How Families Changed – What Everyone Knows and No One Knows

We all have an image of that sentimentalized 1950s family: mom, dad, and the kids. Mom and dad married, of course, and living together and having the kids only after the wedding. Dad goes off to work, mom stays home with the kids. Never mind that it was more of an aberration than a tradition. It still seems like the One True Family.

Changes in Families: What Everyone Knows

Go ahead and try to generate some of the ways that families have changed, and you can probably come up with some of the most important ones off the top of your head. For example, everyone knows that:

1. Couples often don't wait to get married before living together
2. Committed couples sometimes don't get married at all
3. Many women work at paid jobs, and are no longer economically dependent on a husband
4. Once women became just as committed to their paid work as men were to theirs, wives and husbands could not always find work in the same place, so they had commuter marriages
5. Couples don't just consist of one man and one woman
6. Couples comprised of two women or two men can now get married
7. Lots of married couples don't stay married, and divorce is no longer so stigmatized
8. Lots of couples don't have kids
9. Lots of couples have kids before they get married
10. Lots of people have kids without being married or even coupled, and the stigma – though still around – is not as bad as it once was
11. Lots of people stay single, with or without kids

Changes in Families: What Hardly Anyone Knows

Some of those changes in families that everyone knows about were initially described in the media as something new. In fact, though, some of them were not all that new at all. They had already been happening, unheralded and absent from the prevailing narratives. Other significant changes hardly got any attention at all. For example:

1. The march of women out of the home and into the workforce was much ballyhooed, but many women of lesser means were already working – economically, they had no choice.
2. The commuter marriages that seemed so new and shiny were not so unique either. Other couples were separated for long periods of time by war, imprisonment, or seasonal jobs. Immigrant families sometimes spanned not just different households but different countries.
3. Perhaps the most significant development in the evolution of the meaning of family was almost entirely missing from the consciousness of mainstream America – until the anthropologist Kath Weston published Families We Choose: Lesbians, Gays, Kinship in 1991. "Families of choice" may well offer the most prescient view we have of what families of the future might look like, and not just in LGBT communities.

Single, No Children: Who Is Your Family is a brief collection of my writings on family (some new, some previously published). The themes I've been describing so far come from new work which you can find in Chapter 2, "How Our Families Became So Much More Than Just Mom, Dad, and the Kids." After describing some of the most important heralded and hidden changes in families since the 1950s, I also describe some emergent family forms, including several radical ones just beginning to be recognized in the popular press.

In addition to three other very short articles, Single, No Children: Who Is Your Family includes a chapter by the same name that was previously available only in a very expensive scholarly volume.

Here is the opening of the chapter, "How Our Families Became So Much More Than Just Mom, Dad, and the Kids," in Single, No Children: Who Is Your Family:

Slate writer Will Saletan was miffed. On a high school health test, his son was asked to select the correct definition of family, and lost five percentage points for choosing "a collection of related-by-blood individuals living together." He was supposed to pick "a collection of individuals who care for and about each other." Saletan tweeted about it, and his tweet was quickly retweeted well over one thousand times. A flurry of thoughtful, snarky, and contentious comments and essays from across the political spectrum ensued.

In the 1950s, one of the other alternatives would have been the obviously correct answer: "Should be two parents, children and perhaps some extended members living together." Even a much narrower version would have seemed noncontroversial: "a married mother and father, of the same race, living together with their children; dad is the breadwinner and mom stays home to raise the kids."

Decades later, scholars would realize that the heterosexual nuclear family that so dominated the middle of the twentieth century was an aberration, not a tradition. At the time, though, raging debates over the meaning of family were mostly absent. Official definitions of family (as offered, for example, by the Census Bureau), scholarly definitions, ideological construals, and popular perceptions mostly converged. Hardly anyone anticipated the sweeping changes that would rattle the unit that was supposed to be the very foundation of society. As sociologist John Scanzoni noted, "The accepted wisdom was that the post-World War II nuclear family style was the culmination of a long journey – the end point of changes in families that had been occurring for several hundred years."

Instead, in the historically brief stretch of barely more than half a century, all of the truths about family we took to be self-evident got upended. Some of the changes were heralded, others hidden. Still others are just emerging now, in the opening decades of the 21st century, and offer hints as to what family might mean in the coming decades.

[Note. You can also read more about changes in families and ways of living in How We Live Now: Redefining Home and Family in the 21st Century. The new collection, Single, No Children: Who Is Your Family, is available in paperback and as an ebook. I think of that short book as the companion volume to another brief collection, Single Parents and Their Children: The Good News No One Ever Tells You.]

Source: Bella DePaulo, book cover