Family Breakdown
The prevailing structures of family life that evolved over the centuries have splintered in recent decades. With the emergence of the “nuclear family,” extended family members have been excluded from the task of childrearing and homemaking. In the ensuing decades, the nuclear family faced pressure from the push for women to prioritize careers, the sexual revolution, and legal reforms that gave rise to amorphous social norms. While such changes have justly celebrated benefits, they have come with substantial costs too.
The two-parent family, once the norm in American society, has weakened as divorce and one-parent households have been normalized across much of American society. Mutually reinforcing social norms and public policies have spurred this decline, with social and economic consequences that have affected children and reverberated into subsequent generations.
Daniel Patrick Moynihan, The Negro Family: The Case for National Action. Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s report on black poverty identified the breakdown of the family and the rise of single motherhood, not economic forces, as the root cause of intergenerational poverty. Urban ghettos, he argued, perpetuated negative cultural and family norms within the black community. His conclusion was that government policy should prioritize stable family formation to make possible sustained economic growth within urban communities.
Andrew J. Cherlin, “The Deinstitutionalization of American Marriage.” Cherlin, a sociology professor, argues that the “weakening of the social norms that define partners’ behavior” has transformed marriage into a primarily symbolic institution for personal achievement, rather than a social institution for having and raising children. Shifting norms around cohabitation, in particular, contributed to this process of “deinstitutionalization.”
W. Bradford Wilcox, “The Evolution of Divorce.” Wilcox delves into the consequences of no-fault divorce over the past half-century, linking it to a perception of marriage as an extension of the personal self. Such legal and cultural changes have led, he argues, to rising rates of divorce, falling rates of marriage, and worsening outcomes for children.
Charles Murray, Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960–2010. Murray charts the evolving social structures of the white working class, showing that the same trends that had alarmed Moynihan in predominantly black, urban communities two generations earlier now appeared as a function of class, rather than race. Social pathologies like declining marriage rates and increasing out-of-wedlock births had become so deeply embedded in the white working class by the 2000s that Murray questions “the viability of white working-class communities as a place for socializing the next generation.”
Crown Forum, 2012. 432 pages.
Selection: “Chapter 8. Marriage.” 19 pages.
Robert Putnam, Our Kids: The American Dream in Crisis. Putnam describes the yawning opportunity gap between the lower- and upper-class children and details the ways in which different family norms and parenting practices—what parents do “to and for their kids”—affect children’s long-term outcomes.
David Brooks, “The Nuclear Family Was a Mistake.” Brooks illustrates the demise of the extended family in America over the 19th and 20th century and notes how it was displaced by an ill-equipped, isolated, nuclear family. Nuclear families are less resilient than extended families, he argued, which have the capacity to support members in the event of crisis. Brooks attributes these changes to the Industrial Revolution and the post-war economic boom that made the nuclear family more economically feasible.