Item from the Smart Marriages Archive, reproduced in the Divorce Statistics Collection
Monday, December 27, 1999

Good-bye, Cleavers: Nuclear family won't be
'typical' in the future
Married with children isn't the main model any longer

By Susan R. Pollack / The Detroit News


When Gary Stollak and his friends gather for holiday
dinners with their grown children, there's always one thing
missing: the patter of little feet.

"We adults pound our fists on the table and shout,
'Where are our grandchildren? We want grandchildren!' "
says the Michigan State University psychology professor
and father of three.

"I'm in a social group that has at least 30 children over
25,
and only three are married. Most are either living alone and
making a tremendous amount of money, or living with
someone. We have a new generation of happy
30-year-olds -- they're not married but they're happy. And
not one of my friends has a grandchild."

It's far different from his own childhood, Stollak and other
social scientists say, when couples tended to marry young,
have lots of children and live amid large,
grandparent-centered clans.

And the American family is poised to change even more
dramatically in the coming century, experts say. As growing
numbers of women enter the workforce, cohabitation rates
climb and societal tolerance for alternative lifestyles
increases, we will continue to move light years from the
idealized image of such '50s TV families as Ozzie and
Harriet and the Cleavers -- the traditional two-parent model
with stay-at-home mother, working father and two children
under one roof.

"We're talking about profound changes," says Tom W.
Smith, director of the General Social Survey conducted
annually by the University of Chicago's National Opinion
Research Center. "You can actually look at the course of
human history and talk about only a few shifts in basic
family
types, and we're seeing one of those shifts right here --
it's historic."

Marriage has declined as the central institution under which
households are organized and children are raised, he notes.
Growing numbers of women are delaying marriage and
childbirth or possibly never marrying or having children,
and
various nontraditional living arrangements are flourishing,
with no decline in sight.

"What was the normal or average family is not what it was
a generation ago -- there is not one dominant family type
like there was before," Smith says. "A majority of people
raising children today are raising them in a different kind
of family than the one in which they were raised."

Smith's survey, "The Emerging 21st-Century American
Family," turned up these trends, expected to continue into
the next century:
* By 1998, only 56 percent of adults were married,
compared with nearly 75 percent in 1972.
* Because of high divorce rates, cohabitation and single
parenthood, a majority of families rearing children in the
next
century probably will not include the children's original
two
parents. In 1998, just 51 percent lived in a two-parent
household compared with 73 percent in 1972.
* The percentage of American households composed of
married couples with children dropped from 45 percent in
the 1970s to 26 percent in 1998.
* Children living with single parents increased from less
than one in 20 in 1972 to almost one in five in 1998, while
the percentage of children living in a blended household
more than doubled, from 3.8 percent to 8.6 percent.
* The number of households with unmarried adults and
no children more than doubled in that time period, to 33
percent, becoming the nation's most common living
arrangement.

One needn't look far in Metro Detroit to put a human face
on these trends.

At the Bashert household in Ypsilanti, partners Lisa and
Beth try to eat family dinners with their 17-year-old
daughter, Sian Chivers, at least four times a week.
Afterward, they often walk the dogs, watch videos, read
aloud together (their current favorite is the Harry
Potter series) and make sure Sian finishes her homework.

"We tried a lot of different experiments on how to deal with
various issues of raising a child with two
moms and finally just decided that it's our job to raise her
and everybody else's job to figure it out," says
Beth Bashert, 39, regional organizer for the National
Abortion and Reproductive Rights Action League.

The Basherts have lived together as a family for 11 years,
and adopted the same surname six years
ago. "It was important to us that we present ourselves as a
family to the world and to ourselves," says
Beth, noting that Lisa's long-ago marriage to Sian's father
lasted less than a year.

"When we deal with hospitals or car salesmen or doctors,
they don't know how we're related and they
don't question how we're related. I really appreciate that."

Marilyn Jackson of Detroit is another parent who heads the
kind of family experts predict we will see far
more of.

Jackson, who oversees accounting and payroll at Wayne State
University's Merrill-Palmer Institute, has
been a single parent since age 15 -- "pretty much all my
life," she says.

Now 49, the former welfare mother raised three children (34,
26 and 16) on her own while working in a
Florida cigar factory and an insurance firm and studying for
high school and college diplomas.

"I never felt I had to marry someone if it was just a child
going to bind us and if there was not commitment
in making that relationship work," says Jackson, who
describes herself as extremely independent with
strong, supportive women as role models.

"I'm seeing more women going nontraditional, not getting
into marriages," she says. "I see more single
women buying homes and not looking for the knight in shining
armor to come along and purchase that
home for them. I'm way before my time."

And it's not just women heading single-parent households.
Steve Coleman, a quality engineer in
Detroit, is a divorced dad raising two young boys. Divorced
since 1997, he makes family life run smoothly
by keeping Steven Jr., 8, and Zachary, 7, on a predictable
schedule of meals, latchkey, homework and chores.

"It's pretty steady once you get the hang of it," observes
Coleman, 33, describing himself as a gourmet
chef by trade. "I get a lot of advice from women -- where
they shop, where they get this or that. It's very
helpful. My ears are wide open for everything."

Social scientists such as MSU's Stollak, Smith and others
expect to see more such households in
coming years. As values change, they say, there is less
social stigma attached to nontraditional
arrangements.

"I think there will be increasingly nonstandard combinations
of people," says Rita Casey, director of
Wayne's Merrill-Palmer Institute, which studies children and
families. "It really doesn't matter for the vast
majority of jobs what your home and family life is like. It
is irrelevant to doing a job in almost all cases."

Casey foresees more couples living together without marriage
and more babies adopted by single
parents, which, 20 years ago, "was unheard of," she says.
"The necessity of being married in order to hold
up your head in the community is nearly gone.

"And," she continues, "few school systems today would bat an
eyelash to have a single parent who had
never been married earn their degree and become a school
teacher.
"Yet when I was an elementary teacher in the late '70s, that
was one of those things that would keep
you from getting hired. ... They didn't hire divorced
teachers, either, and, now, just look around you."

Blended families also are on the upswing. Matt and Dana
Andrews Chiodo of Farmington Hills feel as if
they've been living the Brady Bunch lifestyle since they
married and merged households in January.

Their blended family from previous marriages includes six
children under age 10: a fourth-grader,
third-grader, second-grader, first-grader and twin
preschoolers. Because Chiodo shares 50-50 custody
with his first wife, who lives a half-mile away, his four
children live with his new family three days each week
in winter and four days weekly in summer.

"It's a challenge," observes Chiodo, a new-business
development manager for Johnson Controls.

"There was no way for both of us to work and give the kids a
quality life," he says. His new wife,
widowed at a young age, quit her job in May to become a
stay-at-home mom.

"It works out fine for us. ... It's great for me -- I get to
be a dad to two kids who don't have a father."

Yet another model for the future family: Minnie and Keith
Helfrich.

Married 14 years, the fortyish couple from Birmingham made a
conscious decision not to have children.

"It was just something we decided early on," says Minnie, a
design engineer with Ford Motor Co. "I
partially raised my brother, and Keith (marketing director
for Dodge Truck) partially raised his sister. We
chose not to have kids."

Immersed for the last year in a home remodeling project,
they work long hours and sometimes don't eat
dinner until after 9 p.m.

"We're always busy doing something," she says. "Even though
we don't have kids, we seem to not
have as much time. We can't even get ourselves organized."


| Smart Marriages Archive | New Divorce Statistics and Studies Blog | Older Divorce Statistics Collection Archive |