...My non-religious opposition to SSM comes from a Burkean point of view. That is, I do not believe that we should be so quick to revolutionize and to deconstruct the traditional family, which has endured for so long, and has been so key to the cohesion of our civilization. The “traditional family” (one man + one woman, bound exclusively) is not a natural fact; it is an achievement of civilization. As sociologist Carle Zimmerman shows in his historically-based “Family and Civilization,” the traditional family is a historical artifact that provides a unique basis for human flourishing — this, versus the “trustee family” (the clan, including polygamous ones), or the atomized family, which is the ultimate product of individualism. Zimmerman, a Harvard sociologist, doesn’t make religious arguments — indeed, one gets the idea that he is not religious at all — but rather observes the connection between ways of seeing the family and the individual, and the decline of ancient Greece and Rome. The book is too complex to get into in detail here, but this is a passage from a column I wrote about it some years back:

Civilization depends on the health of the traditional family.

That sentiment has become a truism among social conservatives, who typically can’t explain what they mean by it. Which is why it sounds like right-wing boilerplate to many contemporary ears.

The late Harvard sociologist Carle C. Zimmerman believed it was true, but he also knew why. In 1947, he wrote a massive book to explain why latter-day Western civilization was now living through the same family crisis that presaged the fall of classical Greece and Rome. His classic “Family and Civilization,” which has just been republished in an edited version by ISI Press, is a chillingly prophetic volume that deserves a wide new audience.

In all civilizations, Zimmerman theorized, there are three basic family types. The “trustee” family is tribal and clannish, and predominates in agrarian societies. The “domestic” family model is a middle type centering on the nuclear family ensconced in fairly strong extended-family bonds; it’s found in civilizations undergoing rapid development. The final model is the “atomistic” family, which features weak bonds between and within nuclear families; it’s the type that emerges as normative in advanced civilizations.

When the Roman Empire fell in the fifth century, the strong trustee families of the barbarian tribes replaced the weak, atomistic Roman families as the foundation of society.

Churchmen believed a social structure that broke up the ever-feuding clans and gave the individual more freedom would be better for society’s stability and spent centuries reforming the European family toward domesticity. The natalist worldview advocated by churchmen knit tightly religious faith, family loyalty and child bearing. From the 10th century on, the domestic family model ruled Europe through its greatest cultural efflorescence. But then came the Reformation and the Enlightenment, shifting culture away from tradition and toward the individual. Thus, since the 18th century, the atomistic family has been the Western cultural norm.

Here’s the problem: Societies ruled by the atomistic family model, with its loosening of constraints on its individual members, quit having enough children to carry on. They become focused on the pleasures of the present. Eventually, these societies expire from lack of manpower, which itself is a manifestation of a lack of the will to live. ...

Why? Zimmerman was not religious, but he contended the core problem was a loss of faith. Religions that lack a strong pro-fertility component don’t survive over time, he observed; nor do cultures that don’t have a powerfully natalist religion.

Labels: Christianity, conservatism, culture, demographics, extended family, family structure, gay marriage, natalism, religion

VOTE

Ozzie and Harriet step aside. The proportion of homes in America with husband-wife couples has now fallen below 50 percent, the lowest since the Census Bureau began tabulating this family data in 1940.

New census 2010 figures, released today, reveal that 48 percent of all households include a married husband and wife, compared with 52 percent in 2000. That’s down dramatically from the peak. In the 1950 census, 78 percent of all households in America mirrored the Ozzie and Harriet mold, with a husband and wife in the home.

There is wide variation from state to state. Utah has the highest proportion of husband-wife households, at 61 percent. The lowest numbers are in New York and Louisiana, with 44 percent each.

There are more interracial married couples than a decade ago. Their numbers jumped 28 percent since 2000. ...

Unmarried couples make up less than 7 percent of all households, but their numbers still jumped 40 percent from 2000. The largest increase in that group was same-sex partner homes, which skyrocketed 80 percent in the past decade. They make up less than one percent of all households, but in 2010, nearly 650,000 households identified themselves as same-sex partner homes.

Other types of living arrangements are also on the upswing. There are more people living alone. Homes with just one person made up nearly 27 percent of households in 2010. Atlanta and Washington, D.C., are the two cities with most residents living by themselves – about 44 percent in each. The Census Bureau says that probably reflects young single people looking for job opportunities.

Another growing phenomenon is the number of male homeowners living without a spouse, but with other family members. Half of these are dads with their own children. The others might include an adult son whose parent moves in, or a brother housing another brother. Think “Two and a Half Men.” This category of home increased by 19.05 percent, from 4.2 percent of households in 2000 to 5 percent in 2010.

It’s also more common to find multiple generations living together. In 2010, there were 5 million families where three or more generations lived under the same roof, about a million more than a decade before.

The new census numbers also reflects the graying of America.

Labels: aging, cohabitation, culture, extended family, family structure, Fathers, gay couples, interracial marriage, Marriage, singles, unmarried parents

VOTE

The world is heading for demographic catastrophe. Fertility rates have been falling across the globe for 40 years, to the point where, today, Israel is the only First World country where women have enough babies to sustain their population. The developing world is heading in the same direction, fast. Only 3 percent of the world’s population live in a country where the fertility rate is not dropping.

As fertility falls, populations shrink. As populations shrink, economies will sputter. Western countries will struggle to support too many retirees without enough workers, and the rest of the world (particularly places such as China and Russia) will be challenged just to maintain order as societies change in unprecedented ways: Most people will have neither brothers, sisters, aunts, nor uncles, and there will be no such thing as an extended family.

This forecast may sound apocalyptic, but it’s nearly conventional wisdom among the demographers and economists who study such things. However, the conventional wisdom also sees a silver lining to the world’s demographic decline: a “geriatric peace.” As fertility rates decline, and babies become relatively scarce, the average age of societies increases. In many countries the median age is already over 40, with geezers outnumbering children. And once the entire world looks like Florida, the thinking goes, we’ll all be more peaceable, because countries full of old men don’t go to war.

Unfortunately, Susan Yoshihara and Douglas A. Sylva suggest that geriatric peace may be elusive, and in Population Decline and the Remaking of Great Power Politics they have collected essays from an all-star squad of demographers, historians, and military strategists—Phillip Longman, Nicholas Eberstadt, Toshi Yoshihara, and Murray Feshbach are among their Murderers’ Row—who argue that a shrinking world may be more dangerous than we might expect.

In 1950, Japan was the fifth-most populous nation on earth, Germany was the seventh, and the United Kingdom the ninth. By 2050 these countries will rank twentieth, twenty-first, and twenty-second, respectively. Population is the wellspring of power, both economic and military, and the reordering of global power is, Yoshihara and Sylva argue, inherently destabilizing. ...

Yet for all the forward-looking concerns, the most bracing essay here is James R. Holmes’s examination of the demographic crises in classical Greece. In 464 b.c., a terrible earthquake shook Sparta. Much of the city was destroyed, along with some 20,000 Spartan warriors. The devastation was particularly bad from a demographic point of view because the gymnasium where young Spartiates were trained collapsed, wiping out an entire rising generation of warriors—and their potential progeny.

Labels: aging, ancient Greek city-states, China, demographics, extended family, Iran, Japan, war

VOTE

Boomerang kids — those young adults who left the family home only to move back in because they can’t make it on their own — have gotten a bad rap.

A recent study by the Pew Research Center found that the number of people between the ages of 25 and 34 living with their parents nearly doubled between 1980 and 2008. Tough economic times over the past few years have only hastened the trend. Of late, many have lamented the phenomenon, from an opinion piece in this newspaper dubbing Gen Y the “Go-Nowhere Generation” to a news article in The Times that lays some of the blame for the anemic economic recovery squarely on the boomerangers’ shoulders. Countless books, stories and blog posts have also told parents how to best manage living with their adult children — or, better yet, how to coax them out the door.

But why? The Pew study showed that not only do the vast majority of boomerangers say these multigenerational living arrangements have been good for them, but their parents also seem quite pleased (perhaps because three-quarters of their adult children contribute to household expenses, and more than a third pay rent). In fact, parents whose children have moved back in with them are “just as satisfied with their family life and housing situation as are those parents whose adult children have not moved back home,” according to Pew.

Labels: "emerging adulthood", age at first marriage, culture, economics, extended family, Marriage, parenting

VOTE

So these two sociologists go into a bar and the man says to the woman, “What have you been up to?”

“I’ve been studying what I call ‘accordion families,’ ” she says. “Right now something like three and a half million American parents are sharing a house with adult kids who’ve either come back home or never left.”

“You want to talk about trends?” the man counters. “Did you know that aside from childless couples the most common household type in America is an adult living alone? That’s one out of seven adults, over 30 million people.”

Wishing to avoid an argument, the sociologists appeal to the bartender. Which trend seems more significant to him? “Beats me,” he says, “but I liked this place a lot better when the customers were political economists.”

It’s not funny, I know, but it’s not the punch line, either. That comes when the two sociologists I have in mind — ­Katherine S. Newman of Johns Hopkins University, the author of “The Accordion Family,” and Eric Klinenberg of New York University, the author of “Going Solo” — conclude their fascinating studies with a nod each to the bartender. Except by then they’re no longer in a bar; they’re in Sweden. We’ll get to that.

First let’s look at those so-called accordion families, which Newman evaluates both as a transnational phenomenon and in the nuanced particulars of individual households. Like Klinenberg, she devotes a good portion of her book to personal interviews, but where Klinenberg goes deep in his emphasis on the United States, Newman goes wide. At the extreme end of her analysis is a country like Italy, where 37 percent of 30-year-old men live with their parents, and have never lived anywhere else. Less striking but certainly notable is a parallel trend in the United States, where a higher proportion of adult children now live with parents than at any time since the 1950s.

Newman states her thesis plainly: “Global competition is the most profound structural force affecting the residential location of young adults in the developed world (or the under­developed world, for that matter)” — but one is impressed by her refusal to turn thesis into dogma. She acknowledges that different cultures define adulthood in different ways, with Americans tending to see it as “a process of self-discovery” and Europeans as “a station defined by the way one relates to others.” She also appreciates the mutual benefits of multi­generational households, as suggested by a survey showing that 76 percent of American parents of 21-year-olds say they feel close to their child, as opposed to a mere quarter of their own parents saying the same.

Still, Newman does not shy away from the larger effects of a child’s “failure to launch,” independently, into the world. Not the least of these is a generation’s failure to generate. At present there are four workers in Europe for every pensioner; by 2050 there will be only two workers for every retiree. Birthrates in the United States would also be falling if not for Mexican immigrants — yet another job they’ve taken on, along with those of lawn- and elder-care and favored scapegoat. But in Japan, the fastest-aging country in the world, where only 1 percent of the population is foreign-born, the future looks more bleak.

Labels: "emerging adulthood", aging, class, culture, demographics, economics, Europe, extended family, family structure, motherhood, work/family policy

VOTE

Far from being a throwback to the 1950s, recognising marriage in the tax system is desirable because modern couples need the flexibility to divide their work and child-caring responsibilities as they believe best. Today, couples split work and child care in any ratio that works for them. It may be 50/50, or they may choose to reverse roles completely. Perhaps they planned for the man to be the main breadwinner during their child-raising years, but changing market conditions meant that the woman could earn more. Transferrable tax allowances allow couples to create their own unique work-life balance. Nick Clegg's caricature of the 1950s family was popular among radicals of the 1970s, but today his views are held only by conformist intellectuals who have yet to notice how the family has changed.

A tax system that acknowledges marriage is not providing a mere economic incentive, it is sending a moral signal that symbolises the vital part parents play in educating the young people who will protect liberal-democratic civilisation long into the future. That is why tax systems in many other countries recognise marriage. In France, for example, couples can divide their income between themselves and their children. An adult counts as one unit and children half so that a married couple with two children would be able to divide their income between three "units". Each "unit" has a personal tax-free allowance and so less tax is paid, leaving couples with enough money to juggle their time between child care and work as they wish.

We could go a step further and encourage cross-generational family solidarity by allowing income to be assigned to any relative living at the same address. A couple who took responsibility for looking after their elderly parents, for instance, could assign part of their income to them and pay less tax. Scrapping inheritance tax would further encourage mutual support across the generations. Families could build up assets – property, durable goods, shares, cash – with the intention of handing them on from generation to generation, thus rebuilding the extended family on a solid economic base.

Labels: children, extended family, government interest in marriage, Marriage, tax policy, United Kingdom

VOTE

...In fact, the fight for marriage equality works in tandem with the movement to strengthen the black family. Achieving marriage equality will actually help save the black family.

First, laws that prohibit same-sex marriage disproportionately harm black same-sex couples. According to the last Census, twice as many black same-sex couples are raising children as white same-sex couples. Black same-sex couples are also much more likely to be struggling economically. Achieving marriage equality will grant important benefits to these couples that will allow them to take care of and provide for their children and themselves.

But marriage equality helps the black community in a much broader way. Marriage equality is not just about relationship recognition. It's about family recognition, and the black community benefits from laws and policies that recognize the diversity of how families look, and demand equality for all families. ...

Likewise, marriage equality is not just about DOMA. It's not just about Prop 8. The fight for marriage equality is about fighting for equal recognition of all families. It's about combating the assumption that someone else can tell us what our families should look like. And in the black community, that assumption is dangerous, because black families are becoming increasingly nontraditional. Black families are more likely to be headed by single mothers. However, many of those mothers live with another person who helps raise the children, regardless of whether they are biologically or legally recognized as a parent. Black families are also more likely to consist of multi-generational households [pdf]. And the same policies that allow a same-sex couple to parent their children with access to all benefits they would otherwise receive grant those same benefits to aunts and uncles to raise their nieces and nephews and grandparents to raise their grandchildren. They are the same policies that allow a boyfriend to take time off work to care for his girlfriend's sick child even when there is no biological relationship. The principle that all families look different and all must be respected lies at the foundation of the struggle to strengthen the black family.

Labels: beyond marriage, children, cohabitation, culture, extended family, family structure, gay marriage, gay parenting, grandparents, Marriage, parenting, race, single parenting, unmarried parents

VOTE

The extended family is making something of a comeback, thanks to delayed marriage, immigration, and recession-induced job losses and foreclosures that have forced people to double-up under one roof, an analysis of census figures has found.

“The Waltons are back,” said Paul Taylor, executive vice president of the Pew Research Center, which conducted the analysis.

Multigenerational families, which accounted for 25 percent of the population in 1940 but only 12 percent by 1980, inched up to 16 percent in 2008, according to the analysis.

The analysis also found that the proportion of people 65 and older who live alone, which had been rising steeply for nearly a century — from 6 percent in 1900 to 29 percent in 1990 — declined slightly, to 27 percent.

At the same time, the share of older people living in multigenerational families, which plummeted to 17 percent in 1980 from 57 percent in 1900, rose to 20 percent. ...

The shift appears to have been accelerated by the recession. In 2008, at the beginning of the recession and the latest year for which figures are available, 2.6 million more Americans lived in a multigenerational household than did the year before.

Labels: culture, economics, extended family, grandparents, race

VOTE

...Baumgardner also allows that Greer’s books may have self-contradictory elements, and I must admit that as a 21st-century reader, I’ve found that they can be choppy and manifesto-like, with off-putting wild generalizations and quasi-magical terminology. (Of course, this can also be said of third-wave feminists’ writings, e.g., Naomi Wolf’s.) Shulamith Firestone deems motherhood “a condition of terminal psychological and social decay, total self-abnegation and physical deterioration.” And Greer veers off in some directions that left me nonplussed (the taste of the menstrual blood of myself or others is something I’m happy to leave to the imagination). But then I turned to her chapter called “Family,” in which she argues that “stem”—or extended, multigenerational—households are inordinately stable; as opposed to today’s two-parent nuclear families, stem homes can never be “broken,” as their success does not “rest on the frail shoulders of two bewildered individuals trying to apply a contradictory blueprint.

Bingo. What better phrase to describe marriage among those of my own bewildered demographic slice—parents of the Creative Class? We start with the best of intentions. In her 20s, the Creative Class female carves out a cool Creative Class career, like Writer. She meets a man with an equally cool Creative Class job—say, Devoted Documentary Filmmaker of the Obama 10-Year African Kiva Water Project. In their 30s, the baby comes: the Creative Class mom is pitched into hormonal bliss (at least at first); the very same week—argh, the timing!—Gates Foundation money suddenly comes through for the Obama-kiva-water-project documentary. Clinking champagne glasses, both spouses agree that Dad must fly to Africa for two months to finish filming while Mom cares for the baby. (The last thing she wants is be a 1950s nag—and how rarely does Gates money come through, how important is drinking water for Africa?)

After kissing her husband goodbye, the Creative Class mother now begins to care for their baby, alone, in New York, or Los Angeles, or whatever cool city they’ve moved to. She’s isolated from her stem family—the grandma, aunts, and in-laws (who all love children!) have long been left behind in notoriously un-Creative Lompoc, Fort Lauderdale, or Ohio. She can barely maneuver the stroller down the four flights of stairs to get to Gymboree ($20 for 45 minutes, and you have to actually stay with your nine-month-old and drum). Result: the 21st-century Creative Class mom’s life is actually far worse than that of her 1950s counterpart. Her husband works as many hours (and travels more), but life is uncomfortable on his salary alone, and the isolated mom has no bingo-playing moms’ group to ease the unnatural, teeth-chattering stress of one-on-one care of her child.

Labels: adultery, extended family, Marriage, motherhood

VOTE

A recent profile in the New York Times of the marriage between President Barack Obama and First Lady Michelle had a great deal to say about how the Obamas have balanced their desire for public influence and personal privacy. The article had nothing to say about one of the most simple and remarkable facts about the first family: for the first time in recent memory, the family in the White House is not a nuclear family.

The White House has played host to its share of unusual marriages, but the Obamas have broken new ground by bringing in Michelle’s mother, Marilyn Robinson, to help care for their children. The Obamas’ stated reason for inviting Robinson to live in the White House was so that she could assist in the care of Sasha and Malia, the Obamas daughters. As baby boomers age and America becomes what the President’s Council on Bioethics called the “mass geriatric society,” more and more elderly Americans may begin to live with their adult children. As with the Obamas, the desire for improved care-giving will be the main motivation. But in this case, the elders, not the children, will be the ones receiving the care.

Our society has not always been very clear about what obligations grown children have toward their aging parents. But in the case of the Boomers, the question becomes exceedingly complex. Taking advantage of the rise of no-fault divorce laws, they sought flexibility and happiness through more negotiable romantic and sexual attachments. They had fewer children than their parents’ generation, but those they did have were buffeted by the chaos of divorce, remarriage, custody battles, and multiple Christmases.

Now, the balance of dependence is tipping. As boomers enter their second childhood, we may witness the historical irony of aged parents experiencing some of the chaos and uncertainty felt by their children. What responsibilities of care does one have toward a stepfather? Toward a parent with more than one set of children? It’s no longer a question of who gets to keep the kids but rather of who gets stuck with the grandparents.

In such an environment it is easy to see why the public provision of medicine and end-of-life care is becoming especially important. Complicated family arrangements matter less when the main caregiver for the elderly is the government. A recent survey from the Pew Research Center found that only 12% of parents age 65 and older report depending more on their children than their children do on them.

Labels: culture, divorce, extended family, family policy

VOTE

...Perhaps nothing will be as surprising about 21st-century America as its settledness. For more than a generation Americans have believed that "spatial mobility" would increase, and, as it did, feed an inexorable trend toward rootlessness and anomie. This vision of social disintegration was perhaps best epitomized in Vance Packard's 1972 bestseller A Nation of Strangers, with its vision of America becoming "a society coming apart at the seams." In 2000, Harvard's Robert Putnam made a similar point, albeit less hyperbolically, in Bowling Alone, in which he wrote about the "civic malaise" he saw gripping the country. In Putnam's view, society was being undermined, largely due to suburbanization and what he called "the growth of mobility."

Yet in reality Americans actually are becoming less nomadic. As recently as the 1970s as many as one in five people moved annually; by 2006, long before the current recession took hold, that number was 14 percent, the lowest rate since the census starting following movement in 1940. Since then tougher times have accelerated these trends, in large part because opportunities to sell houses and find new employment have dried up. In 2008, the total number of people changing residences was less than those who did so in 1962, when the country had 120 million fewer people. The stay-at-home trend appears particularly strong among aging boomers, who are largely eschewing Sunbelt retirement condos to stay tethered to their suburban homes—close to family, friends, clubs, churches, and familiar surroundings.

The trend will not bring back the corner grocery stores and the declining organizations—bowling leagues, Boy Scouts, and such—cited by Putnam and others as the traditional glue of American communities. Nor will our car-oriented suburbs replicate the close neighborhood feel so celebrated by romantic urbanists like the late Jane Jacobs. Instead, the we're evolving in ways congruent with a postindustrial society. It will not spell the demise of Wal-Mart or Costco, but will express itself in scores of alternative institutions, such as thriving local weekly newspapers, a niche that has withstood the shift to the Internet far better than big-city dailies.

Our less mobile nature is already reshaping the corporate world. The kind of corporate nomadism described in Peter Kilborn's recent book, Next Stop, Reloville: Life Inside America’s Rootless Professional Class, in which families relocate every couple of years so the breadwinner can reach the next rung on the managerial ladder, will become less common in years ahead. A smaller cadre of corporate executives may still move from place to place, but surveys reveal many executives are now unwilling to move even for a good promotion. Why? Family and technology are two key factors working against nomadism, in the workplace and elsewhere.

Labels: culture, extended family

VOTE