family structures are fine, their own behavior suggests that they believe otherwise. As the sociologist W. Bradford Wilcox has pointed out, highly educated progressives may talk a tolerant game on family structure when speaking about society at large, but they have extremely strict expectations for their own families. When Wilcox asked his University of Virginia students if they thought having a child out of wedlock was wrong, 62 percent said it was not wrong. When he asked the students how their own parents would feel if they themselves had a child out of wedlock, 97 percent said their parents would “freak out.” In a recent survey by the Institute for Family Studies, college-educated Californians ages 18 to 50 were less likely than those who hadn’t graduated from college to say that having a baby out of wedlock is wrong. But they were more likely to say that personally they did not approve of having a baby out of wedlock.

In other words, while social conservatives have a philosophy of family life they can’t operationalize, because it no longer is relevant, progressives have no philosophy of family life at all, because they don’t want to seem judgmental. The sexual revolution has come and gone, and it’s left us with no governing norms of family life, no guiding values, no articulated ideals. On this most central issue, our shared culture often has nothing relevant to say—and so for decades things have been falling apart.

Read: Why is it hard for liberals to talk about ‘family values’?

The good news is that human beings adapt, even if politics are slow to do so. When one family form stops working, people cast about for something new—sometimes finding it in something very old.

Redefining Kinship

In the beginning was the band. For tens of thousands of years, people commonly lived in small bands of, say, 25 people, which linked up with perhaps 20 other bands to form a tribe. People in the band went out foraging for food and brought it back to share. They hunted together, fought wars together, made clothing for one another, looked after one another’s kids. In every realm of life, they relied on their extended family and wider kin.

Except they didn’t define kin the way we do today. We think of kin as those biologically related to us. But throughout most of human history, kinship was something you could create.

Anthropologists have been arguing for decades about what exactly kinship is. Studying traditional societies, they have found wide varieties of created kinship among different cultures. For the Ilongot people of the Philippines, people who migrated somewhere together are kin. For the New Guineans of the Nebilyer Valley, kinship is created by sharing grease —the life force found in mother’s milk or sweet potatoes. The Chuukese people in Micronesia have a saying: “My sibling from the same canoe”; if two people survive a dangerous trial at sea, then they become kin. On the Alaskan North Slope, the Inupiat name their children after dead people, and those children are considered members of their namesake’s family.

In other words, for vast stretches of human history people lived in extended families consisting of not just people they were related to but people they chose to cooperate with. An international research team recently did a genetic analysis of people who were buried together —and therefore presumably lived together—34,000 years ago in what is now Russia. They found that the people who were buried together were not closely related to one another. In a study of 32 present-day foraging societies , primary kin—parents, siblings, and children—usually made up less than 10 percent of a residential band. Extended families in traditional societies may or may not have been genetically close, but they were probably emotionally closer than most of us can imagine. In a beautiful essay on kinship, Marshall Sahlins, an anthropologist at the University of Chicago, says that kin in many such societies share a “mutuality of being.” The late religion scholar J. Prytz-Johansen wrote that kinship is experienced as an “inner solidarity” of souls. The late South African anthropologist Monica Wilson described kinsmen as “mystically dependent” on one another. Kinsmen belong to one another, Sahlins writes, because they see themselves as “members of one another.”

Back in the 17th and 18th centuries, when European Protestants came to North America, their relatively individualistic culture existed alongside Native Americans’ very communal culture. In his book Tribe , Sebastian Junger describes what happened next: While European settlers kept defecting to go live with Native American families, almost no Native Americans ever defected to go live with European families. Europeans occasionally captured Native Americans and forced them to come live with them. They taught them English and educated them in Western ways. But almost every time they were able, the indigenous Americans fled. European settlers were sometimes captured by Native Americans during wars and brought to live in Native communities. They rarely tried to run away. This bothered the Europeans. They had the superior civilization, so why were people voting with their feet to go live in another way?

When you read such accounts, you can’t help but wonder whether our civilization has somehow made a gigantic mistake.

We can’t go back, of course. Western individualists are no longer the kind of people who live in prehistoric bands. We may even no longer be the kind of people who were featured in the early scenes of Avalon . We value privacy and individual freedom too much.

Our culture is oddly stuck. We want stability and rootedness, but also mobility, dynamic capitalism, and the liberty to adopt the lifestyle we choose. We want close families, but not the legal, cultural, and sociological constraints that made them possible. We’ve seen the wreckage left behind by the collapse of the detached nuclear family. We’ve seen the rise of opioid addiction, of suicide, of depression, of inequality—all products, in part, of a family structure that is too fragile, and a society that is too detached, disconnected, and distrustful. And yet we can’t quite return to a more collective world. The words the historians Steven Mintz and Susan Kellogg wrote in 1988 are even truer today: “Many Americans are groping for a new paradigm of American family life, but in the meantime a profound sense of confusion and ambivalence reigns.”

From Nuclear Families to Forged Families

Yet recent signs suggest at least the possibility that a new family paradigm is emerging. Many of the statistics I’ve cited are dire. But they describe the past—what got us to where we are now. In reaction to family chaos, accumulating evidence suggests, the prioritization of family is beginning to make a comeback. Americans are experimenting with new forms of kinship and extended family in search of stability.

Usually behavior changes before we realize that a new cultural paradigm has emerged. Imagine hundreds of millions of tiny arrows. In times of social transformation, they shift direction—a few at first, and then a lot. Nobody notices for a while, but then eventually people begin to recognize that a new pattern, and a new set of values, has emerged.

That may be happening now—in part out of necessity but in part by choice. Since the 1970s, and especially since the 2008 recession, economic pressures have pushed Americans toward greater reliance on family. Starting around 2012, the share of children living with married parents began to inch up. And college students have more contact with their parents than they did a generation ago. We tend to deride this as helicopter parenting or a failure to launch, and it has its excesses. But the educational process is longer and more expensive these days, so it makes sense that young adults rely on their parents for longer than they used to.

In 1980, only 12 percent of Americans lived in multigenerational households. But the financial crisis of 2008 prompted a sharp rise in multigenerational homes. Today 20 percent of Americans— 64 million people, an all-time high —live in multigenerational homes.

The revival of the extended family has largely been driven by young adults moving back home. In 2014, 35 percent of American men ages 18 to 34 lived with their parents . In time this shift might show itself to be mostly healthy, impelled not just by economic necessity but by beneficent social impulses ; polling data suggest that many young people are already looking ahead to helping their parents in old age.

Another chunk of the revival is attributable to seniors moving in with their children. The percentage of seniors who live alone peaked around 1990. Now more than a fifth of Americans 65 and over live in multigenerational homes. This doesn’t count the large share of seniors who are moving to be close to their grandkids but not into the same household.

Immigrants and people of color—many of whom face greater economic and social stress—are more likely to live in extended-family households. More than 20 percent of Asians, black people, and Latinos live in multigenerational households, compared with 16 percent of white people. As America becomes more diverse, extended families are becoming more common.

African Americans have always relied on extended family more than white Americans do. “Despite the forces working to separate us—slavery, Jim Crow, forced migration, the prison system, gentrification—we have maintained an incredible commitment to each other,” Mia Birdsong, the author of the forthcoming book How We Show Up , told me recently. “The reality is, black families are expansive, fluid, and brilliantly rely on the support, knowledge, and capacity of ‘the village’ to take care of each other. Here’s an illustration: The white researcher/social worker/whatever sees a child moving between their mother’s house, their grandparents’ house, and their uncle’s house and sees that as ‘instability.’ But what’s actually happening is the family (extended and chosen) is leveraging all of its resources to raise that child.”

Read: Why black families struggle to build wealth

The black extended family survived even under slavery, and all the forced family separations that involved. Family was essential in the Jim Crow South and in the inner cities of the North, as a way to cope with the stresses of mass migration and limited opportunities, and with structural racism. But government policy sometimes made it more difficult for this family form to thrive. I began my career as a police reporter in Chicago, writing about public-housing projects like Cabrini-Green. Guided by social-science research, politicians tore down neighborhoods of rickety low-rise buildings—uprooting the complex webs of social connection those buildings supported, despite high rates of violence and crime—and put up big apartment buildings. The result was a horror: violent crime, gangs taking over the elevators, the erosion of family and neighborly life. Fortunately, those buildings have since been torn down themselves, replaced by mixed-income communities that are more amenable to the profusion of family forms.

The return of multigenerational living arrangements is already changing the built landscape. A 2016 survey by a real-estate consulting firm found that 44 percent of home buyers were looking for a home that would accommodate their elderly parents, and 42 percent wanted one that would accommodate their returning adult children. Home builders have responded by putting up houses that are what the construction firm Lennar calls “two homes under one roof.” These houses are carefully built so that family members can spend time together while also preserving their privacy. Many of these homes have a shared mudroom, laundry room, and common area. But the “in-law suite,” the place for aging parents, has its own entrance, kitchenette, and dining area. The “Millennial suite,” the place for boomeranging adult children, has its own driveway and entrance too. These developments, of course, cater to those who can afford houses in the first place—but they speak to a common realization: Family members of different generations need to do more to support one another.

The most interesting extended families are those that stretch across kinship lines. The past several years have seen the rise of new living arrangements that bring nonbiological kin into family or familylike relationships. On the website CoAbode , single mothers can find other single mothers interested in sharing a home. All across the country, you can find co-housing projects, in which groups of adults live as members of an extended family, with separate sleeping quarters and shared communal areas. Common , a real-estate-development company that launched in 2015, operates more than 25 co-housing communities, in six cities, where young singles can live this way. Common also recently teamed up with another developer, Tishman Speyer, to launch Kin , a co-housing community for young parents. Each young family has its own living quarters, but the facilities also have shared play spaces, child-care services, and family-oriented events and outings.

Read: The hot new Millennial housing trend is a repeat of the Middle Ages

These experiments, and others like them, suggest that while people still want flexibility and some privacy, they are casting about for more communal ways of living, guided by a still-developing set of values. At a co-housing community in Oakland, California, called Temescal Commons , the 23 members, ranging in age from 1 to 83, live in a complex with nine housing units. This is not some rich Bay Area hipster commune. The apartments are small, and the residents are middle- and working-class. They have a shared courtyard and a shared industrial-size kitchen where residents prepare a communal dinner on Thursday and Sunday nights. Upkeep is a shared responsibility. The adults babysit one another’s children, and members borrow sugar and milk from one another. The older parents counsel the younger ones. When members of this extended family have suffered bouts of unemployment or major health crises, the whole clan has rallied together.

Courtney E. Martin, a writer who focuses on how people are redefining the American dream, is a Temescal Commons resident. “I really love that our kids grow up with different versions of adulthood all around, especially different versions of masculinity,” she told me. “We consider all of our kids all of our kids.” Martin has a 3-year-old daughter, Stella, who has a special bond with a young man in his 20s that never would have taken root outside this extended-family structure. “Stella makes him laugh, and David feels awesome that this 3-year-old adores him,” Martin said. This is the kind of magic, she concluded, that wealth can’t buy. You can only have it through time and commitment, by joining an extended family. This kind of community would fall apart if residents moved in and out. But at least in this case, they don’t.

Read: The extended family of my two open adoptions

As Martin was talking, I was struck by one crucial difference between the old extended families like those in Avalon and the new ones of today: the role of women. The extended family in Avalon thrived because all the women in the family were locked in the kitchen, feeding 25 people at a time. In 2008, a team of American and Japanese researchers found that women in multigenerational households in Japan were at greater risk of heart disease than women living with spouses only, likely because of stress. But today’s extended-family living arrangements have much more diverse gender roles.

And yet in at least one respect, the new families Americans are forming would look familiar to our hunter-gatherer ancestors from eons ago. That’s because they are chosen families—they transcend traditional kinship lines.

The modern chosen-family movement came to prominence in San Francisco in the 1980s among gay men and lesbians, many of whom had become estranged from their biological families and had only one another for support in coping with the trauma of the AIDS crisis. In her book, Families We Choose: Lesbians, Gays, Kinship , the anthropologist Kath Weston writes, “The families I saw gay men and lesbians creating in the Bay Area tended to have extremely fluid boundaries, not unlike kinship organization among sectors of the African-American, American Indian, and white working class.”

She continues:

Like their heterosexual counterparts, most gay men and lesbians insisted that family members are people who are “there for you,” people you can count on emotionally and materially. “They take care of me,” said one man, “I take care of them.”

These groups are what Daniel Burns, a political scientist at the University of Dallas, calls “forged families.” Tragedy and suffering have pushed people together in a way that goes deeper than just a convenient living arrangement. They become, as the anthropologists say, “fictive kin.”

Over the past several decades, the decline of the nuclear family has created an epidemic of trauma—millions have been set adrift because what should have been the most loving and secure relationship in their life broke. Slowly, but with increasing frequency, these drifting individuals are coming together to create forged families. These forged families have a feeling of determined commitment. The members of your chosen family are the people who will show up for you no matter what. On Pinterest you can find placards to hang on the kitchen wall where forged families gather: “Family isn’t always blood. It’s the people in your life who want you in theirs; the ones who accept you for who you are. The ones who would do anything to see you smile & who love you no matter what.”

Two years ago , I started something called Weave: The Social Fabric Project . Weave exists to support and draw attention to people and organizations around the country who are building community. Over time, my colleagues and I have realized that one thing most of the Weavers have in common is this: They provide the kind of care to nonkin that many of us provide only to kin—the kind of support that used to be provided by the extended family.

Lisa Fitzpatrick, who was a health-care executive in New Orleans, is a Weaver . One day she was sitting in the passenger seat of a car when she noticed two young boys, 10 or 11, lifting something heavy. It was a gun. They used it to shoot her in the face. It was a gang-initiation ritual. When she recovered, she realized that she was just collateral damage. The real victims were the young boys who had to shoot somebody to get into a family, their gang.

She quit her job and began working with gang members. She opened her home to young kids who might otherwise join gangs. One Saturday afternoon, 35 kids were hanging around her house. She asked them why they were spending a lovely day at the home of a middle-aged woman. They replied, “You were the first person who ever opened the door.”

In Salt Lake City, an organization called the Other Side Academy provides serious felons with an extended family. Many of the men and women who are admitted into the program have been allowed to leave prison, where they were generally serving long sentences, but must live in a group home and work at shared businesses, a moving company and a thrift store. The goal is to transform the character of each family member. During the day they work as movers or cashiers. Then they dine together and gather several evenings a week for something called “Games”: They call one another out for any small moral failure—being sloppy with a move; not treating another family member with respect; being passive-aggressive, selfish, or avoidant.

Games is not polite. The residents scream at one another in order to break through the layers of armor that have built up in prison. Imagine two gigantic men covered in tattoos screaming “Fuck you! Fuck you! Fuck you!” At the session I attended, I thought they would come to blows. But after the anger, there’s a kind of closeness that didn’t exist before. Men and women who have never had a loving family suddenly have “relatives” who hold them accountable and demand a standard of moral excellence. Extreme integrity becomes a way of belonging to the clan. The Other Side Academy provides unwanted people with an opportunity to give care, and creates out of that care a ferocious forged family.

I could tell you hundreds of stories like this, about organizations that bring traumatized vets into extended-family settings, or nursing homes that house preschools so that senior citizens and young children can go through life together. In Baltimore, a nonprofit called Thread surrounds underperforming students with volunteers, some of whom are called “grandparents.” In Chicago, Becoming a Man helps disadvantaged youth form family-type bonds with one another. In Washington, D.C., I recently met a group of middle-aged female scientists—one a celebrated cellular biologist at the National Institutes of Health, another an astrophysicist—who live together in a Catholic lay community, pooling their resources and sharing their lives. The variety of forged families in America today is endless.

You may be part of a forged family yourself. I am. In 2015, I was invited to the house of a couple named Kathy and David, who had created an extended-family-like group in D.C. called All Our Kids , or AOK-DC. Some years earlier, Kathy and David had had a kid in D.C. Public Schools who had a friend named James, who often had nothing to eat and no place to stay, so they suggested that he stay with them. That kid had a friend in similar circumstances, and those friends had friends. By the time I joined them, roughly 25 kids were having dinner every Thursday night, and several of them were sleeping in the basement.

I joined the community and never left—they became my chosen family. We have dinner together on Thursday nights, celebrate holidays together, and vacation together. The kids call Kathy and David Mom and Dad. In the early days, the adults in our clan served as parental figures for the young people—replacing their broken cellphones, supporting them when depression struck, raising money for their college tuition. When a young woman in our group needed a new kidney, David gave her one of his.

We had our primary biological families, which came first, but we also had this family. Now the young people in this forged family are in their 20s and need us less. David and Kathy have left Washington, but they stay in constant contact. The dinners still happen. We still see one another and look after one another. The years of eating together and going through life together have created a bond. If a crisis hit anyone, we’d all show up. The experience has convinced me that everybody should have membership in a forged family with people completely unlike themselves.

Ever since I started working on this article, a chart has been haunting me . It plots the percentage of people living alone in a country against that nation’s GDP. There’s a strong correlation. Nations where a fifth of the people live alone, like Denmark and Finland, are a lot richer than nations where almost no one lives alone, like the ones in Latin America or Africa. Rich nations have smaller households than poor nations. The average German lives in a household with 2.7 people. The average Gambian lives in a household with 13.8 people.

That chart suggests two things, especially in the American context. First, the market wants us to live alone or with just a few people. That way we are mobile, unattached, and uncommitted, able to devote an enormous number of hours to our jobs. Second, when people who are raised in developed countries get money, they buy privacy.

For the privileged, this sort of works. The arrangement enables the affluent to dedicate more hours to work and email, unencumbered by family commitments. They can afford to hire people who will do the work that extended family used to do. But a lingering sadness lurks, an awareness that life is emotionally vacant when family and close friends aren’t physically present, when neighbors aren’t geographically or metaphorically close enough for you to lean on them, or for them to lean on you. Today’s crisis of connection flows from the impoverishment of family life.

I often ask African friends who have immigrated to America what most struck them when they arrived. Their answer is always a variation on a theme—the loneliness. It’s the empty suburban street in the middle of the day, maybe with a lone mother pushing a baby carriage on the sidewalk but nobody else around.

For those who are not privileged, the era of the isolated nuclear family has been a catastrophe. It’s led to broken families or no families; to merry-go-round families that leave children traumatized and isolated; to senior citizens dying alone in a room. All forms of inequality are cruel, but family inequality may be the cruelest. It damages the heart. Eventually family inequality even undermines the economy the nuclear family was meant to serve: Children who grow up in chaos have trouble becoming skilled, stable, and socially mobile employees later on.

Recommended Reading

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The Black Family in the Age of Mass Incarceration

When hyper-individualism kicked into gear in the 1960s, people experimented with new ways of living that embraced individualistic values. Today we are crawling out from the wreckage of that hyper-individualism—which left many families detached and unsupported—and people are experimenting with more connected ways of living, with new shapes and varieties of extended families. Government support can help nurture this experimentation, particularly for the working-class and the poor, with things like child tax credits, coaching programs to improve parenting skills in struggling families, subsidized early education, and expanded parental leave. While the most important shifts will be cultural, and driven by individual choices, family life is under so much social stress and economic pressure in the poorer reaches of American society that no recovery is likely without some government action.

The two-parent family, meanwhile, is not about to go extinct. For many people, especially those with financial and social resources, it is a great way to live and raise children. But a new and more communal ethos is emerging, one that is consistent with 21st-century reality and 21st-century values.

When we discuss the problems confronting the country, we don’t talk about family enough. It feels too judgmental. Too uncomfortable. Maybe even too religious. But the blunt fact is that the nuclear family has been crumbling in slow motion for decades, and many of our other problems—with education, mental health, addiction, the quality of the labor force—stem from that crumbling. We’ve left behind the nuclear-family paradigm of 1955. For most people it’s not coming back. Americans are hungering to live in extended and forged families, in ways that are new and ancient at the same time. This is a significant opportunity, a chance to thicken and broaden family relationships, a chance to allow more adults and children to live and grow under the loving gaze of a dozen pairs of eyes, and be caught, when they fall, by a dozen pairs of arms. For decades we have been eating at smaller and smaller tables, with fewer and fewer kin.

It’s time to find ways to bring back the big tables.

This article appears in the March 2020 print edition with the headline “The Nuclear Family Was a Mistake.” When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic .

Essay on My Nuclear Family

Students are often asked to write an essay on My Nuclear Family in their schools and colleges. And if you’re also looking for the same, we have created 100-word, 250-word, and 500-word essays on the topic.

Let’s take a look…

100 Words Essay on My Nuclear Family

What is a nuclear family.

A nuclear family is a small family unit. It usually includes a mother, a father, and their children. This is the most common kind of family in many places. In my own nuclear family, there are four people: my parents, my younger brother, and me.

Life in My Nuclear Family

We spend a lot of time together. Every morning, we eat breakfast as a family. After school, my brother and I do our homework while our parents work. In the evening, we share stories at dinner. Weekends are for family outings or watching movies.

Roles in My Family

Each person has a role. My father goes to work to earn money. My mother takes care of the house and helps us with schoolwork. My brother and I go to school and help with chores. Together, we make our family strong.

Love and Support

The best thing about my family is the love and support we give each other. If one person is sad or has a problem, we all try to help. This love makes my nuclear family a wonderful place to grow up.

250 Words Essay on My Nuclear Family

Introduction to my family.

My family is small and sweet, consisting of four members. We are a nuclear family, which means it’s just my parents, my younger sister, and me. We live together in a cozy house filled with love and laughter.

My dad works in an office, and my mom is a teacher. They both love their jobs and work hard to take care of us. Dad is funny and always makes us giggle, while mom is gentle and helps us with our homework. They teach us good manners and the importance of kindness.

My Sister and Me

My sister is in grade school, and I am a few years older. We go to the same school and play together after we finish our studies. She likes drawing, and I enjoy playing soccer. Even though we have different hobbies, we share our toys and have fun together.

Spending Time Together

We enjoy family time a lot. Every evening, we eat dinner together and talk about our day. On weekends, we sometimes go to the park or watch a movie. These moments are special because we create happy memories.

My nuclear family may be small, but the love we share is huge. We support each other in tough times and celebrate together in happy times. I feel lucky to have such a wonderful family.

500 Words Essay on My Nuclear Family

My family is a small group of people who live together, care for each other, and share a strong bond. This type of family is often called a nuclear family and it includes my father, my mother, my younger brother, and me. Each member of my family plays a special role and together, we make a happy team.

My Father: The Pillar of Strength

My father is the strongest person I know. He goes to work every day to make sure we have everything we need, like food, clothes, and a house to live in. When he comes home, he often helps me with my homework and plays games with us. He teaches me to be brave and honest, and he is always there to support us when we are scared or sad.

My Mother: The Heart of Our Home

My mother is the one who makes our house feel like a home. She cooks delicious meals, helps us get ready for school, and gives the best hugs. She listens to our problems and is always ready with advice or a kind word to cheer us up. Her love and care make every day brighter.

My Younger Brother: My Playmate

My younger brother is my best friend and playmate. We share toys, play games, and sometimes argue, but we always make up quickly. He looks up to me, and I try to set a good example for him. We learn from each other and have fun exploring the world together.

Our Daily Life

Every day in our family is filled with routines and little traditions. We eat breakfast together, talk about our plans for the day, and then head to school or work. In the evening, we share our day’s experiences at dinner and often watch a show or read books together before bedtime. These moments are simple, but they are very important to us.

Weekends and Holidays

Weekends and holidays are special times for us. We often go on trips to the park, visit relatives, or try new activities. These are the times when we create memories that last forever. We celebrate birthdays, festivals, and achievements together, which brings us even closer as a family.

Challenges and Support

Like any family, we face challenges too. Sometimes we get sick, have tough days at work or school, or disagree with each other. But the great thing about my family is that we always support each other. We talk about our problems and find ways to solve them together. This makes us strong and helps us overcome any obstacle.

Conclusion: The Love in My Family

In conclusion, my nuclear family is a small world of love, laughter, and support. My father, mother, brother, and I may be just four people, but together, we have a huge amount of love and happiness. We care for each other through good times and bad, and I feel lucky to be a part of such a wonderful family. It’s like a team where everyone plays their part, and together, we make life beautiful.

That’s it! I hope the essay helped you.

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• Essay on Pregnancy
• Essay on My Own Philosophy Of Education
• Essay on My Parents My Hero

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The Nuclear Family

Two instruments evoke memories of being a child during the Cuban Missile Crisis.

Family radiation: Sometimes a startling juxtaposition of two words can summon a powerful historical moment. The Family Radiation Measurement Kit evokes the domesticity and dread that American families experienced as they pondered life in a fallout shelter during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Chemist and entrepreneur Barney Heller donated his family’s radiation measurement kit to the Science History Institute in January 2024. His childhood memories electrify two instruments that thankfully never came out of their box.

Heller was a child of the Cold War. He was 8 years old during the Cuban Missile Crisis in October 1962, when the U.S. and Soviet Union came close to nuclear conflict over the placement of Soviet weapons in Cuba and U.S. missiles in Turkey. His parents had met while they were stationed in a Navy hospital in Japan during the Korean War. His father was an orthopedist; his mother a nurse.

The family lived in Kettering, Ohio, a suburb of Dayton in an area that was a hotbed of nuclear work. Monsanto developed triggers for atomic bombs at Mound Laboratories in nearby Miamisburg. Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton was one of the Air Force’s major centers for research and development. The Heller family understood that “Wright-Pat” would surely be a target in any nuclear attack.

Young Barney experienced two kinds of drills at school in first and second grade: tornado drills, in which students moved into the hallways, and air-raid drills, during which they were told to shelter under their desks. “That didn’t make sense to me,” he told me in an interview. Heller remembers wondering how a desk could protect anyone from atomic bombs.

The Heller family had a homebuilt fallout shelter underneath their home, intended as a retreat in which to wait out the radioactive aftermath of a nuclear attack. Heller’s parents were staunch Republicans who hated President Kennedy, but he doesn’t think their politics had much to do with the bomb shelter. It was just a kind of thing that people were building at the time, and it didn’t seem that having a Republican president like Eisenhower or a Democrat like Kennedy influenced the chance of atomic explosions.

The shelter had no door and no roof, just the house’s floor above. It was a small space, maybe 10 feet by 6 feet, with a concrete floor, two bunk beds, and a pair of new mattresses wrapped in paper. Barney remembered asking his parents, “There’s three of us; who’s sleeping on the ground?”

His family practiced going into the shelter once. “We marched down into it. Didn’t faze me at all at the time,” he said, but the significance was clear. “You don’t remember much when you’re 8, but that kind of burned into my mind.”

The shelter was stocked with a 5-gallon metal can of water, canned foods, and the family radiation measurement kit. There was a small portable toilet, the thought of using which disturbed Barney. And there wasn’t a television, 8-year-old Barney noticed. “I thought, it’s gonna be pretty boring,” he remembered.

As a kid Barney compared his family’s shelter to those of his friends and neighbors. “Ours wasn’t as fancy as theirs,” he told me. “I figured ours wouldn’t do well in an attack.” One buddy’s shelter had a door and a kind of snorkel, with a hand crank to power a fan to bring in fresh air. Other friends had bomb shelters that were dug into the ground in their backyards.

One neighbor in particular, a general practice doctor, had a shelter that looked better to Heller. Barney suggested his dad should do some “upgrades to keep up with the neighbors,” as he recalled. “No, I’m an orthopedist,” his father said. “I know what I’m doing.”

Other neighbors had board games in their bomb shelter. He asked his mother if they could get some games for their shelter, too. But, he said, “Mother didn’t want to deal with the thought of that at the time.”

The kit included two pocket-sized instruments. Users started with the ratemeter, which measured radiation exposure in roentgens per hour. If the ratemeter indicated the presence of radiation from nuclear fallout, users switched to the dosimeter to measure cumulative exposure. Both instruments had a pocket clip in case you needed to move outside the shelter. They connected to a battery-powered charger when the time came to read them.

The kit’s instructions include a chart describing the likely effects of various doses of radiation. Exposure to 75 roentgens led to vomiting in 10% of people. A “median lethal dose” of 450 was “fatal to 50% in 2 to 12 weeks,” while more than 2,000 roentgens meant “death in minutes to a day due to central nervous system damage.”

Bendix, a mid-scale defense contractor and scientific instrument manufacturer with a sizable division in Cincinnati, produced these kits between 1960 and 1963. They were one of the first commercially available products enabling home users to gauge radiation exposure. The kit retailed for $24.95 (more than $250 today), though many were included with commercially available bomb shelter kits. Heller surmises a local Bendix salesman sold it, since his father was “very susceptible to salesmen.”

The kit appears to be unused and complete, except for the corroded battery, which the Institute asked Heller to discard before donating. Heller found the kit among his father’s things after he died in 2023 at the age of 99.

Smaller explosions than the one suggested by the bomb shelter introduced young Barney to the charms of chemistry. He recalls that his 7th-grade chemistry teacher taught the class how to combine ammonia and potassium iodide to make contact explosives, like the snap pops now sold in firework shops. It was this hands-on experience that sparked his interest in chemistry. Today, Heller runs the Hardt Chemical company , specializing in concrete, gypsum, and rubber polymerization.

As for the bomb shelter and the radiation measurement kit, Heller remarked that “after the Cuban Missile Crisis, no one talked about it anymore. Then they called it a tornado shelter.”

Roger Turner is the curator of instruments and artifacts in the Science History Institute Museum.

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Jessica Grose

The nuclear family is no longer the norm. good..

By Jessica Grose

Opinion Writer

Over 20 years ago, the sociologist Vern Bengtson gave a lecture in which he predicted that multigenerational bonds would be ascendant in the 21st century. Bengtson, who spent decades studying generations of 300 California families , pushed back against the idea that the decline of the nuclear family model was bad for society.

Even two decades ago, Americans were increasingly moving away from the “mom, dad and two kids” family structure that corresponded with the norms and pop culture of the 1950s. As years went on, more people got divorced, more people were having children outside marriage, and older generations were living longer. Some, like David Popenoe of Rutgers University, saw this as a crisis for children, writing in 1993, “I see the family as an institution in decline and believe that this should be a cause for alarm.” But Bengtson theorized that these changes could be positive and protective, economically and emotionally. He wrote, “For many Americans, multigenerational bonds are becoming more important than nuclear family ties for well-being and support over the course of their lives.”

This argument was “a little scoffed at at the time,” said Merril Silverstein, a professor of sociology at Syracuse University who researches aging and was a colleague of Bengtson’s at the University of Southern California. But Bengtson, who died in 2019, was prescient: A new report from Pew Research Center found that “multigenerational living has grown sharply in the U.S. over the past five decades and shows no sign of peaking.”

Analyzing census data, Pew found that the population living in multigenerational households in the United States has quadrupled since 1971. In March 2021, nearly 60 million people were living “with multiple generations under one roof.” According to Pew, while these living arrangements are more common in Asian, Black and Hispanic households, they are also rising among non-Hispanic white Americans. (Immigration accounts for part of the increase in the U.S., Pew said, with extended families still the norm in many regions and countries, save for parts of North America, Europe, Australia and New Zealand, according to the U.N.’s population division .)

As part of the same report, Pew examined data from its own nationally representative survey of 9,676 adults, including 1,548 living in multigenerational households, to see why they were choosing to live with extended family and how they felt about their living situations. The top two reasons for multigenerational living were financial issues and caregiving needs. And overall, Americans who live with relatives from other generations feel good about it: “More adults living in multigenerational households say the experience has been very positive (30 percent) or somewhat positive (27 percent) than say it has been somewhat negative (14 percent) or very negative (3 percent),” Pew noted.

As the historian Stephanie Coontz wrote, the idealized American nuclear family, with a father as breadwinner and mother as caregiver, living atomized from the rest of their community, was a “ historical fluke ,” and throughout history, parents have always relied on relatives and friends for help with the caregiving of children.

You don’t even have to share a residence to realize major benefits; they just need to live nearby. The Times’s Quoctrung Bui and Claire Cain Miller discovered in 2015 that American adults lived a median distance of just 18 miles from their mothers , and they cited a 2013 paper by the economists Janice Compton and Robert Pollak , who found that “labor force participation by married women with children increased by as much as 10 percentage points when they lived near their mothers or mothers-in-law and unanticipated child care needs seemed to play a big role.”

I’ve personally found this to be true. We live about 10 miles from my parents, and they’ve saved my bacon in the child care department more times than I can count. If we hadn’t lived with them during part of 2020 when child care was unavailable and we had two kids at home, my husband or I would have had to take a leave from work. Beyond the child care piece of it, my children see my parents once a week for dinner, which everyone enjoys. Sometimes for kids, grandparental relationships can be a little less fraught than those with parents: Grandma doesn’t have to be the one dropping the hammer, making you do homework and brush your teeth every night. She can be a source of support with less rancor.

Despite the upsides, living with your parents into adulthood is sometimes still portrayed as something embarrassing, a failure to launch, but it shouldn’t be. In fact, it’s now the norm.

“In 2014, for the first time in more than 130 years, adults ages 18 to 34 were slightly more likely to be living in their parents’ home than they were to be living with a spouse or partner in their own household,” Pew found , and that remained true in 2021 for men in that age group.

Steven Ruggles , a professor of history and population studies at the University of Minnesota, told me that this is happening, in part, because the relative incomes of young men have been steeply declining since the 1970s, and they are more likely than their female counterparts to be living at home. At the same time, housing prices are way up , availability is way down, and especially in big cities, buying a home is out of reach for most young people; this is an economic fact of life right now, and no one should be mocked for it.

That said, multigenerational living isn’t some kind of utopia. “Those with upper incomes were the most likely to say their experience had been positive,” Juliana Horowitz, an associate director of social trends research at Pew, told me, partly because “upper-income people are more likely to say there’s enough space for everyone to live comfortably.” It’s not surprising that it might be more relaxing to live with your mother when she has her own floor. And some of the growth in multigenerational households is due to more grandparents raising grandchildren , which has been fueled in part by the opioid crisis that is devastating the country. No one would say that’s a good thing.

Per Pew, “About a quarter of adults in multigenerational homes say it is stressful all or most of the time.” Bengtson predicted this years ago in his address. “There are potentially negative consequences of the longer years of shared lives across generations,” he said, one of which is “protracted conflict.” He quoted one mother who described “a lifelong lousy parent-child relationship” that just stretched out to infinity. No one said the new norm didn’t come with challenges — and no one, not me anyway, is against the nuclear family model. But we should acknowledge its fragility, which was made ever clearer by the Covid pandemic and the chaos it wrought in all of our infrastructures of care.

Which is why I think moving toward a more extended family model — what sociologists call a vertical rather than a horizontal family structure — is mostly to the good. During the pandemic, a Harvard study found that Americans ages 18 to 25 and mothers of young children were the demographic groups most likely to report “miserable degrees of loneliness,” and even before the pandemic, the Health Resources and Services Administration described a “ loneliness epidemic ,” which was particularly acute among seniors.

“I think it’s a net positive,” said Silverstein. “In gerontology, we like to say dependence is a double-edged sword. We want to rely on people, but we also resent them, and that’s part of the human condition.” Do I still act like a sulky teenager sometimes when I’m around my parents for more than 48 hours ? I do! Would I move away from them? Nope, not if I could help it.

Want More on Multigenerational Living?

One of my favorite essayists and thinkers, Kaitlyn Greenidge, wrote about living with her mother and sisters in what they jokingly call “the compound” and how it has offered her a new narrative about what it means to mature. “Living with all this noise has stirred up many emotions: gratitude to my family for their support, the irritation of adolescence as we sometimes catch ourselves in the dances of our older selves, a longing for sleep that can only be felt in a household full of children who are all awake and ready to play by 6:30 a.m. on a Saturday,” she wrote.

What happens when your family doesn’t want to or isn’t able to help you care for your children? It can feel very sour, Anne Helen Petersen explained , and force decisions about work and child care that can make you pretty unhappy.

In The Atlantic in 2020, my Times Opinion colleague David Brooks argued that “ the nuclear family was a mistake .” He went deep into the history of the family in the United States and agreed with Coontz that “the period when the nuclear family flourished was not normal. It was a freakish historical moment when all of society conspired to obscure its essential fragility.”

“While new human mothers around the world are renowned for our pluck and adaptability, maternal grandmothers are the rare global constant in our lives,” Abigail Tucker pointed out in this Times piece from 2021 . She also noted that women who feel supported by their kin may have lower rates of postpartum depression.

Tiny Victories

Parenting can be a grind. Let’s celebrate the tiny victories.

My grandson was really upset by his first Covid shot, so I offered to teach him my tried-and-true pain-coping technique: Lamaze childbirth method. Before the second shot, two weeks of five-minute FaceTime practice doing slow deep breathing, relaxing his body, staring at one spot and reciting a mantra culminated in a triumphant phone call: “Grandma, it worked!” — Diana Zimmerman, Great Neck, N.Y.

If you want a chance to get your Tiny Victory published, find us on Instagram @NYTparenting and use the hashtag #tinyvictories; email us ; or enter your Tiny Victory at the bottom of this page . Include your full name and location. Tiny Victories may be edited for clarity and style. Your name, location and comments may be published, but your contact information will not. By submitting to us, you agree that you have read, understand and accept the Reader Submission Terms in relation to all of the content and other information you send to us.

The Evolution of American Family Structure

July 10, 2020  |  11 Min Read

America’s mainstream culture evolves to reflect the predominant values of the day, including social systems such as the family. Instead of being one unit, the family institution has been in  a constant state of evolution , according to California Cryobank.  Today, there really is no consistent definition of the American family. With single-parent households, varying family structures, and fewer children, the modern family defies categorization. But these most recent changes have brought with them a nostalgia-based myth: that divorce, domestic violence, and single parenthood are recent phenomena. When the history of the American family was  surveyed in-depth  by Insider, it became apparent that this is not the case. Constant change and adaptation are the only themes that remain consistent for families throughout America’s history. In fact, recent changes in family life are only the latest in a series of transformations in family roles, functions, and dynamics that have occurred over time.

A Brief History of the Pre-20th Century Family

When America was founded, a family was defined as a husband, wife, biological children and extended family (unfortunately, slaves were not considered part of any family). This meant that most people who could legally marry did, and then stayed married until death. According to Insider, in the 19th and early 20th centuries people often married to gain property rights or to move social class. All of that changed in the 1800s, with the ideas of love and romance becoming the main reason to wed. Divorce was rare; History Collection reports that, “the  process of getting a divorce  was very expensive, and a judge would never allow it, unless it was the last resort .. If two people were unhappy in a marriage, they sometimes decided to quietly separate in a mature, responsible way, but they were legally still married, and could never remarry someone else, unless their first husband or wife died.” Because this structure was so dominant, it played a crucial role in the creation and replication of cultural roles for men and women. The role of wives was to assist their husbands within the home, both keeping house and raising children.

Wives had no legal identity under a condition called coverture; ThoughtCo explains that “legally, upon marriage, the husband and wife were  treated as one entity . In essence, the wife’s separate legal existence disappeared as far as property rights and certain other rights were concerned.” Husbands, in contrast, were managers and providers in the family. They controlled finances and had ultimate authority in the eyes of both society and the law. This meant that “a husband could not grant to his wife anything such as property, and could not make legal agreements with her after marriage because it would be like gifting something to one’s self or making a contract with one’s self.”

It was generally against the law to live together or have children outside of marriage. However, by the 19th century, coverture was less of an issue and these rigid legal boundaries were relaxed, with common-law marriage widely recognized as an acceptable union.

Government and the Family

The 19th century brought about a number of important  changes to the family , according to Shirley A. Hill’s  Families: A Social Class Perspective . In the first half of the century, married women began to have property rights through the Married Women’s Property Acts, which began to be enacted in 1839. By the early 20th century, most states permitted married women to “own property, sue and be sued, enter into contracts and control the disposition of property upon her death.” However, during this time a woman’s role in the family was still defined by her husband.

Another important development was government regulation of some aspects of childhood, such as child labor and schooling. To improve the well-being of children, “reformers pressed for compulsory school attendance laws, child labor restrictions, playgrounds … and widow’s pensions to permit poor children to remain with their mothers.” Despite these legal changes, the family became an even more important source of happiness and satisfaction. The “companionate family was envisioned as a more isolated, and more important unit — the primary focus of emotional life.” New ideas about marriage emerged, based on choice, companionship, and romantic love. This in turn caused a surge in the divorce rate, which tripled between 1860 and 1910.

Depression and War

The stability of families was tested by the Great Depression, as unemployment and lower wages forced Americans to delay marriage and having children. The divorce rate fell during this time because it was expensive and few could afford it. However, by 1940 almost 2 million married couples lived apart. Some families adjusted to the economic downturn by “returning to a cooperative family economy. Many children took part-time jobs and many wives supplemented the family income.”

When the Depression ended and World War II began, families coped with new issues: a shortage of housing, lack of schools and prolonged separation. Women ran households and raised children alone, and some went to work in war industries. The results of the war-stricken state of society were that “thousands of young people became latchkey children and rates of juvenile delinquency, unwed pregnancy, and truancy all rose.”

Family Structures in the Postwar World

In reaction to the tumult both at home and abroad during the 1940s, the 1950s marked a swift shift to a new type of domesticity. Insider reports that “the idea of the nuclear, All-American Family was  created in the 1950s , and put an emphasis on the family unit and marriage.” This time period saw younger marriages, more kids, and fewer divorces. The average age for women to marry was 20, divorce rates stabilized, and the birth rate doubled. However, the perfect images of family life that appeared on television do not tell the whole story: “Only 60 percent of children spent their childhood in a male-breadwinner, female-homemaker household.”

This “democratization of family ideals” reflected a singular society and economy, one that was driven by a reaction against depression and war and compounded by rising incomes and lower prices. The economic boom that followed World War II led to significant economic growth, particularly in manufacturing and consumer goods; around 13 million new homes were built in the 1950s. Families moved to the suburbs because they could afford to, and the family became a “haven in a heartless world,” as well as “an alternative world of satisfaction and intimacy” for adults and children that had experienced the ravages of wartime. In fact, this is where the concept of close-knit families as we know it originates. Domestic containment as a way of life was reinforced by American youth, who wanted to have long-lasting and stronger relationships than their parents had. Soldiers and servicemen who returned from war were looking to get married and raise children.

The Idyllic ’50s

The standard structure of the family in postwar America consisted of a breadwinner male, his wife who did household chores and looked after the children, and the children themselves. Families ate meals and went on outings together, and lived in sociable neighborhoods. Parents paid close attention to disciplining their children and live-in relationships were unheard of — in fact, girls stayed in their parents’ home until marriage and did not commonly attend college. Children became emotional rather than economic assets for the first time, close with their parents and the center of the family. Because of this, parents studied child development and worked to socialize their children so that they would become successful adults. Childhood became a distinct period of life. However, young girls were supposed to be housewives instead of educated professionals. 

All in all, family structure in the ’50s was based around one central necessity: a secure life. The economic and global instability of the early 20th century gave rise to the need for closely defined family units. This led to an ideology that lauded economic advancement and social order, the results of which were younger marriages that lasted longer, more children, fewer divorces, and more nuclear families.

The Modern Family Unit

The nuclear family of the ’50s epitomized the economically stable family unit. The idea of the middle-class, patriarchal, child-centered families were short-lived. This is why the modern family, in most cases, bears little resemblance to this “ideal” unit. Many of the changes that were part of this transition are a direct result of the expanding role of women in society, both in terms of the workplace and education. The rise of the post-industrial economy, based in information and services, led to more married women entering the workplace. As early as 1960, around a third of middle class women were working either part-time or full-time jobs. Since the ’60s, families have also become smaller, less stable, and more diverse. More adults, whether young or elderly, live outside of the family as well. Today, the male-breadwinner, female-housewife family represents only a small percentage of American households. A considerable majority of Americans (62 percent) view the idea of marriage as “one in which husband and wife both work and share child care and household duties.” Two-earner families are much more common as well. In 2008, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that women made up almost  50 percent  of the paid labor force, putting them on equal footing with men when it comes to working outside the home. In addition, single-parent families headed by mothers, families formed through remarriage, and empty-nest families have all become part of the norm.

Along with these shifts have come declining marriage and birth rates and a rising divorce rate. The American birth rate is half of what it was in 1960, and hit its lowest point ever in 2012. In addition, the number of cohabiting couples increased from less than half a million in 1960 to 4.9 million in the 2000 census. According to the 2005 American Community Survey,  more than 50 percent  of households in America were headed by an unmarried person during that year. And by 2007, almost 40 percent of children were born to unmarried, adult mothers. One reason for these developments is that marriage has been repositioned as a “cornerstone to capstone, from a foundational act of early adulthood to a crowning event of later adulthood.” It is viewed as an event that should happen after finishing college and establishing a career.

Further Change in the Marital Family

A number of historical factors contributed to shifts in how Americans perceive and participate in family structure. According to the American Bar Association, in 1965, the Supreme Court  extended constitutional protections  for “various forms of reproductive freedom” through its ruling in  Griswold v. Connecticut . There were also medical advances in contraception, including the invention of the birth control pill in 1960. As a result, the way children were brought into families became more varied than ever before. Divorce changed during the ’60s as well. In 1969, California became the first state to adopt no-fault divorce, permitting parties to end their marriage simply upon showing irreconcilable differences. Within 16 years, every other state had followed suit.

Included in these trends is the expansion of rights granted to same-sex couples. With the decline of barriers to lesbian and gay unions and the increase in legal protections, more LGBTQ populations are living openly. Gay marriage was legalized in 2015; However, for some legal purposes these relationships are still not treated like marriages. Still, in general, families are more racially, ethnically, religiously, and stylistically diverse. However, all of this change does not mean that the family is a dying institution. About 90 percent of Americans still marry and have children, and those who divorce usually remarry.

The Role of Human Services

Many who are interested in family development and culture choose to pursue a career in human services . With an emphasis on current issues and skills for living successfully in today’s society, this applied science is constantly evolving, much like the family units that are its area of study. It is a discipline including contributions from related academic areas such as law, sociology, psychology, anthropology, healthcare, and more. Because of this, professionals in the field practice in a variety of contexts, including:

• Community outreach
• Human services

The field of human services plays an important role in navigating the implications of today’s global society. Though the families of today have little in common with those in previous decades and centuries, social sciences professionals have a clear perspective on how to approach the complexities of a constantly evolving institution. And these skills will only become more valuable as families continue to evolve.

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CSP Global offers online human service degree programs at both the undergraduate and graduate level. The comprehensive education students receive through these programs allows them to become practitioners in this dynamic and interdisciplinary field.

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Family essay plan – Modern nuclear family….

Last Updated on January 9, 2019 by Karl Thompson

Assess the view that the modern nuclear family is the most effective type of family unit in which to socialise children and stabilise adult personalities (24)

The above view is associated mainly with the Functionalist perspective , to an extent with the Marxist perspective, while Feminists tend to disagree.

George Murdock (1949) argued that that the nuclear family performs four essential functions to meet the needs of society and its members: The stable satisfaction of the sex drive – which prevents the social disruption cased by a ‘sexual free for all’; the reproduction of the next generation and thus the continuation of society over time; thirdly, the socialisation of the young into society’s shared norms and values and finally he argued the family provides for society’s economic needs by providing food and shelter.

Murdock thus agrees with the two statements in the question and goes further, arguing that the nuclear family performs even more functions. Furthermore, he argued that the nuclear family was universal, following his study of over 250 different societies.

Some sociologists, however, criticise Murdock’s view as being too rose tinted – pointing out that conflict and disharmony can occur both within nuclear families and within societies where the nuclear family is dominant. A second criticism is that the nuclear family is not universal – Gough studied the Nayr of South India and found that women and men had several sexual partners, but this type of matrifocal family was functional for that society.

A second Functionalist, Talcott Parsons  argued that the type of society affects the shape of the family – different societies require the family to perform different functions and so some types of family ‘fit in’ better with particular societies.

To illustrate this, Parsons argued that there were two basic types of society – modern industrial society and traditional pre-industrial society. He argued that the nuclear family fits the needs of industrial society and that the extended family fitted the needs of pre-industrial society. He argued that as society became industrialised, society had different needs, and that the nuclear family evolved to meet these needs. For example, one thing industrial society needed was a geographically mobile workforce – the nuclear family is appropriate here because it is more mobile than the extended family.

Parsons also argued that the family performs less functions with the move to industrialisation – as the health care and welfare functions come to be taken over by the state. However, the family becomes more specialised – and performs two ‘essential and irreducible functions’ – these are the two mentioned in the question – the primary socialisation of children is where we are first taught societies norms and values and learn to integrate with wider society and the stabilisation of adult personalities is where the family is the place of relaxation – the place to which one returns after a hard day of working to de – stress.

Parsons has, however been criticised, as with Murdock, for having a ‘rose tinted view’ – Feminists argue that women get an unfair deal in the traditional nuclear family, for example. A second criticism is that while he may have been right about the 1950s, when he was writing, the nuclear family seams less relevant in our post-modern age when many couples need dual incomes – meaning the nuclear family may be too small to effectively perform the two functions mentioned in the question.

The Marxist view of the family is that it does do what is stated in the question, but they criticise the Functionalist view, arguing that the family also performs functions for Capitalism. Firstly, they say it performs an ‘ideological function’ in that the family convinces children, through primary socialisation, that hierarchy is natural and inevitable. Secondly, they also see the family as acting as a unit of consumption – the family is seen by Capitalists as a something to make money out of – what with the pressure to ‘keep up with the Joneses and ‘pester power’

Thus, applying Marxism we learn that the Functionalist view is too optimistic – they see the Capitalist system as infiltrating family life, through advertising, for example, which creates conflict within the family, undermining its ability to harmoniously socialise children and stabilise adult personalities.

Finally, we come onto Feminist views of the family . Radical Feminists are especially critical of the view in the question. They argue, for example, that many nuclear families are characterised by domestic abuse and point to the rising divorce rates in recent years to suggest that the nuclear family is not necessarily the best type of family. Moreover, many Feminists have argued that the nuclear family and the traditional gender roles that go along with it has for too long performed an ideological function – this set up is projected as the norm in society, a norm which women have been under pressure to conform to and a  norm which serves to benefit men and oppress women – because women end up becoming dependent on men in their traditional roles – so they see the nuclear family as being the primary institution through which patriarchy is reproduced, again criticising the rather rose tinted view of the Functionalist perspective on the family.

So to conclude, while the statement in the question may have appeared to be the case in the 1950s, this no longer appears to be the case in British society today.

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Essay on Nuclear Family

Family is regarded as the basic unit of society. It consists of a father, mother, grandparents and children all living together under one roof. Family forms an essential part of our life. It is the first institution of the children and thus inculcates the moral values in them so that they may grow up to become good citizens of the society. There is the existence of several types of families in the society like Joint family, Nuclear family, single-parent family, etc. Every type of family has its own merits and demerits.

10 Lines Essay on Nuclear Family

1) A nuclear family is one which consists of a mother, father and their children.

2) Nuclear family is a small family, also referred to as a conjugal or elementary family.

3) The concept of the nuclear family originated from England in 13 th century.

4) A nuclear family consists of only two generations.

5) The trend of nuclear families gained popularity in the 20 th century.

6) In a nuclear family, all the members are free to make their own decisions.

7) Privacy of members is well protected in this type of family.

8) However, children are deprived of the love of their grandparents.

9) Nuclear families are free from unnecessary quarrels and disagreements.

10) Urbanization and modernization are the main causes of increase in nuclear families.

Long Essay on Nuclear Family in English

These days the concept of the nuclear family is rising in society and so I have elaborated a long essay on the merits and demerits of the nuclear family. I hope that it might be an aid to students of all classes i.e. 1-12th in writing an essay, assignment, and project on this topic.

1800 Words Essay – Essentials, Merits and Demerits of Nuclear Family

Introduction

We cannot imagine our life without our families. It is the one that makes us feel secure, helps us in making decisions during difficulties and celebrates our joy and festivals. Many of us might be a part of extended families while many of us would belong to nuclear families. India is a nation where a joint family system has been common but nowadays it is being replaced by the concept of the nuclear family in most of the urban areas. We will be discussing below the concept of the nuclear family, its rising trend in India and its advantages and disadvantages.

What is meant by a Nuclear Family?

The nuclear family is stated as a small family that consists of father, mother, and children. It is also called an elementary family or conjugal family. The number of people in the nuclear family is very less as compared to the number of members of a joint family. The children after marriage leave their families and settle with their wife and children. In other words, a married couple with their biological children or adopted children lives together as a small family called a nuclear family. 

In a nuclear family, mother and father are only the head of the family. These families do not have any elder members like that of extended families. Thus the married couples are free to make decisions according to their own will. They live an independent life with any number of children.

Concept of Nuclear Family

The concept of the nuclear family is considered to have originated in the 13th century in England. This concept emerged in England after proto-industrialization. There was no concept of extended families having people of many generations living together. They adopted the concept of shifting into single families after marriage.

However, the term and trend of the nuclear family became popular in the 20th century. This family structure trend became more popular in the United States during the 1960s and 1970s. Later the trend of nuclear families started decreasing in America and people shifted to other types of family structures.

The Reason for calling it a “Nuclear Family”

The term nuclear family came into existence in the 20th century. Some sources state that the term originated in 1924 and 1925. This age was termed as the atomic age and thus the term nuclear has its connection with the noun ‘Nucleus’. The term nucleus means the core or center of something. Therefore, in the same context, a nuclear family means a family whose all members are part of one common core. This gives it the name nuclear family.

The Framework of the Nuclear Families

Nuclear family, unlike joint families, consists of members of two generations i.e. the one in which they are born and the second in which they marry. The other generation is not possible until and unless they marry their children in some other families. The nuclear family is basically formed of two types of nuclear families to exist in one single family.

• Family of Orientation- The family in which an individual is born and raised.
• Family of Procreation- The family formed after the individuals are married to a girl or boy who    belongs to another family.

Rising of the Concept of Nuclear Family in India

A nuclear family is a very simple structured family that consists of a small number of people as compared to the Joint family.  The term family when discussed in India it commonly refers to the Traditional or Joint family. The joint family has been a part of Indian culture and tradition from ancient times. Nowadays, the trend of nuclear families is rising in the urban areas of India.

This is happening at a fast pace in the cities. The children do not want to live under the supervision of their elders after their marriage. They want to live an independent life with full privacy and without any type of disturbance. The factors like modernization and urbanization are promoting the people to practice the concept of nuclear families in the cities rather than being a part of traditional families.

Advantages and Disadvantages of Nuclear Family

There are several types of family structures prevalent in society and the nuclear family is one among them. Some of the advantages and disadvantages of nuclear family enlisted below:

• Freedom to Make Decisions- The members of a nuclear family are free to make any decision they want. They can decide everything by themselves without any interference of their elders. This is not possible in a joint family as there are elder members in the family and they advise the younger ones in their decision-making.
• Development of Good Attributes- The development of different attributes in the children happens in a better way in nuclear families. Thus, this contributes to the good personality development of the children. Moreover, the children in nuclear families are close to their parents and thus can discuss every problem they are facing in an easier way.
• Improved Status of Women- The women in the nuclear families get more time to after themselves and their children. They are not under pressure to work according to the elders of the family. They are free to do whatever they want. Husbands and wives get quality time to spend with each other in nuclear families that are not possible every time in joint families.
• Loving and Peaceful Atmosphere- There are fewer members in a nuclear family than an extended family. Nuclear families with fewer people have very less chances of misunderstanding and conflicts. There is the existence of peace and harmony among the members and that is essential for living a happy family life.
• Sole Responsibilities- The responsibilities in a nuclear family are on the parents, unlike the joint family. The parents are individually responsible for the income and every need of the children as they are only the head of the family.
• Savings and Family Planning is Possible- The income of the house in the nuclear families is not shared among all like the joint families. It is safe in the hands of the parents and they can save it for the future of their children. Moreover, the number of children in nuclear families is limited as the parents can opt for family planning.

Disadvantages

• Children are Devoid of Love from their Grandparents- The children in nuclear families are not able to get the love and affection of their grandparents. Children living in joint families are well-mannered and know well to tackle several difficulties easily.
• No Elders to Guide in Difficulties- The nuclear families lack elders and experienced people and thus there is no one to guide the members during the time of difficulty. The parents themselves have to make decisions about everything and that is very difficult sometimes.
• Financial Loss- The breaking of joint families in the nuclear families results in the division of property or land into different small parts. Every brother gets a small piece of land and thus the yield is also reduced. They have to employ laborers for carrying out all the agricultural work and thus paying for the same is a kind of financial loss.
• Insecurity in Children- The children in nuclear families are devoid of love and care of their parents if both mother and father are working. They are raised and fed by the maids in the houses. This lack of love and time by the parents inculcates the feeling of insecurity and loneliness in the children. This causes many of them to be addicted to bad habits also.
• Lack of Moral and Social Values- The children in the nuclear family many times lack social attributes and become undisciplined. They become habitual of living in freedom and do not like mixing with other family members.
• Widows are Neglected- The widows in nuclear families do not get proper attention and care and they feel as if they are neglected. The children in such cases feel socially and emotionally insecure. This is not the case of widows in joint families. The widow gets good support from the other members of the family and thus forgets every pain gradually and starts living a normal life.

Nuclear Family v/s Joint Family

A joint family is one that consists of people up to three generations living together under the same roof while a nuclear family in contrast is small and simple with very only mother, father and children. There is the existence of mainly two types of family structures in India namely joint and nuclear families. The joint family also referred to as the traditional family has been in existence since ancient times in India. Earlier the people in India were confined to the villages and they were involved in the occupation of agriculture. Thus, they preferred to live together and the male members of the family were involved in the same family business. The concept of the nuclear family is however not a new concept but the structure of this kind of family was more prevalent in the western culture. It has become common in India at present because of modernization and changes in the lifestyle of people.

Is Nuclear Family A Perfect Family?

Every type of family structure present in society has its own benefits and drawbacks. Some of us desire to be a part of a nuclear family while others are a joint family and alternatives. It is wrong to say that the nuclear family is a perfect family. It depends upon the individual what he or she desires. There are conflicts, love, problems, etc in every type of family. It is we the members of the family who make the atmosphere of the family a peaceful and loving one.

According to me, both joint and nuclear families are good structures of families in society. I have always been a part of a nuclear family so I have a habit to dwell in the nuclear family but I had always felt the absence of my grandparents and other relatives too. The enjoyment of any type of celebration or festival in joint families is very interesting rather than the nuclear families. Therefore, being a part of the nuclear family I always have missed the warmth and love of a joint family. We can be part of nuclear families but remain in touch with our other family members and develop the habit of visiting our grandparents at a fixed interval of time.

The type of family that we desire to have is our individual choice. The nuclear family trend is rising but the importance of joint families is always felt. The love and care of different members in the joint family is really amazing. Moreover, the presence of grandparents in the joint families is a boon for the children as they teach them good values and morals. Children are also very close to their grandparents because of the love and affection they receive from them.

I hope this information would be helpful for you to know about the merits and demerits of Nuclear Family in a very convenient way.

FAQs: Frequently Asked Questions on Merits and Demerits of Nuclear Family

Ans. The word nuclear family came into existence in the thirteenth century.

Ans. The word family has been derived from the Latin word ‘Famulus’ that means servant.

Ans. The term ‘Nuclear family’ was coined by George P. Murdock, an anthropologist.

Ans. The love between the family members is stated as Storge(empathy bond).

Ans. Argentina is a country in the world that has the prevalent concept of nuclear families.

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The Increasing Diversity and Complexity of Family Structures for Adolescents

Lisa d. pearce.

University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

George M. Hayward

Laurie chassin.

Arizona State University

Patrick J. Curran

The structure of adolescents’ families, and thus parental forms, in the United States, have become more heterogeneous and fluid over the past several decades. These changes are due to increases in never-married, single parents, divorce, cohabitation, same-sex parenting, multi-partnered fertility, and co-residence with grandparents. We document current diversity and complexity in adolescents’ families as important context for rethinking future parenting theory and research. We also discuss how understandings of adolescents’ families are somewhat limited by current methods used to measure characteristics of families. We recommend social network and profile-based methods as alternatives to capturing key dimensions of family structure and processes. Understanding the diversity of households and families in which adolescents are raised can improve theory and research on parenting.

Even though a universal feature of adolescence is the growing autonomy that youth gain from parental oversight, parents, and the family context in general, continue to play a vital role in adolescents’ lives. The ways that adolescents are “parented,” including the provision of material and psychosocial resources, the quality of parent-child interactions and relationships, and levels of parental monitoring and scaffolding of youth have been consistently shown to matter for adolescents’ academic outcomes, subjective well-being, sexual behavior, substance use, delinquency, and other outcomes ( DiClemente et al. 2001 ; Simons and Conger 2007 ; Steinberg 2001 ). Thus, social scientists, policy-makers, and practitioners continue to investigate and attempt to promote successful models for parenting adolescents.

For better or worse, many current investigations of the features and types of parenting that seem most beneficial for adolescents are based on theories of parenting and adolescence developed decades ago when family structures and their distribution in the population looked very different than they do today. Two cornerstones of contemporary theory, warmth and control, are concepts developed primarily between the 1930s and 1960s ( Baldwin 1955 ; Baumrind 1967 ; Becker 1964 ; Sears, Maccoby, and Levin 1957 ; Symonds 1939 ) —a period in which about 90 percent of children under the age of 18 lived with two parents ( Ruggles and Brower 2003 ). Studies of parenting have been increasingly recognizing how styles of parenting and their impact vary across cultures, socioeconomic strata, and family structures (e.g., Lareau 2003 ; Newman 2012 ; Sorkhabi and Mandara 2013 ; see also from this issue Jones, Loiselle, and Highlander; Lansford et al.; Murry; Stein et al.). Thus, to more accurately theorize, measure, and interpret findings regarding the parenting of adolescents, we must be clear about how families and households have changed over time, especially their increasingly dynamic and complex natures.

In this article, we review and summarize a wide body of literature showing how family forms and their prevalence have changed over the last several decades. After defining what we mean by “family” and “adolescence,” we describe the family households of adolescents, or the family members with whom they tend to live. We then discuss how family members might also be spread across other households, near and far. We then examine current practices in measuring the family contexts of adolescents and recommend innovations such as family network and profile methods. It is our goal to provide as detailed a picture as we can as to the range and distribution of adolescents’ family contexts in addition to suggesting methods for further enhancing our understanding of parenting contexts during adolescence.

Definitions

Family has always been a relatively elusive concept – definitions of family have changed over time, families themselves change over time, and members of families change (i.e., development and aging) ( Harris 2008 ; Powell et al. 2010 ). For our purposes, we focus on all parents, siblings, and extended family members who play a role in adolescents’ lives. Family members may be related by blood, marriage, or other lasting bonds (e.g., cohabitation, guardianships, or adoption). Some family members reside in the same household as a given adolescent and some do not. Sometimes adolescents move between households following custody arrangements or other special circumstances. Thus, we start by describing change in the family households of adolescents and then broaden our focus to consider non-residential family members and their connections to adolescents over time.

Adolescence is a phase of life whose exact age bounds vary by expert or study, but are generally considered to encompass the second decade of life. This is roughly the time period from the onset of puberty to the beginning of adult roles ( Steinberg 2016 ). We cite studies using a variety of age or grade ranges, including 12–17, 18–24, or grades 7–12, primarily due to the ages of participants. Further, many studies of family structure or stability aggregate data for all minors (ages 0–17). Thus, some of the data that we present apply to all youth, not just adolescents. Where we are able, we comment on the extent to which adolescents’ family forms are different than those of younger children.

The Households in Which Adolescents Live

As of 2016, 15 percent of all American households, and 23 percent of family households, contained at least one 12–17 year old ( U.S. Census Bureau 2017a ). Below we describe the changing prevalence of other family members in the households of adolescents. We discuss the parents, siblings, and grandparents with whom adolescents often live as well as homeless adolescents and adolescents who head their own households.

Parental Structure

The nuclear family (a mother and father—usually married—and their biological child/ren) has long been assumed to be the Standard North American Family (SNAF) ( Smith 1993 ) and continues to generally be the standard form to which all others are compared ( Powell et al. 2010 ). As seen in Figure 1 , as recently as 1960, about 88 percent of children (ages 0–17) lived with two parents (biological/adoptive, step, or cohabiting parents), eight percent lived with their mothers only, one percent lived with their fathers only, and three percent lived with other relatives or non-relatives. As of 2016, the percentage of children living with two parents is 69 percent -- a 22 percent decrease in 56 years. The shift was mostly due to single mother and single father families: now, 23 percent of children live with their mother only and four percent live with their fathers only. These numbers represent a 192 percent increase in mother-only families and 259 percent increase in father-only families ( U.S. Census Bureau 2017e ). Although father-only families have increased in number faster than mother-only families, mother-only families are still nearly six times more common.

Living Arrangments of Children Under 18 Years Old, 1960–2016

Source: U.S. Census Bureau (2017e)

Notes. The Census report does not have statistics for 1961–1967; for graphical purposes, a linear trend in each category is used between the data points for 1960 and 1968.

The increase in single parent households over time is primarily the result of two trends. First, divorce has been on the rise in the United States since the end of the Civil War, with a brief plateauing during the early 1980s ( Kennedy and Ruggles 2014 ). Second, there has been a rise in the percentage of all births occurring to unmarried women, from four percent in 1940 to 41 percent in 2013 ( Curtin, Ventura, and Martinez 2014 ). However, just over half (55 percent) of the births to single mothers, as of 2016, are to cohabiting parents ( U.S. Census Bureau 2017d ), and this has been increasing over time ( Kennedy and Bumpass 2008 ). Thus, increasingly, one biological parent is not residing in the household, and if there are two parents, they may be cohabiting partners rather than marital ones. Because of racial and ethnic variation in rates of nonmarital births, cohabitation, and divorce ( Barber, Yarger, and Gatny 2015 ; Curtin et al. 2014 ; Ruggles 1997 ; Smith, Morgan, and Koropeckyj-Cox 1996 ; Tucker and Mitchell-Kernan 1995 ), the increase in mother-only households and children living with other relatives has been particularly dramatic for Black and Hispanic youth, as illustrated in Figure 2 .

Living Arrangments of Children Under 18 Years Old, by Race/Ethnicity, 1960–2016

Source: U.S. Census Bureau 2017g

Notes. The Census report does not have statistics for 1961–1967; for graphical purposes, a linear trend in each category is used between the data points for 1960 and 1968. Data for Hispanics begin in 1980 since they were not available before then for the subcategories shown here.

The way data were collected for many years, one can identify whether there are two adults living in a household and whether at least one of the adults is biologically or adoptively related to children in the household. However, further specification of the marital or even romantic status of the two adults or how both adults are related to each child is often impossible in data collected from before the mid-1990s. More contemporary data has the specificity that allows us to further distinguish households by the complexity of family relationships. For example, we create Table 1 below by adapting U.S. Census Bureau data based on the Current Population Survey in 2016 ( U.S. Census Bureau 2017b ). This table builds upon Figure 1 and allows us to hone in on three groups of adolescents: 9–11 year-olds, 12–14 year-olds, and 15–17 year-olds.

Living Arrangements of Children and Adolescents in the United States in 2016 (Numbers in Thousands)

Source. U.S. Census Bureau (2017b) .

Note: Calculations of significant differences were made following the source documentation instructions.

Overall, 9–17 year-olds have very similar living arrangements to 0–17 year-olds. About 68 percent of 9–14 year-olds and 64 percent of 15–17 year-olds live with two parents as compared to 69 percent of all 0–17 year-olds. Twenty-eight percent of 9–14 year-olds and 30 percent of 15–17 year-olds live with one parent, compared to 27 percent of 0–18 year-olds. And, four and five percent, respectively, do not reside with a parent compared to four percent of those aged 0–17. Not surprisingly, the older adolescents (whose parents have had more time to change living situations or family structure) are slightly more likely than the younger children to live in single parent, other relative, or nonrelative homes.

For the 64–68 percent of adolescents living with two parents, the vast majority of them (about 96–98 percent) live with married biological or adoptive parents. For the 28–30 percent of adolescents who live with one parent, the vast majority of them live with their mothers; specifically, 85 percent of 9–11 year-olds, 84 percent of 12–14 year-olds, and 82 percent of 15–17 year-olds who live with a single parent live with their mother. Conversely, between 15 and 18 percent of adolescents in a single-parent home live with their single father. For all single parent categories, the largest groups, by far, are never married mothers and divorced mothers. Living with a separated mother is the third most common single parent living arrangement, which describes 11–13 percent of adolescents. Lastly, for the 4 to 5 percent of adolescents who do not live with either parent, the most common arrangement is to live with a grandparent, though this likelihood decreases with age: 65 percent of 9–11 year-olds, 58 percent of 12–14 year-olds, and 46 percent of 15–17 year-olds living without parents are living with a grandparent. The next most common arrangements for those living without either parent are living with another relative (25 to 33 percent), living with a nonrelative (7 to 18 percent), and living in foster care (4 to 6 percent).

Given the family change and diversity we have documented, theory and research about the parenting of adolescents must take into account that both parents and children are increasingly experiencing transitions in who lives with them that may induce emotional and financial stress or raise real or perceived stigma ( Cherlin 2010 ; McLanahan and Sandefur 1994 ; Pryor 2004 ). This changes resources for parenting as well as the kinds of issues for which adolescents need support. Further, parents are increasingly spread across different households, which raises issues of how parenting is shared (or not) inside and outside an adolescent’s primary residence.

Same-Sex Parents

There have also been changes over time in the percentage of children living with two parents of the same sex. Vespa, Lewis, and Kreider (2013) find that about 16 percent of same-sex cohabiting or married couples in the United States have biological, adoptive, or stepchildren under age 18 living with them as of 2012 (11 percent of male couples and 22 percent of female couples). This is higher than the 1990 rate of 13 percent, but is lower than estimates between 2000 and 2008, which fluctuated between 17 and 19 percent ( Gates 2012 ). With current estimates of same-sex couples from the American Community Survey at about 860,000 for 2015 ( U.S. Census Bureau 2017c ), if 15–20 percent of them have one child, then between 129,000–172,000 youth are currently living with co-resident same-sex parents.

One noteworthy trend among same-sex couples is the proportional increases in adoptive children compared to biological children, which may be due to LGBT individuals coming out earlier in life and thus becoming less likely to have children while in relationships with opposite sex partners ( Gates 2012 ). The global increase in assisted reproductive techniques (ART)( Dyer et al. 2016 ), in tandem with medical advances and fertility clinics welcoming same-sex couples, is also increasing the ability for same-sex individuals (whether coupled or not) to become parents ( Greenfeld and Seli 2016 ; Grover et al. 2013 ). With the number of same-sex couples growing each year between 2008–2015 ( U.S. Census Bureau 2017c ), the proportion of adolescents living with same-sex parents has grown.

Theory and research on parenting often consider mothers’ and fathers’ roles in providing warmth and control, and sometimes claim unique and essential roles of both, but evidence suggests the gender composition of parents has minimal influence on children’s psychological and social outcomes ( Biblarz and Stacey 2010 ). However, parents’ gender is correlated with how parents and children get along, parents’ emphasis on gender conformity, and parenting skills, so theory and research on parenting should continue to examine the gender composition of parents as a factor shaping parenting and its outcomes ( Bos, van Balen, and van den Boom 2007 ; Golombok, Tasker, and Murray 1997 ).

Although social acceptance of same-sex couples marrying and having children is growing, there is still potential for parents and children in these families to experience stigma and discrimination ( Gates 2015 ). As Jones et al. (this volume), Mills-Koonce, Rehder, and McCurdy (this volume), Murry (this volume), and Stein et al. (this volume) all point out, in families facing real and perceived stigma, parents face the challenge of building a positive sense of oneself and one’s family in addition to helping children understand and persevere in these social dynamics.

Foster and Adoptive Parents

In September of 2015, about 172,000 adolescents ages 10–20 were living in foster care; during the same year, 92,000 adolescents entered foster care and 99,000 exited foster care ( Children’s Bureau 2016 ). Among youth ages 0–20 who exited, 51 percent were reunified with their parents or primary caretakers and 22 percent were adopted ( Children’s Bureau 2016 ). In published statistics, adopted children are typically included with those who are biologically related to parents. However, Child Trends (2012) uses more detailed survey data on adoption from 2007 to show that two percent of all children (ages 0–17) live with at least one adoptive parent and no biological parents. Of those, 37 percent were in foster care at some point, 38 percent were adopted through private domestic adoption, and 25 percent were adopted internationally. One more recent estimate suggests that approximately seven percent of children ages 0–17 in the United States live with at least one adoptive parent, but this includes those adopted by a step-parent, unlike the prior estimate ( Kreider and Lofquist 2014 ).

Fostering and adopting children raises all kinds of unique parenting issues. Adolescent foster or adoptive children have often experienced prior neglect, abuse, or abandonment, making them less trusting of parent figures in general ( Pryor 2004 ). Adoptive parents and children sometimes differ notably in culture or appearance, posing potential issues for how they or others view their relationships ( Pryor 2004 ). Foster parents may be managing uncertainty about how long a child/ren will be in their home and what kinds of bonds to forge ( Pryor 2004 ). Birth parents may still be in contact and involved with their children, raising issues of how to manage co-parenting with foster parents. In other words, there are additional factors at play in foster or adoptive parenting, highlighting key roles of parents and how those are modified across family structure.

Another important feature of family or household context, when it comes to parenting, is how many and what types of siblings live with adolescents on average. Using data from 2009, Kreider and Ellis (2011) find that about 58 million children live with siblings (78 percent). Of these children, the majority (82 percent) live with only full siblings, 14 percent live with a halfsibling, 2 percent live with a stepsibling, and 2 percent live with an adopted sibling. About 22 percent of all youth have no siblings, 38 percent have one sibling, 24 percent have two siblings, 11 percent have three siblings, and 5 percent have four or more siblings.

Siblings function as both sources of intimacy and conflict for adolescents ( Lempers and Clark-Lempers 1992 ), which is largely a continuation of their sibling relationships from childhood ( Dunn, Slomkowski, and Beardsall 1994 ). Intimacy remains stable among same-sex sibling dyads throughout adolescence, but increases for mixed-sex dyads, while conflict appears to taper off during middle to late adolescence ( Kim et al. 2006 ). Theory and research on parenting often focuses on one dyad despite there often being other children in the family. The number of siblings has implications for how resources (material and emotional) are shared which is directly related to parenting ( Blake 1981 ). This takes on even more complexity in blended families with a combination of sibling types.

Grandparents

Table 1 , discussed earlier, shows that about two percent of all children live without parents but with a grandparent. Figure 3 , below, adds to this statistic by showing trends over time in children living with grandparents, in any combination with or without parents ( U.S. Census Bureau 2017f ). The figure shows a doubling in the percent of children who live with a grandparent between 1980 and 2014, from 3.2 percent to 6.6 percent. Notably, about two-thirds of children living with a grandparent are also living with one of their parents (typically the mother). These are called multigenerational households, or households containing three or more generations, and have been shown elsewhere to also vary by race – with Hispanics and blacks having the highest rates (8 percent of households), followed by Asians (6 percent) and whites (4 percent)( Vespa et al. 2013 ). Theories and research on grandparents as parents should factor in how the middle generation (biological parents) fit into the family and parenting, as well as how life course stages and developmental compatibility between family members affect grandparents’ parenting styles ( Burton, Dilworth-Anderson, and Merriwether-deVries 1995 ; Kemp 2007 ).

Children Under 18 Living with Grandparents as Percentage of All Children Under 18

Source: U.S. Census Bureau (2017f)

Homeless adolescents

Although rare, another important family form to address for adolescents is homelessness. About seven percent of the homeless population are unaccompanied children (under 18 years old) and youth (18–24), and about 37,000 children and youth were experiencing homelessness during a point-in-time estimate in 2015 ( National Alliance to End Homelessness 2016 ). However, this is likely an underestimate, since enumeration techniques are not as effective for youth, and youth often do not congregate in the same areas as those in older age groups. Indeed, survey estimates of youth who experience at least one night of homelessness in a given year range from about 1 million to 1.7 million ( Fernandes-Alcantara 2013 ). Homelessness is surely a taxing and stigmatizing experience for adolescents and their parents, further what parents can or cannot provide adolescents.

Adolescents as parents

Births to adolescents are declining and reached an all-time low in 2015 ( Martin et al. 2017 ), predominately due to improved contraceptive usage ( Lindberg, Santelli, and Desai 2016 ), though many adolescents do become parents – usually unintentionally. Finer and Zolna (2014) show that, as of 2008, 91 percent of pregnancies among 15–17 year-olds and 77 percent of pregnancies among 18–19 year-olds are unintended. Nevertheless, in 2015, adolescent females ages 15–19 had about 230,000 births, with about one percent of 15–17 year-old girls giving birth and four percent of 18–19 year-old girls ( Martin et al. 2017 ). Adolescent parents and their children face a number of obstacles and are at an increased risk for a host of negative outcomes, yet intervention programs have the potential to mitigate these (see Pinzon et al. (2012 ) for a comprehensive review on both outcomes of adolescent parenting and interventions). The renegotiation of parenting when one’s own adolescent becomes a parent, and may need new kinds of support and/or more independence, likely presents unique challenges.

Household Transitions Experience by Adolescents

What we have presented to this point are snapshots of what the households of children or adolescents look like across the population in certain years. Another way of understanding variance in the family contexts of youth is to consider how stable these contexts are over time. Several studies have conceptualized family instability as the number of transitions households experience ( Cavanagh 2008 ; Fomby, Mollborn, and Sennott 2010 ), and increasingly studies are comparing particular types of transitions or the timing of those transitions and their associations with child well-being ( Lee and McLanahan 2015 ). When households lose or gain parents or siblings, it is likely to affect parenting resources and styles ( Pryor 2004 ).

Parental Transitions

Brown (2006) uses data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health (Add Health), a nationally representative sample of youth in grades 7–11 during the 1994–95 school year to report the frequency of family transitions within one year of adolescence. Ninety-three percent of these youth experienced no household transitions in that year; specifically, 62 percent of adolescents in this sample lived with two-biological parents throughout the year (married or cohabiting), 12 percent remained in a previously formed stepfamily, and 19 percent remained with a single mother. Seven percent of adolescents experienced a household or family transition during that year: four percent moved from a two-parent family to a single-mother family, three percent went from a single-mother household to a two-parent household (either cohabiting or married), and one percent experienced a transition from one two-parent household type to another (usually from a cohabiting stepfamily to a married stepfamily). Laughlin (2014) shows that 12 percent of children ages 12 to 17 years old in 2011 had experienced a change in the number of residential parents or parent’s partners in the home in the past four years.

Considering the trajectories of household structure throughout all of childhood and adolescence, Mitchell (2013) uses data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979 Mother’s and Children sample to estimate latent classes of children’s long-term living arrangements for youth who were 14–19 years old in 2006. She finds five general pathways: 1) consistently living with two biological parents from birth (55 percent), long-term living with a single mother (18 percent), living with married biological parents who divorce (12 percent), gaining a stepfather through marriage (11 percent), and being born to cohabiting parents who later married or broke up (4 percent). Although these five pathways do not encompass the experiences of all adolescents, they give a good sense of the most common experiences over time.

Custody and Living Arrangements

Using data from the 2009 American Community Survey, Elliot and Simmons (2011) show that about 18 percent of men and 44 percent of women with a divorce in the past year were living with children under 18. This equates to over a million children experiencing a divorce in the past year, with the median age of these children around 9.8 – about the onset of adolescence. Following many of these divorces will be custody arrangements that inevitably change the living situation of the adolescents involved. Custody arrangements have changed tremendously over the past few centuries (see DiFonzo (2014) for a review), but the most recent trend (from the mid-1980s to present) has been a substantial decline in sole custody awards to mothers coupled with a dramatic increase in shared custody awards ( Cancian et al. 2014 ). Estimates of custody awards from 2008, based on a very large sample of court records in Wisconsin, suggest that about 42 percent of awards are now for sole mother custody, 45 percent are for shared custody, nine percent are sole father custody, and the rest are split custody ( Cancian et al. 2014 ).

Other Residential Transitions

The period between late adolescence and early adulthood, often called “emerging adulthood” ( Arnett 2004) , is marked by numerous transitions and identity exploration. For example, about 69 percent of high school graduates begin college immediately following their high school completion ( McFarland et al. 2017 ). This is often accompanied by a residential move, as about half of college students live apart from their parents, which is split about evenly between those with and without roommates ( Sallie Mae 2017 ). Thus, late adolescence is a period of home-leaving for many but not necessarily independent living for most. For adolescents who do not go on to college, many of them begin some sort of paid work, establish their own household, or start families ( DeLuca, Clampet-Lundquist, and Edin 2016 ; Mitchell and Syed 2015 ), often with difficulties in the labor market due to having no more than a high school degree ( Rosenbaum 2001 ). Especially among disadvantaged youth, the typical explorations of emerging adulthood may not be possible ( Côté 2014 ); these youth often face an expedited path to adulthood that involves forgoing postsecondary education and becoming independent as quickly as possible ( DeLuca et al. 2016 ).

Interestingly, the percentage of older adolescents and young adults who return to their parents’ home after leaving, who are sometimes referred to as “boomerang kids,” has been increasing over time in the United States ( Goldscheider and Goldscheider 1999 ). In fact, recent estimates show that living with parents is the most common living situation for 18 to 34 year-olds, at 32 percent ( Fry 2016 ). The reaction of parents to this phenomenon varies, but there is an expectation among parents in the United States that their live-in adult children are working toward independence ( Newman 2012 ).

In general, the increasing fluidity and change in the households and family structures of adolescents signals a growing need for theories and research on the parenting of adolescents to not just expand to consider different family forms, but to also recognize family instability as its own context for parenting ( Pryor 2004 ). As the life course perspective recognizes ( Elder 1998 ), young people (and their parents) carry forward their early life experiences, and so a divorced and single mother might not just be parenting with reduced time and resources in the present, but she and her child/ren are also living with the experiences of the past, such as how well was the divorce handled by all. Due to distress and disruption, parenting is often temporarily compromised during and immediately following a transition in family structure ( Capaldi and Patterson 1991 ; DeGarmo and Forgatch 1999 ).

Nonresidential Family Members of Adolescents

Nonresident fathers.

Due to rising rates of births to single mothers and divorce, as well as the fragility of cohabiting unions, many children have nonresident fathers for some or all of adolescence. In Figure 1 , we show that about 27 percent of youth live away from their father, with the majority of them (23 percent of youth) living with a single mother. Rates of single motherhood also vary substantially by race, with 18 percent of white children, 52 percent of black children, and 25 percent of Hispanic children living with a single mother as of 2016 ( U.S. Census Bureau 2017g ). Nonresident fathers, as a group, substantially increased involvement in their children’s lives between 1976 and 2002, with more fathers seeing their children weekly and fewer fathers reporting no contact at all ( Amato, Meyers, and Emery 2009 ). Cheadle, Amato, and King (2010) add nuance to this finding and identify four latent classes of nonresident father involvement: 38 percent of fathers have high and stable involvement over time, 32 percent have low and stable involvement, 23 percent have high involvement initially but decrease it over time, and 8 percent have low involvement initially but increase it over time.

Nonresident Mothers

Although uncommon, some children spend years not living with their biological or adoptive mothers. In Figure 1 we show that about 8 percent of youth live away from their mother, with about half of these youth (4 percent) residing with single fathers. Table 1 further shows that this percentage is about the same for 9–11 year-olds, 12–14 year-olds, and 15–17 year-olds. The economic situation of nonresident mothers tends to be worse, on average, than that of nonresident fathers, as they earn less money and are less likely to be working ( Sousa and Sorensen 2006 ). However, nonresident mothers tend to spend more time with their children than nonresident fathers ( Gunnoe 1993 ). Because of the historical norm that mothers are more likely to get custody, women who lose or have less custody than fathers probably face stigma that will affect their parenting and create a need for children to also be parented in ways that helps them prepare for potential discrimination. Being a nonresident parent, father or mother, introduces challenges to spending time with one’s children to parent, and may remove one from involvement in important decisions or parenting tasks ( Pryor 2004 ).

Multi-Partner Fertility

Adults have become increasingly like to have children with more than one partner, often called multi-partner fertility (MPF). Recent estimates suggest about 10 percent of adults have MPF ( Monte 2017 ). This means many adolescents have siblings (with full, partial, or no biological ties) with whom they may be maintaining relationships, potentially across residences. Once again, because surveys usually only collect information on household members, we know little about how many adolescents have siblings of any kind residing in other households, nor the quality, benefits, or consequences of those relationships. It is likely that the presence of siblings across other households stretches resources such that adolescents in these situations may get, on average, less time and support from their parents ( Meyer and Cancian 2012 ; Tach, Mincy, and Edin 2010 ). There may also be tension between different parent figures or parents and children that interferes with or complicates the parenting of adolescents ( Pryor 2004 ).

Extended Family

Adolescents are often close to and exchange support with extended family members, including grandparents, aunts and uncles, or cousins ( Sterrett et al. 2011 ). Increasing gains in longevity translate to a higher likelihood that adolescents know their grandparents longer than in previous generations ( Kemp 2007 ). The closer grandparents live to their grandchildren, the more emotionally close they are, but grandparents who live far away often use electronic forms of communication, and studies show that frequent phone or email conversations build closeness ( Harwood 2000 ). Kinds of support that grandparents provide include emotional support, peace-keeping, “straight talking,” and sharing family history ( Soliz 2008 ).

Although research is increasingly incorporating the roles of nonresidential family members, and especially parental figures, in the lives of adolescents ( Jones et al. 2007 ), more could be done to examine forms of support (or conflict) provided to adolescents and residential parent figures. Past theories and methods have relied heavily on the household context and often assumed two biological parents are involved, but now the socialization and raising of adolescents falls to a larger network of adults. The better we understand the forms family configurations and exchanges take, the better we can tailor theory, research, and practice or interventions to fit families as they are.

Measuring Family Contexts for the Parenting of Adolescents

In addition to data on families collected through the U.S. Census, there are a number of high quality, nationally representative sample surveys, many of which are used in the research reported above, that make the description of adolescent family contexts possible. What we know about the family contexts in which adolescents live depends on how we collect data and “measure” family life. Although we learn a great deal from existing data, in some ways, the designs of these studies limit our ability to fully understand certain aspects of adolescents’ families.

Most existing surveys mainly collect information about family members who reside together in households. For some surveys, like the Current Population Survey or the American Community Survey, households are a sampling unit, and one member of the household reports on all others. The quality of those data for understanding family structures within households depends heavily on a well-designed household roster or matrix that lists all members of a household and carefully notes the relationships between all members. When data do not include complete information about the relations between each household member and all other household members, we are restricted from knowing important family characteristics, like whether a married or cohabiting couple in a household are biological, adoptive, or step-parents to the child/ren in the household ( Manning, Brown, and Stykes 2014 ; O’Hara, Shattuck, and Goerge 2017 ). Further, data often lack the detail necessary to determine whether co-resident children are full, half, or unrelated siblings ( McHale, Updegraff, and Whiteman 2012 ).

For many years, household surveys such as U.S. Census forms (up until 1980) required the “household head” to be the household respondent. This was typically a man. In 1980, the Census changed procedure, allowing any “householder” to be the respondent, and this would include men or women who jointly own or rent the home. The proportion of reporting householders who are women has increased over time ( Ruggles and Brower 2003 ). On the other hand, in many more recently established survey studies, such as the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health, the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979 Children and Young Adults, or the National Study of Youth and Religion, mothers are the primary reporting parent and source of information on other members of the household. Household- or child-focused studies are often designed to have mothers (whenever possible) as reporters because of long-standing assumptions about their chief importance in and knowledge of children’s development and family processes ( Schaeffer, Seltzer, and Dykema 1998 ). It has also proved easier and less costly, historically, to locate and recruit women or mothers for survey research ( Braver and Bay 1992 ; Schaeffer et al. 1998 ). Despite the benefits of relying on mothers for family information, only having reports from one parent limits the information we have about adolescents and their families.

Regardless of how residential family members and their relationships to each other are documented, household-based surveys are also limited by the extent to which they can shed light on family members who reside outside the focal household ( Manning et al. 2014 ). This includes nonresidential parents, siblings, grandparents, aunts and uncles, cousins, or even adults who are not blood relatives but play a central role in parenting adolescents. Some studies, like the National Study of Families and Households, involve interviews with multiple parents, including follow ups with parents who leave the household. Very few nationally representative studies of youth or families collect data from nonresidential parents from the start. One exception is the Fragile Families Study ( Reichman et al. 2001 ), in which fathers are interviewed at all the same time points as mothers, even if they live apart. It is undoubtedly expensive to fully delineate and measure adolescents’ families, especially from the perspective of multiple family members, but the value in doing so justifies consideration of how we might more creatively approach the collection of data on adolescents’ family contexts.

A handful of other previously identified factors may also bias our understandings of adolescents or young adults’ living arrangements when young people themselves are the sampling units. For example, when youth are sampled from schools, youth who are not in school either because of dropping out or being homeschooled may be missing from the sampling frame ( Johnston and O’Malley 1985 ). Thus, the types of families or households those youth tend to have could be underrepresented in the data. Further, some studies restrict residents of institutions from being in the sampling frame, meaning that when focusing on youth, those who live on a college campus or are incarcerated (and their family situations) are underrepresented. And, some studies restrict their samples to college students, making findings less generalizable to the whole population of late adolescents or young adults. ( Côté 2014 ; Mitchell and Syed 2015 ).

Future Directions

Family networks.

One alternative that could address limitations inherent in the household-centric design of surveys is the application of social network approaches and methods to the collection of data on family members ( Bernardi 2011 ; Widmer 2010 ). These methods have been primarily used for adults’ social networks to date, and to collect information on the most influential people in their lives. Widmer (2010) argues families are best defined as configurations created out of the interdependencies between family members. Using a social network approach to conceptualize families allows researchers to put adolescents at the center of a network of family members, considering the social, psychological, biological, and geographic distances of those in the web of family. It also makes it possible to assess the type and quality of ties between members of an adolescent’s family network, including the social capital available ( Widmer 2010 ). Further, one could consider the support networks (family or wider) of multiple family members and the extent to which they overlap or leave certain family members isolated ( Bernardi 2011 ).

The conceptualization of adolescents’ families as social networks suggests new forms of data collection as well ( Bernardi 2011 ; Widmer 2010 ). In survey studies designed to understand the role of family and family members in the lives of adolescents, rather than a standard household roster,, adolescents might be asked to complete a sociogram or network diagram that systematically elicits reports of the important family members in an adolescent’s life ( Widmer, Aeby, and Sapin 2013 ). “Important” could be defined according to key theories or research questions. For example, studies might focus on listing and describing family ties based on levels of closeness, social support, financial support, or time spent together. Further, adolescents could report perceptions of how close each of these family members is to every other family member, so that standard network measures, such as density or centrality, could be applied to understanding family characteristics. Other family members could also become participants in the study and provide their own assessment of adolescents’ family networks and the ties involved.

In longitudinal studies, the repeated mapping of adolescents’ family networks could provide rich data for shifts over time in influential family members, family relationships, and family living arrangements. This dynamic approach allows for assessing levels of stability or instability in family networks as well as various trajectories in network change. Widmer (2010) demonstrates how change in family configurations in the short and long term are related to psychological well-being.

Using a social network approach in measuring the family structures, ties, and interactions of adolescents could address several issues raised earlier in the paper. For one, this measurement strategy could do a better job of documenting family relations across households, not limiting researchers to the context of one household. Second, depending on how data about family networks are collected, this approach could do a better job of characterizing types and features of family relationships ( Widmer 2010 ). With a variety of studies indicating that levels of warmth and control provided by parents are more predictive of youth well-being than the family structure/s in which they have lived ( Arnold et al. 2017 ; Demo and Acock 1996 ; Lansford et al. 2001 ; Phillips 2012 ), it is important that we understand how family configurations improve or challenge the ability of parents to provide high quality parenting ( Pryor 2004 ; Murry this issue).

Family Profiles

Another alternative for measuring the family contexts in which adolescents live is to use cluster analysis or latent class methods to suggest “types” or “profiles” of families. Common types of families would be identified by a set of indicators of family structure such as number and type of parent figures, sibling types and living arrangements, different residential custody arrangements, multigenerational living, and more. Family configurations could represent families at one moment in time or a set of experiences across time.

Research on the implications of family structure for children and adolescents often focuses on one part of family structure at a time, like whether there are one or two parents in the home, or the impact of a remarriage on adolescents. However, the relationship status or transitions experienced by parents might be different based on whether an adolescent has siblings or not and how many. Manning et al. (2014) and others describe the multifaceted nature of families as “complexity,” and they recommend an approach that documents types of parent figures as well as siblings. Methods such as latent class analysis could achieve this.

Indicators of dynamic living arrangements such as shared residential custody could be included in analyses. One could represent family transitions over time such as having ever lived with a single parent, a step-parent (married or cohabiting), having had a biological-, half-, or step-sibling, having ever lived with a grandparent, having experienced a parental dissolution, having moved from home, or ever having returned to home.

The use of social network or configurational methods has the potential to transform the study of adolescents’ family contexts and parenting by providing better coverage of family members and processes. Rather than having to rely on certain segments of what adolescents might define as their family, or only consider one aspect of family structure at a time, these methods allow the complexity of families to be more fully captured. Moreover, with network or family profile methods, measures of the quality or content of family interactions could be included. This might include family experiences, such as death, severe or chronic health issues, incarceration, or deportation of a family member as factors that define a family and present new issues for parenting adolescents.

Conclusions

Understanding forms of family in which adolescents come of age and their impact is challenging on a number of fronts. There are many dynamics at play. The definition of family has been changing over time, families experience changes of members across time, and parents and adolescents themselves are developing through time. Further, there are key measurement challenges, including the extent to which we focus on household members as family, who we ask to report on family structure and dynamics, and how to best capture changes in these very complex processes over time.

Despite these challenges, we do have a sense of the range and prevalence of family forms and how these have changed over time. Adolescents increasingly live in single-parent, step-parent, and no-biological-parent homes. Having step-siblings or half-siblings in the home or in other homes is more common. Grandparents are increasingly present in adolescents’ homes and lives. Older adolescents or young adults are more likely to return to their parents’ homes for a period of time. Further, the number of changes in living arrangements families experience has increased. Because so much about adolescents’ families has changed since the middle of the 20 th century when foundational theories of parenting were developed, it is important we consider how newer contexts for parenting might alter or expand theory or research on parenting adolescents.

The many aspects of family change experienced in the United States over the past few decades share a common set of implications for parenting adolescents. Different forms and increasing change within families involves relationship transitions for both parents and children, can be stigmatizing for parents and children, might increase the number of parent figures needing to coordinate support and guidance for an adolescent, and can be a source of difference or distance between parents and children.

Relationship transitions, such as separation or divorce, are associated with more parental stress and harsher parenting in mothers ( Beck et al. 2010 ; Cooper et al. 2009 ). Amato (2004 :32) contends that while there are many risk factors associated with divorce, “disruptions in parent-child relationships have the greatest potential to affect children negatively.” Families with “boomerang” adolescents, who have moved out and then return, may have challenges negotiating appropriate autonomy-granting and independence-building ( Newman 2012 ). Thus, the transitions involved in creating increasingly new and different family forms raise challenges to parenting adolescents. Classic theories highlighting the importance of warmth and control (e.g., Baldwin 1955 ; Baumrind 1967 ; Becker 1964 ; Sears et al. 1957 ; Symonds 1939 ) can be enhanced in thinking about ways parents can adequately provide support to adolescents during times of transition and in new family forms.

These considerations all point to an increased need for cooperation, negotiation, and understanding among parents, partners, and children ( Amato 2004 ). Theory and research should continue to address the extent to which relationship transitions limit parents’ abilities to provide optimal support and monitoring, and whether, at the same time, adolescents in these situations might need more support and monitoring. Parents themselves should and often do acknowledge the need to process these transitions in as healthy a manner as possible to protect their and their adolescents’ well-being. For example, authoritative parenting, in which parents are warm, involved, and supportive of their adolescent’s autonomy and decision-making, yet are clear and firm about their boundaries and expectations, can be successful across multiple family types and cultures ( Baumrind 1971 ; Sorkhabi and Mandara 2013 ; Steinberg 2001 ). Other parents and family members who are not be dealing with family transitions might consider how they can best support those parents who are, in the interest of helping families emerge from transitions.

When family forms are changing so fast, and society holds strong to nostalgia for the idealize family of the past ( Coontz 1992 ), there is great potential for suspicion and condemnation of non-nuclear families, same-sex parent families, or foster/adoptive families that stem from a failure or inadequacy on the part of biological parents. Thus, parents and adolescents in these family forms, with these experiences and identities, face personal challenges that arise from marginalization, and they worry about and attend to each other’s harm from such discrimination. These processes are also discussed by Murry (this issue) and are a potential context in which to consider what optimal parenting of adolescents involves.

Parents in these often-judged families can benefit from being aware and educated about the risk of experiencing real and perceived stigma. If parents are presented with data to show the relative normality of their experiences today and the questionable reasoning in assuming a golden age of families in the past ( Coontz 1992 ), they may gain confidence as parents, allowing them to provide the support and monitoring that seems more essential to adolescents than family structure in and of itself. Likewise, adolescents who face potential stigma because of their family experiences can be taught how to understand and cope with it. Finally, parents and adolescents who have consistently been a part of a nuclear, biological, heterosexual parent family should also recognize that different family forms are not necessarily inferior family forms. They should connect with different kinds of families to learn how their lives are more similar than they know. As everyone recognizes the dangers in assuming that family structure equates to family quality, the risk of stigma for parents and children in new family forms will decline.

Complex families with multiple parent figures, including grandparents, other relatives, non-residential parents, and foster parents, have increased potential for conflicts about parenting and greater challenges negotiating a unified and beneficial parenting approach ( Pryor 2004 ). As a greater number of parent figures become involved in adolescents’ lives, parenting behaviors become responsive to the desires and circumstances of a range of parent types, new children, and others. These complex family networks will affect access to, and relationships with, all of a parent’s children ( Meyer and Cancian 2012 ; Tach et al. 2010 ).

Finally, with greater heterogeneity and change over time in the number of parent figures involved in an adolescents lives comes the potential for greater distance between parents and adolescent along a number of lines. Step-parents, foster or adoptive parents, or even parents who had children via ART, and their adolescent children, often have issues surrounding the lack of biological connection between them and/or negotiating how to establish strong bonds and encourage their connection with their biological parents (if they are still involved) ( Pryor 2004 ). Grandparents who parent may share biological ties with adolescents, but their age difference may pose challenges to parenting. Non-resident mothers or fathers may be or feel less involved in key decisions or socialization processes due to their limits on time together ( Pryor 2004 ).

We have covered a variety of aspects of family structure and their implications for the contemporary study of parenting adolescents. Yet, there remain other ways that families differ that might impact parenting and should also be studied further. We focused on permanent relationship and living arrangement change in our survey of the literature, but families can become separated in temporary (but often long-term) ways that hold many of the same implications for how parenting might unfold. For example, military families deal with frequent moves as well as deployment of at least one parent ( Arnold et al. 2017 ). There has been a massive increase in the likelihood an adolescent will be separated from a parent who is incarcerated, presenting its own unique challenges ( Johnson and Easterling 2012 ; Murphey and Cooper 2015 ). Deportation is increasingly an issue for immigrant families in the United States, and refuges may have family members left in their country of origin. There are also family experiences that do not change the structure of family, but shift the balance of resources or parenting. This could include parent or child physical or mental health issues, unemployment, or death of a family member. In general, the better we are at considering the range of family forms and experiences in our measures and models, the more advice can be tailored to specific parenting contexts for adolescents.

In addition to incorporating new family forms and their implications into our theorizing and research on parenting adolescents, we must also advance our methods of measuring families. Because of the challenges in grasping all complexities of adolescents’ families, research should continue to pursue and implement new ways to conceptualize and measure family forms and processes. Social network methods bring a flexibility and comprehensiveness to the measurement of significant family ties, as well as allowing the study of multiple family members’ perspectives. Profile or clustering methods permit studying unique configurations of certain aspects of family structure and the quality of interactions.

In the absence of these alternate forms of data on families, we recommend that studies focused on or controlling for the role of family structure in parenting theorize the appropriate dimensions of family context to a given topic, and include as many of those as possible. This would include measures of number and type of parents, siblings, and extended family members and involvement of non-residential parent figures in an adolescent’s life. We also recommend modeling interactions between parenting styles and family structure, so we can better evaluate the extent to which the importance of key constructs like emotional support or behavioral monitoring varies by family context.

More fully recognizing the contemporary range of family structures and the unique issues involved with each greatly improves the odds that we are more accurately theorizing, measuring, and analyzing best practices for parenting adolescents. In turn, the public can also be better informed about the growing normality of non-nuclear, impermanent family structures, possibly lowering stigma of certain families and raising parents’ and adolescents’ confidence in maintaining strong bonds and successfully preparing for the transition to adulthood.

Acknowledgments

This research received support from the Population Research Training grant (T32 HD007168) and the Population Research Infrastructure Program (P2C HD050924) awarded to the Carolina Population Center at The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill by the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development.

Contributor Information

Lisa D. Pearce, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

George M. Hayward, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Laurie Chassin, Arizona State University.

Patrick J. Curran, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

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Is the Nuclear Family Means?

This essay about the nuclear family defines it as a household consisting typically of a heterosexual couple and their biological or adopted children. It discusses the historical rise of this family model during the mid-20th century, particularly in Western societies, influenced by economic and societal shifts post-World War II. The essay critiques the nuclear family for placing excessive pressures on parents and isolating them from extended community support. Additionally, it addresses the evolution of family structures, highlighting the diversity in modern family forms such as single-parent households, blended families, and same-sex couples with children. The text underscores that while the nuclear family has been idealized as a stable unit, contemporary society recognizes a variety of family models that reflect current economic conditions, social norms, and cultural values, demonstrating that family stability and support can come from various structures.

How it works

The term “nuclear family” commonly denotes a household comprising a heterosexual pair and their biological or adopted progeny. This archetype has historically represented the conventional familial arrangement, notably in Western cultures, and frequently emerges in media, literature, and policymaking as the quintessential family unit.

Historically, the concept of the nuclear family gained traction post-World War II and the ensuing economic upturn. During this epoch, societal norms and economic paradigms advocated for a familial structure wherein the father typically engaged in extramural labor, the mother oversaw domestic affairs, and their offspring were nurtured under their direct tutelage and guardianship.

This model was extolled for furnishing a secure and structured milieu for child-rearing, emblematic of moral and societal decorum.

Nevertheless, the nuclear family is neither a ubiquitous standard nor a stagnant institution. Its ascendancy is relatively modern when juxtaposed against the broader expanse of human history. Antecedent to the industrial era, extended family cohabitation—encompassing grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins sharing habitation and resources—prevailed and was frequently economically requisite. The transition to nuclear family living arrangements transpired concurrently with urbanization and industrial employment, fostering geographic mobility, with diminished accommodations for expansive extended families in burgeoning urban locales.

Despite its idealization, the nuclear family comprises merely one among manifold familial configurations and is not devoid of impediments. Detractors of the nuclear family model posit that it confers disproportionate burdens upon progenitors and estranges them from broader communal support networks. They highlight that this seclusion can engender considerable strain, as the obligations of childcare, education, and emotional sustenance primarily devolve upon a mere duo of adults. Moreover, economic exigencies, shifts in societal mores, and heightened divorce rates have engendered evolutionary changes in the nuclear family model, occasionally diminishing its prevalence.

In contemporary society, familial structures evince heightened diversity. Single-parent households, cohabiting couples sans progeny, blended families, and same-sex couples rearing offspring exemplify familial units that contravene the traditional confines of the nuclear family. Sociologists and scholars in family studies contend that these diverse configurations possess the potential to furnish the same stability and sustenance conventionally associated with nuclear families.

Furthermore, the escalating acknowledgment of diverse familial paradigms mirrors broader societal transitions towards inclusivity and validation of disparate cultural norms regarding family. Many non-Western societies accentuate extended familial bonds that play pivotal roles in nurturing and support, diverging significantly from the Western nuclear model.

In summation, while the nuclear family has historically been touted as the archetypal linchpin of societal frameworks in numerous regions, it neither reigns supreme nor necessarily represents the predominant form of family any longer. The metamorphosis of familial structures serves as a reflection of shifts in economic landscapes, societal norms, and cultural principles. Embracing the validity and merits of sundry familial configurations is imperative in addressing the genuine requisites of individuals and communities within a diverse and dynamic society.

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Home / Essay Samples / Sociology / Modern Society / The Nuclear Family in Sociology: Perspectives and Challenges

The Nuclear Family in Sociology: Perspectives and Challenges

• Category: Sociology , Life
• Topic: Family Relationships , Family Values , Modern Society

Pages: 4 (1654 words)

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Nuclear Family and British Social Breakdown Essay

Introduction.

One of the biggest concerns of the contemporary British society is the issue society breakdown. This matter has attained the attention of not just sociologists and anthropologists but the general public as well. Many factors have been attributed to this social problem. Different theories have been fronted to explain the origin, causes and effects of this challenge.

As they say numbers do not lie. According to statistics, the probability of kids in the Great Britain not been raised by both parents is the greatest in the region, except of Belgium, Latvia and Estonia. As we speak only less than two thirds of children under the age of 14 are living in the same household with their biological parents. This research was carried out by Organization for Economic Development and Co-operation (OEDC).

The figures indicates that 68.9 per cent of kids under 14 live with both natural parents in United Kingdom while 70.7 of the same age bracket live with both parents in the United States, and 79.5 in France. These statistics form the basis of our critical discussion. In this paper we examine and explain the importance of nuclear family and its functions in British society. The paper goes ahead to elucidate whether the decline of nuclear family contributes to the wider British social breakdown.

Contrast and exploration of the nature and functions of the nuclear family with other family types or structures

Comparatively nuclear family demonstrates a couple of similarities and contrasts with other family structures. A brief description of nuclear family is that it be defined as a family that is composed of two sets of family members, parents and children, living together in the same home.

Interaction within family is usually unlimited and usually very personal. This can be depicted by the close conduct experienced from time to time such as sharing household utilities and facilities. Family members in a nuclear family are generally freer with each other and forms closer ties as compared to other types of family structure.

The core function of nuclear is basically supporting each other psychologically, socially, and economically. This comes handy when it comes to transacting vital undertakings such as inheritance of property where every member is expected to receive a share. In comparison to other family structures this exercise is less complex. In extended families such issues as inheritance can be termed as nightmare, this is probably because of the larger numbers.

Extended family is the other major type of family structure. It can be described as a family with more than parents and offspring. Sociologist have moved forward and tried to classify extended family as follows. First is the vertical extended family. This branch is made up of three or more sets such as grandparents, parents and children.

Secondly, the horizontal extended family. This family consists of cousins, aunts, and uncles. The last branch is modified extended, commonly referred as Michael Gordon, after his outstanding contribution. This branch is essentially made up of two or more nuclear families living separately.

One common distinguishing factor between nuclear and extended family is the level of sets representation in each of them. It is also clear that numbers do vary. Rarely will you find nuclear families with fewer people than extended family or vice verse. In terms of relationships, extended families have “weaker” relations as compared to nuclear family. In terms of functions the two differ a bit. In nuclear family the focus is primarily on the “immediate” members but in extended the focus spreads out to meet the needs of everyone in the household.

The other fast developing structure of family is single-parent family. As the name insinuates, it is composed of a single parent and children. From statistics, they are more female single parents as compared to male parents. Sometimes this family type is referred as a broken nuclear because often it is a result of broken nuclear family. Single-parent family can be contrasted with nuclear by the fact that in nuclear family both parents work together for the good of the children while in single-parent family only one parent is involved.

Advantages and disadvantages of nuclear family compared to other types of family unit

The nuclear family bears many advantages and as expected some downside also. To start off is the strength of privacy. Matters conducted within a nuclear family are more likely to be secret, confidential and private. Privacy is a key factor searched by most people because it brings the element of integrity and creation of personal space.

Financial stability is another most sought after factor in marriage and society. Nuclear family provides the most conducive environment for financial stability. Both parents are able to save, plan, and provide for the children. This makes the burden bearable for the parents and protects the children from unnecessary lack.

Another noticeable advantage of nuclear family is freedom, comfort and avoidance of stress. Nuclear family creates that environment that is more likely to be free from stress and strain. In a way, members find their way to enjoy their life without much interference from other “external” forces.

The disadvantage of nuclear family includes lack of support from the larger society in case of eventualities such as tragedy or death. More often, nuclear family tends to be “clogged” to itself and members might lack the “external” touch. This is might contribute to lack of social skills.

Possible influences of the ‘breakdown’ of society

The state of society breakdown can be contributed to many factors. For the purpose of this paper we shall discuss the following factors: Changes of family structure, career development and feminism. Changes in family structure can be attributed to the increasing threat of society breakdown. It is noticed that a fragmented family will yield to a fragmented society.

This is a source of concern to our society. The traditional family has been interfered with and now what we are witnessing is new forms of marriages and families. These new development have resulted to the sad reality of escalating rate of divorces. Notably since 1960, there has been a tremendous increase in divorces occurrences in the Great Britain.

Actually between 1961 and 1969 the number doubled and the same increase was recorded in 1972. The trend has continued to expand touching its peak at 1993 at 180,000. According to experts, some couples are more prone to suffer divorce. The group that married young and had children before the marriage or practiced cohabitation. The other vulnerable group is partners who have been married or gone through another divorce.

Career development is the other main contributor of society breakdown. Marriages and families generally demand a lot of time and resources. In the same tone, career development is taxing and consumes a lot of time. The strength and wisdom to balance the two has lead many people to choose forsaking marriage and family at the expense of developing their careers.

Holistically looking at it, at the end of the day it is the society that is hurt because this means compromise in other aspects. In such a case it is easier to cohabitate than to manage a family. It is easier and more prestigious to work towards job promotion than to sacrifice finances for the sake of family.

The other could be associated with broken society is the aspect of feminism. From the onset I must clarify that this aspect is not entirely wrong but only some parts which are misplaced. As we know it is the responsibility of women to be “homemaker” in the family. This is a noble task that requires a lot of humility and patience.

However, what are we seeing in the society? Women who are so agitated for their right such that they cannot simply be homemakers. The theory of feminism has good intentions but if addressed with wisdom then I am afraid it ends up doing more harm than good. A family needs both a man and a woman. The man is the head and woman supporting him. And together they form a nuclear family.

Restoration of nuclear family

Nuclear family is the most ideal family structure for restoration of the broken society. From the above discussion it is clear that the strengths outweigh the weaknesses. Restoration of nuclear family is a very possible mission. This could be achieved through carrying out programs encouraging especially the young people the significance of family and nuclear in this matter. This program could incorporate “success stories”, couples, families that have successful lived to enjoy the fruits of nuclear family.

From the above discussion it clear that decline in nuclear family is leading to the wider broken society in the current British society. In summary nuclear family plays a very strategic and vital role to the well being the society. This can be demonstrated by how much we, as the society, stand to gain if this family structure shall be restored. The following are the main contributors of the society ‘breakdown’ they include Changes of family structure, career development and feminism.

• Chicago (A-D)
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IvyPanda. (2018, December 19). Nuclear Family and British Social Breakdown. https://ivypanda.com/essays/nuclear-family/

"Nuclear Family and British Social Breakdown." IvyPanda , 19 Dec. 2018, ivypanda.com/essays/nuclear-family/.

IvyPanda . (2018) 'Nuclear Family and British Social Breakdown'. 19 December.

IvyPanda . 2018. "Nuclear Family and British Social Breakdown." December 19, 2018. https://ivypanda.com/essays/nuclear-family/.

1. IvyPanda . "Nuclear Family and British Social Breakdown." December 19, 2018. https://ivypanda.com/essays/nuclear-family/.

Bibliography

IvyPanda . "Nuclear Family and British Social Breakdown." December 19, 2018. https://ivypanda.com/essays/nuclear-family/.

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Forget Aircraft Carriers: Submarines are How the U.S. Navy Beats China in a War

Summary: Mike Sweeney's essay, published by the U.S. Naval Institute, argues that submarines, not aircraft carriers, will dominate future naval warfare, especially in a potential conflict with China.

-Historian John Keegan's insights support this view, emphasizing submarines' stealth and versatility compared to carriers' vulnerability. Despite its ambitious shipbuilding, China lags in developing quiet, capable nuclear submarines, making it a regional rather than a global naval power.

-Sweeney contends that without advanced undersea warfare capabilities, China cannot match U.S. naval superiority globally. The essay highlights the strategic importance of submarines in maintaining U.S. naval dominance amid evolving threats.

Why Submarines Could Eclipse Aircraft Carriers in U.S.-China Naval Conflict

Last year, the U.S. Naval Institute published an essay by Mike Sweeney claiming that “ Submarines Will Reign in a War with China .” The essay, as you might expect, suggested that the submarine—rather than the  aircraft carrier —will be the most important naval vessel of the future.

Were submarines to reign supreme in the future of naval warfare, the United States would benefit, as  China  has failed to develop a submarine fleet capable of competing with the Americans.

The era of the submarine?

Sweeney’s essay echoed the sentiments of noted historian  John Keegan , who argued in the 1980s that of the two most important naval platforms to emerge during World War II (the aircraft carrier and the submarine) it was the submarine that would prove more vital to future warfare.

“The aircraft carrier, whatever realistic scenario or action is drawn...will be exposed to a wider range of threats than the submarine must face,” Keegan wrote. “In a shoreward context, it risks attack not only by carrier-borne but also by land-based aircraft, land-based missiles, and the submarine itself.”

Keegan’s insights drew heavily upon the only significant naval engagement fought since the conclusion of World War II, the  Falkland Islands War . During the  conflict , the British navy was confronted with a new threat (anti-ship cruise missiles, or ASCMs) and an old threat, the submarine.

The Argentinians, defending the Falkland Islands, deployed the  San Luis  diesel-powered submarine. Despite being poorly maintained, despite being staffed with a poorly trained crew, the  San Luis  proved troublesome for the relatively advanced British navy. The British navy deployed a submarine, too, the nuclear-powered HMS  Conqueror , which sank Argentina’s  General Belgrano  cruiser, scaring the Argentine Navy to port for the rest of the conflict.

Keegan believed that the threat submarines (and ASCMs) posed would prove insurmountable and un-survivable, causing the oceans to become “empty,” with future combatants engaging only beneath the surface of the waves.

Now, Keegan’s prediction hangs over the heads of U.S. war planners prepping for conflict with China.

“Increased threats to aircraft carriers and other surface combatants from “land-based aircraft, land-based missiles, and the submarine itself” is a fair description of the anti-access/area denial (A2/AD) capabilities China has developed,” Sweeney wrote. “More broadly, the future of undersea warfare is likely to be a major determinant of the long-term military balance between China and the United States.”

Preparing for China

China is currently amid one of world history’s most ambitious  shipbuilding sprees , a modernization “remarkable in its scope and success,” according to Sweeney. Yet, despite the scope and success, China’s navy has failed to produce high-quality nuclear submarines. Whereas the United States (and Soviets) were able to achieve sophisticated quieting technology decades ago, the Chinese SSN, the  Shang -class, “is estimated to be on par with Soviet designs from the 1970s, before the quieting breakthroughs that produced the  Akula .” And “China’s SSBNs, the Jin-class , have noise levels comparable to Soviet SSBNs that first put to sea more than four decades ago,” Sweeney wrote.

Accordingly, without capable nuclear-powered submarines, Sweeney argues, the Chinese navy will “remain a regional navy.” True, China has built the capabilities to challenge U.S. supremacy in the narrowly defined “western Pacific,” but that “does not equate to a global challenge to U.S. naval superiority.” In order to compete with the United States on a global  level , “China would have to expand its expeditionary operations and a central part of that would need to be vastly improved undersea warfare capabilities.”

About the Author: Harrison Kass

Harrison Kass is a defense and national security writer with over 1,000 total pieces on issues involving global affairs. An attorney, pilot, guitarist, and minor pro hockey player, Harrison joined the US Air Force as a Pilot Trainee but was medically discharged. Harrison holds a BA from Lake Forest College, a JD from the University of Oregon, and an MA from New York University. Harrison listens to Dokken.

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