Not all the family functions that seem to have been transferred outside the family—or that romantics sometimes yearn to bring back—were there in the first place. It is often claimed that "extended families" (with three generations at home, aunts and uncles included) were the rule, and that they have now been replaced by "nuclear" families. But actually most Americans have always lived in families consisting only of parents and children, and in colonial days, just as today, most children moved away from their parents' homes to set up households of their own. Nor is the mobility that scatters kinfolk to widely separated regions a new thing; historical studies indicate that frequent moves to new places have always been the rule in American life.
