Monday, May 12, 2008
Census data deals a blow to an American icon -- and the conservative groups that promote it.
Jun 7, 2001 | We all know what the nuclear family looks like: It looks like a cliché, a fond and fuzzy cliché evoked by episodes of "Leave It to Beaver" or "Ozzie and Harriet." These potent icons are faded and fictional, not to mention completely overwhelmed by general cultural consensus and demographic studies. Yet the "ideal" American family -- a father and a mother, bound to each other by legal marriage, raising children bound to them by biology -- is a stubborn relic, a national symbol that has yet to be retired as threadbare and somewhat unrealistic.
Everything has changed: In the past three decades the rates of divorce, single parenting and cohabitation have risen precipitously. And these developments come from a generation of people who were born and raised to count marriage and parenthood as important milestones of successful adulthood. In other words, Americans seem to have left the nuclear-family model behind -- despite the persistent belief of their elders that it is the blueprint for happiness and moral rectitude.
Yet when the idea of family is addressed in a political context (and Americans, despite our reputation as rugged individualists, still insist that our private lives are political), a dichotomy arises, usually along partisan lines, between abstract notions of an ideal American family and the real families that the majority of Americans actually live in.
At no time has this enormous gap between thought and deed been as visible as when U.S. Census figures came out recently that documented the extent to which Americans are not practicing what some among us still preach. The nuclear family, according to the numbers, is fast becoming a demographic oddity; the number of single-parent families is skyrocketing and many Americans couples are choosing to not get married but to have families anyway.
What then happens to the purveyors of "family values," to the conservative organizations that view Americans who live as single parents, unmarried partners or blended, gay and lesbian families as problematic, or even immoral?
It looks as though many of the proponents of family values as defined by a seemingly mythological standard are responding to the census figures in two ways. First, they seem to have made a distinct rhetorical shift. Rather than preaching the absolute authority of God, many of these groups now invoke the (relative) authority of social science to argue for the preservation of the nuclear family. At the same time, however, they cling to the idea that what is "right" is worth fighting for, regardless of the statistics, and in this crusade, conservatives are finding support in certain quarters, including the White House.
Those who wish to hark back to the nuclear family -- which reached a peak of 45 percent of the American population in 1960 -- face formidable odds of success. The most recent census figures show that, for the first time, the percentage of Americans living in nuclear families has declined to below 25 percent of the population. (As this figure represents married couples living with children, it also includes blended families, so the percentage of married couples living with their biological children is presumably lower.)
We also know that young adults are delaying marriage and children (the average age of women at first marriage is now 25, up from 20 in 1960; for men it is now 27, up from 22 in 1960), if they marry at all. Twenty-six percent of Americans live alone, outnumbering those who live in nuclear families. Americans are much more likely to live together outside of marriage -- unmarried couples now constitute 9 percent of all unions. Single parents are the fastest-growing group of people with children; during the 1990s, the number of single-parent families grew five times faster than the number of married couples with children. The number of families headed by single fathers, while still low, doubled from 1 percent of all households in 1990 to 2 percent in 2001.
In other words, Americans have redefined the American family. And any political organization that wants to get enough votes to keep candidates who support their platforms in office must grapple with the reality that the majority of Americans -- and American voters -- do not live in traditional families.
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