Family (2) Nuclear Family

The nuclear family had its heyday between 1950 and 1965, but it was relatively rare in terms of history.

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.

Several unique factors made the nuclear possible during this period.

• Women were obliged to stay at home and look after their children.

• Post-war labour shortages pushed up wages, making a single income family viable.
  

  By 1961, the median American man aged 25 to 29 was earning nearly 400 percent more than his father had earned at about the same age...
  

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...

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”...

Since the 1960s, the dominant family culture has been the “self-expressive marriage.”
Marriage is no longer primarily about childbearing and childrearing. Now marriage is primarily about adult fulfillment”...

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...

These cultural changes have brought about serious changes in relationships.

Over the past two generations, people have spent less and less time in marriage—they are marrying later, if at all, and divorcing more...

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...