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.

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 about the evolving nature of family life in America.

I have spent most of my career pointing out the dangers of imagining a Golden Age in the past that we should try to recapture. Nostalgia offers a warped explanation of what actually did work in the past and airbrushes out what did not. It leads to the scapegoating of those who supposedly ruined “the good old days” while providing no tools for coping with the new realities that underlie contemporary challenges.

Few people today call a doctor when they feel a bout of nostalgia coming on. But for 200 years, nostalgia was considered a dangerous disease that could trigger delusions, despair, and even death. A 17th-century Swiss physician coined the word to describe the debilitating algos (pain) felt by people who had left their nostos (native home). In the U.S.

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.

Especially around Valentine’s Day, it’s easy to find advice about sustaining a successful marriage, with suggestions for "date nights" and romantic dinners for two.

But as we spend more and more of our lives outside marriage, it’s equally important to cultivate the skills of successful singlehood. And doing that doesn’t benefit just people who never marry. It can also make for more satisfying marriages.

It wasn't long ago that being single after a certain age was considered a recipe for lifelong misery. Up until 1970, the average woman married before she was legally old enough to have a drink at her wedding, and the average man married at 23. A woman still single at the ripe old age of 26 was what the Japanese call Christmas Cake -- past her pull date and destined to spoil. A man not married by the end of his 20s was considered irresponsible, if not "deviant."

In 1973, when President Richard Nixon proclaimed August 26 Women's Equality Day -- commemorating the day in 1920 that women won the right to vote -- a woman could still be denied housing by a real estate broker or credit by a bank, simply because of her gender.

In a letter to The Wall Street Journal this week, Ivanka Trump gave a robust defense of the Trump administration's proposed paid family leave program. The Journal's editorial board had denounced it as a government "entitlement" that "could create another disincentive for work and advancement."

Millennials, generally defined as people born between 1982 and 2000, were supposed to be the generation that forged what has been called "a new national consensus" in favor of gender equality.