Outside of affluent areas, it seems like traditional families are a thing of the past.
My high school classmates and I turned 40 this year. From what I can see on Facebook, only 10-15% of us are still married to our original spouse and parenting kids with them (what’s technically called an “intact nuclear family”). The rest either:
- never married and never had kids
- got married but never had kids
- had kids but never got married
- got divorced
- are gay
This is from a small school in a rural, working-class town, with high levels of unemployment, poverty, and drug addiction. I’m sure the sample here is biased.
But my dad grew up in the same town and graduated the same school, and his alumni group was nothing like that. Society—and the value we place on marriage and child-rearing—radically changed in the 30 years between his graduation and mine.
The factors here are complex: America deindustrialized, blue-collar towns like mine saw their economies get nuked, cultural attitudes about families changed, organized religion got deprioritized, drugs became both more potent and more rampant, 9/11 and Iraq happened, smart phones and social media re-wired our brains, the global financial crisis wrecked our job projects right as we entered the labor market, child care and groceries became outrageously expensive, endocrine disrupters in our food and water supplies caused widespread fertility issues, etc. etc. etc.
But the consequences of this don’t bode well.
Not for our families or our kids. Not for our communities. And not for America at large.