The Women's Freedom Network Newsletter July/August, 2002;  Volume 9, No. 4 The Collapsing Nuclear Family: Inventing a Crisis by Carl F. Horowitz

"The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed - and hence clamorous to be led to safety - by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary."

- H.L. Mencken

Contemporary conservatives, who have made a cottage industry out of quoting Mencken, rarely waste an opportunity to skewer an egalitarian -driven crisis du jour, be it "three million homeless" or "an epidemic of date rape." Ironically, they have been peddling their own brand of panic with respect to marriage and the family, and never so much as in the past year.

Last spring the US Census Bureau released a report revealing that nuclear families - husband, wife and at least one child under age 18 living at home - comprise a smaller than ever portion of U.S. households. Married couples, with or without children, comprised 51.7% of all households in 2000, down from 55.1% in 1990. The share of married couples with children under age 18 dipped from 25.6% to 23.5% of all households. By contrast, 7.2% of all households were those headed by a woman with children under age 18, up from 6.6% in 1990. The number of unmarried partners increased from 3.2 million to 5.5 million, or by 72%. Moreover, slightly over a quarter of all households consisted of a person living alone.

Mainstream media, such as Newsweek in its May 28, 2001 cover story, interpreted the numbers in a fairly straightforward way. But conservatives, hungry for evidence showing "family breakdown" to be at the root of our nation's social ills, saw political gold. The institution of marriage, many opined, is on its way to extinction, a casualty of the mass pursuit of reckless hedonism that began in the 1960s.

Given that recent data might not support claims of nuclear family collapse, some traditionalists have resorted to spectacularly dire extrapolations.

"The new Census Bureau statistics," scolded Cal Thomas, "reveal what two generations of 'doing your own thing' and immediate gratification, rather than self-control and putting others first has produced."

Suzanne Fields noted the real way to tell America's moral haves from its have-nots is to see if families have two parents as opposed to one. "This was once cultural common sense," she admonished. "A father who left his kids was a creep. The unwed mother a figure of pity. Today it's business as usual." Focus on the Family President James Dobson, referring to the report in a New Orleans speech last June before the Southern Baptists' annual convention, announced, "The family is disintegrating. It is falling apart right before our eyes." Robert Stacy McCain, deputy editorial page editor of the Washington Times, noted in an editorial entitled, "Titanic Loss of Family Values," that the numbers confirmed conservative activist Paul Weyrich's nugget of wisdom that the American people no longer comprise a moral majority. "Today, apparently millions of American have 'voted with their feet' in abandoning traditional family," McCain wrote.

Don't believe these doomsayers. The decline of two-parent families as a proportion of all U.S. households, while hardly news, leveled off at least a decade ago. Married couples with children accounted for nearly 50% of all families (excluding non-family households) in 1970, 37% in 1990, and 36% in 2000. But other, though less obvious, realities command attention.

First, people are living longer. Whereas in 1970 the life expectancies of men and women, respectively, were 67.1 and 74.7 years of age, by 1997 these figures had risen to 73.6 and 79.4 years of age. In fact, the Census report found the number of households headed by per sons at least 85 years of age rose 38%, more than three times the overall rate of population growth. Since the elderly as a general rule are not raising children of their own (usually because they already have raised them), the increase in life expectancy obviously has swelled the ranks of nominally "childless" married couples and singles.

Second, the median age of first marriage has been rising. The figures for men and women, respectively, stood in 2000 at roughly 27 and 25 years of age, well up from 23 and 20 years of age in 1960. That young adults stay single for a half-decade longer obviously raises the share of unmarried households, especially in local housing markets with ample apartment and condominium vacancy rates.

Finally, the number of children per family has fallen. In 1970, of all U.S. families (married or not) with at least one child under 18 years old living at home, 36.3% had three or more children. By 2000 the relative share of these larger families had declined to 20.5%. With that shift has come a decrease in the number of years during which a family is involved in raising children, a time elapse running from the birth of the first child to the departure from home by the last.

Consider a hypothetical pair of married couples with children. Assume that each couple stays together throughout their child-rearing years, spaces each birth three years apart, and becomes empty-nesters when the youngest child turns 18 years old. In the case of Family A, mom gives birth to four children at ages 26, 29, 32 and 35 years old. Thus, during the mother's ages 26 to 53, a span of 27 years, the parents are raising their children. In Family B, mom gives birth to two children at ages 29 and 32. Thus, she and her husband are officially a nuclear family for only 21 years. In other words, the second family is "childless," at least by Census Bureau definitions, for six more years than the first.

Don't believe these doomsayers. The decline of two-parent families as a proportion of all U.S. households, while hardly news, leveled off at least a decade ago.

What hasn't been feeding the proportionate decrease in two-parent nuclear families are those fabled "skyrocketing" divorce rates. The nationwide divorce rate, after rising for about 20 years (most rapidly during the first half of the 1970's), peaked in 1979 and again in 1981 at 5.3 divorces per 1,000 persons. Since then it has declined to 4.1 divorces per 1,000 persons in 2000, a dip of more than 20%. Cultural warriors for the restoration of marriage, such as Maggie Gallagher, Gary Bauer, and Bill Bennett, are fully aware of this trend. But admitting as much would undercut their efforts to convey an aura of crisis, and thus reduce their opportunities to repeal no-fault divorce laws in all 50 states and restore America's cultural health to its relatively unsullied pre-1960's condition.

Given that recent data might not support claims of nuclear family collapse, some traditionalists have resorted to spectacularly dire extrapolations. Syndicated columnist Kathleen Parker in an editorial reprinted in the July 17, 1999 Washington Times, wrote, "Some demographers are predicting 85 percent of young Americans will never marry." Parker cited no source for her claim. In 2000 only 9.5% of men and 8.6% of women within the 45 to 54 year old age bracket remained unmarried; the respective figures in 1960 were 7.4% and 7.0%. More recently, at a meeting of U.N. diplomats this May, The Heritage Foundation's Patrick Fagan predicted that Europe's population will decline by 97% in four to five generations because of anti-family attitudes and practices there. He added, "America has become the most dangerous country into which a child is born."

Very few people would deny the importance of the nuclear family as a socializing institution. Despite all its flaws -- human nature itself being flawed -- it remains the best alternative of ensuring children receive financial support and emotional guidance. But it is surely not the endangered species that self-styled "pro-family" activists would have the public believe. The vast majority of people here (to say nothing of Europe) eventually marry, and make at least some effort at keeping their marriages intact. But nouveau radical traditionalists such as Allan Carlson and Patrick Fagan go well beyond a desire to nurture stable, loving families. What really fires their engines is an impulse to project moral grievance upon the nation's cultural "enemies." An unholy alliance of feminists, therapists, big-name entertainers and government bureaucrats, they argue (often hysterically), has sapped the family of its moral authority.

The idea that family breakdown can serve as a meta-explanation for the ills of America and the rest of the modern world is questionable to begin with. But those who create hobgoblins of collapse through statistical sleight of hand ought to be seen as reprehensible, not simply misguided.