Articles

Everyone knows that the intensification of work in the global economy and the erosion of the male-breadwinner family have created a crisis for parents organizing child care and couples trying to juggle work and married life. But what most people don't realize is that the male-breadwinner family was invented only 150 years ago, to solve an earlier crisis of work, marriage and family life. The current crisis is as broad as its predecessor, and its ultimate resolution no more predictable now than…

Since the last presidential election, "values" has been a buzzword for political pundits and talking heads. Politicians on both sides of the aisle have rushed to affirm their commitment to strong family values and the traditional value of marriage.

For the last 30 years, rising rates of youth violence, substance abuse and suicide have been blamed on two social pathologies: divorce and unwed motherhood. We have been told that unless we can reverse the tide of family dysfunction, these trends will engulf us. In 1998, a British economist claimed that the collapse of shotgun marriages was leading inexorably to a modern social disaster on the same order as the Irish potato famine of 1846-49.

Thirteen years ago, Vice President Dan Quayle attacked the producers of TV sitcom's Murphy Brown for letting her character bear a child out of wedlock, claiming that the show's failure to defend traditional family values was encouraging America's youth to abandon marriage.

Nearly every week, the U.S. Census Bureau releases a new set of figures on American families and the living arrangements they have been creating in the past decade. And each time, as the media liaison for a national association of family researchers, I'm bombarded with telephone calls from radio and television producers seeking a talking head to confirm the wildly differing -- and usually wrong -- conclusions they've jumped to about what those figures say…

At a recent talk in Chicago I gave about the dangers of romanticizing "traditional" families, a young man asked me if I didn't think the mass rallies of the men's group Promise Keepers in football stadiums across the country represented "potential fascism." I argued, to considerable skepticism from my audience, that however disturbing the ideology of the leaders, the motivations that bring thousands of men together for these events are not fascist, or even explicitly…