Redefining the American Family

(This article was originally published 20 years ago in The Future: Images for the 21st Century, edited by University of Michigan Professor Bunyan Bryant).

American families today are so unlike those in which human beings have traditionally raised children that it is questionable whether they should be called families at all.

Since the invention of agriculture more than 10,000 years ago, children and young people have been raised in families which included not only parents and siblings but other relatives of all ages. Within this multi-generational family, growing children developed a sense of their continuity with the past and the future. Naturally and normally they each discovered that their own individual uniqueness was the result of a subtle interplay between ancestral influences and individual choices and contingencies. Surrounded by a wide variety of adult models on whose conversations they “eavesdropped”, they acquired the ability to distinguish between appropriate and inappropriate behaviors.

At the same time, because the agricultural family was an economic production unit, work life and home life were intermingled. Women and children were subordinate, but everyone had a socially necessary role to play. Through the performances of daily chores children developed competence, a sense of responsibility, and self-esteem.

It was only with the coming of the Industrial Revolution and the shifting of work from the field to the factory that family structures and patterns began to change. To go where the jobs were, families had to be mobile. Thus the “extended” family” became the “conjugal family” of parents and children, stripped of relatives, streamlined so that it could serve as a labor pool for expanding industry.