A two-parent family based on love and commitment can be a wonderful thing, but historically speaking the "two-parent paradigm" has... left an extraordinary amount of room for economic inequality, violence and male dominance.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Almost all scholarly research carries practical and political implications. Better that we should spell these out ourselves than l...eave that task to people with a vested interest in stressing only some of the implications and falsifying others. The idea that academics should remain "above the fray" only gives ideologues license to misuse our work.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
... what's been building since the 1980's is a new kind of social Darwinism that blames poverty and crime and the crisis of our yo...uth on a breakdown of the family. That's what will last after this flurry on family values.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
We urgently need a debate about the best ways of supporting families in modern America, without blinders that prevent us from seei...ng the full extent of dependence and interdependence in American life. As long as we pretend that only poor or abnormal families need outside assistance, we will shortchange poor families, overcompensate rich ones, and fail to come up with effective policies for helping families in the middle.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Families have always been in flux and often in crisis; they have never lived up to nostalgic notions about "the way things used to... be." But that doesn't mean the malaise and anxiety people feel about modern families are delusions, that everything would be fine if we would only realize that the past was not all it's cracked up to be. . . . Even if things were not always right in families of the past, it seems clear that some things have newly gone wrong.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
In most nineteenth-century cities, both large and small, more than 50 percent--and often up to 75 percent--of the residents in any... given year were no longer there ten years later. People born in the twentieth century are much more likely to live near their birthplace than were people born in the nineteenth century.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
For every nineteenth-century middle-class family that protected its wife and child within the family circle, there was an Irish or... a German girl scrubbing floors in that home, a Welsh boy mining coal to keep the home-baked goodies warm, a black girl doing the family laundry, a black mother and child picking cotton to be made into clothes for the family, and a Jewish or an Italian daughter in a sweatshop making "ladies" dresses or artificial flowers for the family to purchase.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Extended families have never been the norm in America; the highest figure for extended-family households ever recorded in American... history is 20 percent. Contrary to the popular myth that industrialization destroyed "traditional" extended families, this high point occurred between 1850 and 1885, during the most intensive period of early industrialization. Many of these extended families, and most "producing" families of the time, depended on the labor of children; they were held together by dire necessity and sometimes by brute force.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »