Coontz and Just the Family Facts

Coontz and Just the Family Facts

by Phil Medlin

Facts on Families

Less than 7 percent of American families today are of the traditional nuclear type.

Married couples with children comprise just 24 percent of all households.

Of the 11 million single moms in the U.S., 41 percent have never been married, and 17 percent of all single parent households are headed by fathers, totaling 2 million— over five times the 1990 figure.

For the first time in U.S. history, singleperson households outnumber nuclear families.

More than half of U.S. families have no children younger than 18. Of households with children under that age, 28 percent are maintained by a single parent.

In the 1950s the median age of first marriage for women was 20.3; by the end of the 1990s it was 25.1.

Unmarried women made up 34 percent of the population in 1950; at the end of the century the percentage climbed to 45.

Families with unmarried partners shot up 71 percent during the last decade.

Source: 2000 United States Census

In this era, economically driven social change in virtually every aspect of daily life is profoundly reshaping the American concept of family, marriage, and what constitutes a household. Scholarly conversations about families have shifted to reflect these new forces, including a recent discussion sponsored by the Margaret Ritchie School of Family and Consumer Sciences. Stephanie Coontz, professor of history and family studies at the Evergreen State College in Olympia, WA, offered current notions of family during her keynote address for the school’s recent centennial celebration. An internationally recognized speaker and educator, Coontz suggested that the idyllic stability often associated with the 1950s resulted primarily from the unprecedented economic expansion and wage growth of the post-World War II period. The relatively shortlived modern family model was made possible by such robust economic conditions, not vice versa. Coontz had previously offered these thoughts in her 1992 book The Way We Never Were: American Families and the Nostalgia Trap and shared them again during her UI address “Ozzie and Harriet Don’t Live Here Anymore! Coming to Terms with America’s Changing Families.”

Coontz suggested that getting past the rhetoric for or against the family of the 1950s could be accomplished by putting into historical perspective their strengths and weaknesses. Rather than arguing about the past, she said an attempt should be made to learn positive lessons from the evidence at hand. Coontz proposed making a choice between accepting the increasingly permanent changes in family systems and declaring them unacceptable alternatives to recent historic norms.

Learning from the past and anticipating the future was a focus throughout the school’s celebration.