Lawmakers No Longer Understand the American Family
The fix has been in, for a long time, in favor of those who marry and have children. In times past, this was just a temporary irritant, since most people indeed ended up marrying (in their early twenties, back in 1970) and having a family. But that family prototype is no longer dominant—and all indications suggest we’re not going back to the way things were. Why are policymakers in denial about the country we have become?
“It’s not that [leaders] don’t understand that families have changed very much from what they used to be. It’s that they don’t want to confront the reasons why families have changed,” said Stephanie Coontz, author of five books on gender and marriage. It’s not that people don’t want to couple—most do, she added—but marriage is not necessary anymore, especially for women who no longer need a man for financial support and don’t need to stay in an unhappy or abusive relationship. They want intimacy, but with equality, and “women have the ability to say, if I don’t get that, I’ll hold out,” said Coontz, the director of research and public education for the Council on Contemporary Families and emeritus faculty of history and family studies at the Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington.
There’s a misguided longing, especially among conservatives, to return to a storied American family that never really existed, Coontz argues in her book The Way We Never Were: American Families and the Nostalgia Trap. In reality, drug abuse, alcohol consumption, and sexually transmitted diseases were more prevalent in the 1950s, but economic conditions (in part because of government support for families) make the mid-twentieth-century family look idyllic in retrospect, Coontz argues in the book.