Behavior: The American Family: Future Uncertain

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Yet if the demands made on the Government in behalf of the family were too vast, this was in a sense only an understandable reaction against the fact that too many vast demands are made on the family these days. Throughout most of Western history, until the 20th century, society as a whole strongly supported the family institution. It was the family's duty to instruct children in moral values, but it derived those values from church, from philosophers, from social traditions. Now most of these supports are weakened, or gone. Yet politicians and other prophets often blame the family for decline in morals and morale—as if the family could be separated from society. The forces that are weakening the U.S. family structure are at the very heart of the changes that are taking place in American civilization. Some of the most significant:

MOBILITY. The mass exodus from rural to metropolitan areas, the increasingly common and frequent corporate transfer, the convenience of the automobile and the highway system built to accommodate it—all have contributed to a basic change in the character of the family. In the less complicated, less urbanized days, the average U.S. family was an "extended" or "kinship" family. This meant simply that the parents and their children were surrounded by relatives: in-laws, brothers, sisters, aunts, uncles, grandparents, cousins. If the relatives did not live within the same household, they were next door or down the block or on the next farm. But as Americans became more mobile, the kinfolk have been gradually left behind. As a result, the typical family has evolved into an isolated "nuclear"' family. It consists simply of a father, a mother and their children, and is usually located miles away from the home of the nearest relative.

Says Dr. John Platt, associate director of the University of Michigan's Mental Health Research Institute: "All sorts of roles now have to be played by the husband and wife, whereas in the older, extended family they had all sorts of help—psychological support, financial advice, and so on. The pressures of these multiple roles are partially responsible for the high rates of divorce, alcoholism, tranquilizers, etc."

WOMEN'S CHANGING ROLE. "Put very simply," says Cornell Political Sociologist Andrew Hacker, "the major change in the family in recent years, and the problems of the future, are both summed up in one word: women. In the past and until very recently, wives were simply supplementary to their husbands, and not expected to be full human beings. Today, women are involved in much greater expectations and frustrations. For one thing, 40% of U.S. women are now employed. When a woman is working, she tends to have a new perception of herself. I see this most egregiously in those women who go to liberal arts colleges, because there the professor takes them seriously, and this gives them big ideas. The unhappiest wives are the liberal arts graduates. The trouble comes from the fact that the institution we call marriage can't hold two full human beings—it was only designed for one and a half."