I first discovered "The Mary Tyler Moore Show" when I was 25, and I immediately fell in love with it. But a few years ago, when I showed some episodes to a family studies class I was teaching, my students were far less impressed than I had expected them to be.

I explained what a revelation it had been in 1970 to see a show about an unmarried working woman in her early 30s who was devoted to her job, was attractive to men and well-liked by her fellow workers, and who turned out to be the most well-adjusted character in the whole cast.

Older generations always seem to fret about the sexual behavior and romantic lives of the younger crowd. In the 1920s, there was alarm when boys stopped visiting in the parlor and started driving girls around in what one newspaper called “a house of prostitution on wheels.” This worry paled in comparison to the panic evoked by the rowdy sexual revolution that began in the late 1960s.

Women have made impressive gains in the past forty-five years. But progress toward family-friendly social policies has been exceptionally slow. In 1971, Congress actually passed a comprehensive childcare bill only to have Richard Nixon veto it after concerted lobbying by antifeminists and right-wingers. It took until 1993 just to get the Family and Medical Leave Act, which gave workers in large companies up to twelve weeks of unpaid job-protected leave.

Since the presidential election, pundits have struggled to explain Donald Trump's upset win. Liberal columnists are united in shock that so many people voted for a man who inflamed racial, ethnic and religious tensions, insulted and mistreated women, and was deemed temperamentally unfit to be president, even by many of his supporters.

For all the hand-wringing about how we've never seen a presidential primary season like this before, in fact, it bears a remarkable resemblance to that of 1992.

For all the hand-wringing about how modern Americans have separated sex from love and devalued marriage, Valentine's Day is a reminder of just how romantic we are. Restaurants are reserved months in advance for romantic dinners for two. Thousands of lovers use the occasion to "pop the question." Married couples vow to renew their ardor. The focus is on passion, sure, but passion in a marriage or a long-term relationship.

The problems bothering white Americans without a college degree have less to do with immediate economic insecurity or material hardship, although those are widespread, than with the collapse of a whole way of life.

America still hasn't adjusted to family realities in the 21st century. Here's what needs to be done and why we need to do it. 

At the Council on Contemporary Families, we are fond of saying that the right research question in today's world is not “What kind of family do we wish people were living in?” but “What do we know about how to help every family identify and build upon its potential strengths and minimize its characteristic vulnerabilities?” In my 75th anniversary address to the National Council on Family Relations (NCFR) (Coontz, 2013), I celebrated the commitment to scientific inquiry and debate that has helped the NCFR's members correct many prejudices and misconceptions about family diversity over the de

WHEN IT COMES to social thinking about families, there is such a thing as "American exceptionalism." Other Western countries tend to view people's life trajectories in light of their place in the class structure. But ever since the late-nineteenth century, Americans have typically attributed people's successes or failures to their family structures and values. This is, of course, a convenient way to reconcile our faith in individual achievement with the reality of racial and economic inequality.