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American families have changed a lot over the last half-century or so: Americans are marrying later, typically after cohabiting; divorce and remarriage are creating variations of “blended” families; most mothers now work outside the home; more fathers spend more time with their children but fewer of them live with their children–just to hint at some of the tumult in family life. The question of this post is whether, given all this change, Americans continue to value family life or have family bonds significantly weakened? I addressed the marriage part of this question in the previous post; this one addresses family life beyond the couple.
Americans certainly worry about “the” American family. In a 2000 Wirthlin poll, about three in five said that they thought the “state of the American family” was either “not very strong” or “weak.”[1] In a 2006 Pew survey, by over two to one, more people said that family life is worse “these days” than said it was now better than before.[2] And yet: Only a few years later in another Pew survey, 40 percent of respondents said that their families today were “closer” than were the families they grew up in–about three times as many (14 percent) who said that their current families were less close.[3] The contrast between the two Pew surveys not only reflects our localism bias (the closer things are to us–our families rather than others’ families–the better they look), it may indicate a mismatch between popular perceptions of “the” family and personal experience.
Let’s take a look first at some behavioral indicators of family bonding and then at some measures of family feeling and see how they have changed over recent decades. Some of the findings may be surprising.
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One indicator of families’ robustness is whether people are still having children. (Wanting children I’ll discuss later.) The graph below shows the average number of children that women who have essentially completed their childbearing, those aged 40 to 44, had from 1976 to 2016. One thing we see on the left side is the era of the “baby boom,” when women averaged about three children each. These women had been in their twenties during the late 1950s, a quite aberrant era in American demography. We also see that since then, the birth rate has been essentially flat: about two children per woman for the last 30 years. That’s negligible change for a generation.
Another behavioral indicator of family feeling is co-residence between generations. (Attitudes about co-residence I’ll discuss later.) The figure below shows the trends in the percentages of young adults who were living with their parents (or other relatives, but excluding a spouse) from 1940 to 2014. For about a generation, the proportion of young adults who lived with their parents dropped sharply and then in the 1970s-‘80s, it turned up, accelerating in recent years. Much of that increased staying in or returning to the nest follows from the economic stagnation average Americans experienced starting in the 1970s and then even more so during the Great Recession. However, the willingness of aging parents and young adults to share a home, even if such sharing may not fit their ideals about young adult independence, suggests continuing familial attachment.
If spending money shows caring, that American parents are spending more and more of their income on their kids–notably on their over-18-year-old kids–than they did a generation ago (see here and here) suggests that they may be caring more.
Finally, for over 30 years, the General Social Survey has asked respondents how often they spent a “social evening” with relatives. For 13 of those years, they also asked about social evenings specifically with parents. The next figure displays the percentage of respondents who reported doing such visiting at least several times a month. There seems to have been no waning–a maybe a waxing–of family time.[4]
These behavioral indicators suggest that at least stability, if not enhancement, in Americans’ valuing of the family. But what about more direct expressions of those family feelings?
Values
Scholars at the University of Southern California followed four generations of over 300 families from the 1970s into the 2000s. One of their interests was whether family values had changed, particularly people’s feelings about “how much responsibility … adult children with families of their own” have for helping their aged parents. The results were mixed. On the one hand, over time, respondents’ insistence on “filial responsibility” weakened, but, on the other, members of later generations expressed more loyality to those obligations than their parents and grandparents did.
We look in a more simple fashion at trends in family feelings by using a couple of other General Social Survey items–ratings of how satisfied Americans are with their family lives and their answers to the question, “As you know, many older people share a home with their grown children. Do you think this is generally a good idea or a bad idea?” The figure below shows that satisfaction with family life hardly changed. More dramatically, between 1973 and 2016, the percentage Americans approving of cross-generational living rose from 33 to 59 percent.[5]
Finally, Americans still want to make families (just like they want to get married). In 1990, 2003, and 2013, about 95 percent of poll respondents, including about 95 percent of those aged 18-to-40, said they either had children or wanted to have them. What Americans consider the “ideal” number of children for a family dropped considerably after the baby boom years–like the actual number of children born–but has been steady at about 2.5 kids for about 30 years.
Closing
Americans generally exhibit as much family “feeling” and value family life at least as much now as they did 30 or more years ago. That so many in the lower reaches of the economy fail to fulfill their family aspirations–and here I refer mainly to long delays of marriage, rising divorce rates, and the increase in single-parent families–has far less, if anything, to do with a loss of family sentiment than with the declining economic fortunes of working-class men.[6] However, the longer the time and the greater the number who fail to achieve these shared family aspirations, the greater the likelihood that people will discard those aspirations. Some commentators argue that we may have already turned that corner (see, e.g. here and here). These data suggest not… or not yet.
That Americans misperceive there to be a general loss of family bonds may partly follow from this working-class reality, but even more it arises from a general rose-colored nostalgia about an America once upon a time when “the” family was “great.” Notably, Americans do not seem to exhibit that nostalgia when it comes to discussing their own individual families, as in the Pew surveys discussed at the top of this post. There they sense caring.
– NOTES
[1] Via iPoll, Roper Center. The most common explanation for the decline that respondents gave was greater laxness in parenting.
[2] Pew Social Trends Poll, 2006, via iPoll, Roper Center.
[3] Pew Social Trends Poll, 2010, via iPoll, Roper Center.
[4] Peter Marsden and Sameer Srivastava rigorously explored the relatives item (through 2008) and found that, after all sorts of adjustments, the underlying trend was indeed upward (in Marsden [ed.] Social Trends in American Life, 2012, Ch. 9).
[5] The elderly are least supportive of the idea–in the mid-2010s only about 40% approved–but they, too have become more favorable–up from about 25% forty years before. By the way, the level and patterns of approval are the same for the college grads and non-grads.
[6] Historian Steve Ruggles wrote in a 2015 overview of long-term historical trends:
With growing inequality, families are facing diverging destinies. … Young people with resources are continuing to form marital and cohabiting unions. Among the college-educated with good jobs, the impact of family change is muted. Marriage is still feasible; marital instability is declining; and cohabitation and single parenthood can be managed without hardship. For much of the population, however, the outlook is grim…. Many who have jobs are underemployed, taking unskilled and part-time jobs even if they have good qualifications. Among young people who lack resources, families are difficult to form or sustain: fewer and fewer young adults are marrying, and those who do are at increasing risk of divorce. For people without secure jobs that provide a living wage, cohabitating unions are highly unstable.
