The Nuclear Family Goes Boom!
In an age of working mothers, single parents and gay matrimony, the very term nuclear family gives off a musty smell. The chances are good that the family of the 21c will be interracial, divided by divorce, multiplied by remarriage, expanded by new birth technologies-or perhaps all of the above. Single parents and working moms will become increasingly the norm, as will out-of-wedlock babies. The concept of the illegitimate child will vanish because the concept of the patriarchal nuclear family will vanish," says Leslie Wolfe, executive director of the Center for Women Policy Studies. While a strict reinforcement of traditional family roles is already under way in parts of the Muslim world and a backlash against feminism has occurred in the West, such counterrevolutions are likely to fail. "The fact of change is the one constant throughout the history of the family," says Maris Vinovskis, a professor at the University of Michigan. "The family is the most flexible, adaptive institution. It is constantly evolving."
The rise of divorce in the late 20th century will be a primary influence on the family in the century to come. Divorce rates have recently stabilized, but they have done so at such a high level-50% of marriages will end in court-that splitting up will be considered a natural thing. One reason the rate of divorce will remain high is that people will live longer. At the last turn of the
century, at least one partner in a couple usually died before age 50, so husbands and wives were preoccupied with child rearing for nearly the entire length of their union. Now and in the future, "you may find yourself empty nesting at age 45, with 40 years of life to go," observes Ken Dychtwald, a San Francisco consultant specializing in the impact of longevity. As a result, he says, "it will become more normal to have several marriages. Divorce will not be seen as a failure but as a normal occurrence at various stages of life." The nonvirtuosos will spend significant stretches of their adulthood rediscovering the single life. Current trends suggest that both men and women will adapt by developing new types of relationships. Computer and videophone dating services will help with matchmaking far more than they do today.
Serial monogamy will make family structures a great deal more complicated. The accretion of step-relatives and former in-laws will be legally messy and increasingly bewildering to children, who will have to divide their loyalties and love among stepmothers, birth mothers, biological fathers and ex-stepparents. An entire new body of case law will unfold as courts try to settle complex custody disputes and determine where a child's best interest may lie in a forest of hyphenated relatives.
Some people in America will be unable, either emotionally or financially, to meet their family obligations. "We cannot be hopeful about their ability to preserve or create any kind of family structure, unless we step in to change their circumstances," says Margaret Mark, director of the Young & Rubicam Education Group. The worst victims may be children. "You may see kids trying to survive on the street," says Edward Cornish, president of the World Future Society in Bethesda, Maryland. "Think of Dickens' London. Worse, think of Brazil, where there are armies of children with no place to go."
New technology and social institutions will have to emerge to help the fractured families of the future. Some forecasters, like Mark, predict that in poorer neighborhoods, schools will become 24-hour family-support systems offering child care, quiet study places, a sanctuary for abused or neglected youngsters, even a place to sleep for those who need one. At the same time, government computers will be far more efficient about tracking the legal obligations of citizens.
Parents who fail to meet child-support payments will find it hard to hide. As corporations become more dependent on women workers and staffed by female executives at high levels, policies will become more accommodating toward families. Video-conferencing and other improvements in communications technology will make it easier for work to be done remotely from home though making a clear separation between work life and home life may actually become more difficult.
With women constituting nearly half the work force, the remaining vestiges of gender inequality will gradually disappear, according to most forecasters. Slowly but inexorably, as women continue to move into fields once dominated by men, the gap between male and female wages will close. As it does, power balances will shift not only at the office but also in the kitchen. When both sexes have equivalent jobs and equivalent paychecks, it won't always be the woman who works "the second shift" of housework after hours or who stays home when a child is sick. Nor, for that matter, will it generally be the woman who receives child custody in a divorce.
To help families cope with ever more intricate obligations, the government should allow large, extended families to incorporate themselves as businesses, suggests David Pearce Snyder, a consulting futurist. This would make families more productive and independent by giving them huge tax advantages that corporations enjoy: generous write-offs for helping each other with new business ventures, tuition funds and the ability to transfer wealth among members without being taxed. Such families would then be much better equipped to look after all their members, relieving the government and other institutions of that burden.
On the other hand, an even more radical approach may evolve. It is reasonable to ask whether there will be a family at all. Given the propensity for divorce, the growing number of adults who choose to remain single, the declining popularity of having children and the evaporation of the time families spend together, another way may eventually evolve. It may be quicker and more efficient to dispense with family-based reproduction and produce future generations in special institutions. People of any age or marital status could submit their genetic material, pay a fee, perhaps apply for a permit and then produce offspring.
In any event, as the nuclear family dissolves, what is likely to evolve is a sort of make-your-own-family approach, which Dychtwald calls "the family of choice." Institutions, employers, neighbors and friends will take on roles once dominated by relatives. "The need and craving for family has not diminished," he says. "It's just that people are forming their own little tribes based on choice and affinity and not on blood." These new pseudo-relatives could overcome the one immutable truth about families: you can't pick your parents. Someday, maybe, you will be able to.
(Claudia Wallis, Time, Sunday, June, 24, 2001)