Chapter 8

Nuclear Family Fission

Arriving home from work, the harried husband, hand on his forehead, has just realized his ghastly goof. His wife — I'm assuming they're married, although that's a bit risky these days — opens the front door to let him in. "Great!" she says. "You remembered to pick up dinner, but where are the kids?"

   This was a promo for a fall 1990 television special, "You've Come the Wrong Way, Maybe" about the "modern American maze."

   "Too often," said the ad copy, "dual careers lead to dueling priorities. We're eager to balance fulfilling lives at home and the office — but can we really 'have it all?' From careers to companionship to children, today's women and men are facing tougher choices than ever before."¹

   And we ain't seen nothin' yet!

   Family experts warn that value conflicts may be the fastest-growing area of family concern. Still, our churches seem to offer little help.

   "Many churches emphasize the importance of traditional family life, and although many people claim to believe in this traditional approach, they do not act on these beliefs," declares researcher George Barna. "Because of this, they are uncomfortable with what the church is preaching."²

   What is this "traditional" American family that so many idealize?

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A Family Is . . . a Family

   The so-called nuclear family was based on the model of an intact marriage with the husband as breadwinner and the wife at home caring for two or more children. Forty years ago more than half of all American families fit that pattern; now, about 10 percent do. In the typical family today both husband and wife work. Another 6 million households are headed by single parents (one in four families); and some 8 million seniors live alone.

   In 1960, married couples (with and without children) made up three-fourths of U.S. households. Twenty years later that had dropped to 60 percent — and by the turn of the millennium it is projected to decline to 53 percent. The other side of the coin is that while "nonfamily" households accounted for 15 percent of all households in 1960, they will reach almost 30 percent by 2001. Today, more than 2.9 million households are composed of unmarried couples,³ an increase of 80 percent over that of 1980.⁴

   In 1990, however, homemaking mothers married to breadwinning fathers still comprised the largest category of families with young children: one-third of the nation's 14.8 million families with pre-school children. The DIWK (double income with kids) households (about 30 percent) are catching up fast, though. And the single-parent family is also gaining because of divorce and the birth explosion among unwed mothers: up from 5 percent of all births in 1960 (and 22 percent of all black births) to 22 percent in 1985 (60 percent of blacks).⁵ Also, the trend is growing for partners living together to have children without being married: by 1990 about one of every 15 children was born to partners out of wedlock.⁶

   It isn't just the traditional family people — like James Dobson and his Family Research Council or Christian broadcaster Pat Robertson — who are worried about nuclear family fission and the effects of married women working outside the home.⁷ In a Time magazine article on the dilemmas of child rearing, Philip Elmer-DeWitt points to some probing questions:

Parents today, primed by racks of best-selling child-care manuals, are haunted by questions about their changing roles. What kind of bonding takes place when a child is passed

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from one paid caretaker to another? What are the risks of growing up without a stable nuclear family or any real community support? How do values get passed from one generation to the next when the dominant cultural influences on children are television, pop music and Nintendo?⁸

   After culling a wide variety of sources, here's how Judith Waldrop and several other experts think home life will be redefined in the 21st century:

• By 2000, more than half of all children will spend part of their lives in single-parent homes.

• By 2010, about one in three married couples with children will have a stepchild or an adopted child.

• Interracial marriage and adoption, spurred by immigration and growing social acceptance, will "darken the face" of the average American family.

• Most children will never know a time when their mothers did not work outside the home.⁹

• The fastest-growing segment of homemakers in the 21st century will be unmarried men who live alone or head families.

• Alternatives to marriage will be sought by older people as well as young singles.

• Households now defined by the U.S. Census Bureau as "non-families" will eventually receive legal recognition as "families" in every state. Such arrangements will include unmarried heterosexual couples, homosexual couples, and friends who "intentionally" live together.¹⁰ (The current standard definition of what constitutes a family is a group of two or more persons related by birth, marriage, or adoption and residing together.)¹¹

• There will be increasing pressure to redefine "family" as "a group of people who love and care for each other."¹²

Two-Career Families

   Usually impelled by the need for money, the two-career family faces the dilemma of balancing work and home. Unless there is a dramatic shift away from the kind of economy that we have become accustomed to, this dollar factor isn't going to leave us anytime soon.

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In many households two incomes are essential to pay for the necessities. Still, many are plagued by anxiety, fearing that they are spending too little time with their children. Nearly 40 percent of fathers and 80 percent of mothers in Los Angeles and Orange Counties said they would quit their jobs, if they could, to rear their children at home, according to a survey commissioned by The Los Angeles Times in 1990. The poll found that with 65 percent of couples with children, both husband and wife were employed. The good news in the survey was that a large majority of parents "care profoundly about family life."¹³

   Commenting on the survey, Dr. Joyce Brothers, psychologist and syndicated columnist, said it was important that "men on all economic levels are worrying about the family and putting it and children's welfare front and center in their lives. For 80 percent of men, family and children were the most important things in life, beyond even work, career and leisure time."¹⁴

   This squares with a survey conducted at 521 of the nation's largest companies among employers who work at home: 40 percent who work from home are men, and 88 percent of these are managers. "More and more executives are making career decisions based solely on what kind of home life they can have with a particular job," said Kathleen Christensen, who conducted the study.¹⁵

   The bad news is that there is little evidence that parents — especially men — actually spend as much time with their children as they say they would like to. "Many cannot live up to their ideals of even the most mundane family traditions, such as eating dinner together," the Southern California survey revealed. The largest gap, interestingly, was between those parents who felt it was important to attend church services (65 percent) and those who actually attended (48 percent).

   Some statistics indicate that many teenagers spend an average of less than thirty minutes a week in a "meaningful relationship" with their mothers and fifteen minutes a week with their fathers.¹⁶

   Apparently young adults now in their twenties experienced that when they were growing up. This group

wants to spend more time with their kids, not because they think they can handle the balance of work and child rearing any better than their parents did but because they see themselves

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as having been neglected, "My generation will be the family generation," says Mara Brock, 20, of Kansas City. "I don't want my kids to go through what my parents put me through" . . . Says Kip Banks, 24, a graduate student in public policy at the University of Michigan: "When I raise my children, my approach will be my grandparents', much more serious and conservative. I would never give my children the freedoms I had."¹⁷

   Nine out of ten evangelical Christians accept the changing gender roles that accompany the two-career pattern, saying that spouses should equally shoulder parenting and household tasks. But again, in practice, a 1990 study by Christianity Today magazine found that only moderate shifting of household responsibilities occurs when the wife works full-time. Working wives frequently do double duty, or at least the lion's share of the denkeeping. Apparently husbands think they do more at home than their wives do! And the breakdown of traditional sex roles has blurred responsibilities.

   The Christianity Today study also found that evangelicals (both men and women) are evenly divided between those who approve and those who disapprove of women who work outside the home while their children are young.¹⁸

   The child-care issue is at the heart of the controversy. Only the next generation will tell us for sure whether day care and substitute parenting provide the same support and psychological nurturing that parents can give.

   A 1990 Census Bureau report showed that 30 percent of preschoolers are cared for in their own homes by someone other than their mother — about half by their fathers, slightly more than a quarter by other relatives, and about one-fifth by babysitters, nannies, or other professional caretakers. Another fourth of preschoolers were in day-care centers or nursery schools.

   As the 1990s tick by, American families will be using child-care facilities in increasing numbers. And they will be paying more for the services, which by 1987 already cost the nation a whopping $15.5 billion annually. Day-care centers doubled during the 1980s and home-care services increased at an even faster rate.¹⁹

   Child care is still in short supply, so expect more private business

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firms to fill the gap as employee pressure mounts for the service to be provided as part of their compensation. Campbell Soup Company, for instance, has an exemplary on-site day-care center that draws inquiries about the program from five or six major companies every week.²⁰ More churches and other religious groups will have to organize to provide quality day care to fill the swelling need of the 1990s and beyond. And underline the word quality.

   Meanwhile, as the government continues to hash over ways to target child-care aid to needy families though vouchers or tax credits, some voices are suggesting that tax credits be given to reward women who stay home and care for their children.²¹

Single-parent Families and Unmarried Couples

   And what about children in single-parent homes, which represent about one out of four family groups at present and are expected to grow to 13 million households by the end of the century?²² For such households, a mother or father who can stay home rather than work is a rarity if not an impossibility.

   Single-parent families occur through divorce, the death of a spouse, and unwed parenting. According to the March 1988 report of the Census Bureau, a third of single-parent families were headed by a divorced mother, 28 percent by a never-married mother, 22 percent by a separated mother, and 6 percent by a widow. Divorced fathers, meanwhile, headed 6 percent of single-parent homes; separated fathers, 3 percent; never-married fathers, 2 percent; and widowers, 1 percent.²³

   Some single-parent families are outstanding successes, and experts caution against generalizations. But a study by the American Academy of Pediatrics describes the risks, ranging from "mild cognitive delays in preschoolers to withdrawal and depression in older kids. Children pressured by aggressive scheduling often show signs of chronic stress."²⁴

   Single-parent poverty is another major problem, exacerbated by the rising number of black, female-led families (now more than half of all black families). These mothers tend to be on the lowest rungs of the wage ladder.

   Each year more than one million teens will become pregnant.

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Four out of five will be unmarried, and 30,000 under the age of fifteen.²⁵ Ninety percent of the babies born to blacks between the ages of fifteen and nineteen are born out of wedlock. And as teen mothers of all races are less and less inclined to marry or put their children up for adoption, most of their infants will be reared in fatherless homes.²⁶

   Another "permutation of the American family" is the small but increasing number of unmarried women who have made "a calculated and intentional decision to raise a child single-handedly, despite a tangle of cultural, biological and sometimes legal complications."²⁷ When the desire to reproduce overtakes the desire to be married, these women may opt for intercourse with a selected partner, or artificial insemination from a known or unknown donor.

   "I could imagine going through life without a man," explains Paula Van Ness, 39, executive director of the National Community AIDS Partnership in Washington, "But I couldn't imagine going through life without a child. My biological clock started sounding like a time bomb."²⁸

   Sociologists are astounded by another social change: the swift rise in unmarried cohabitation, official-speak for couples living together.

   Half of all adults under age thirty will live with someone before they get married. Sixty percent of recently marrieds acknowledge they lived with their new spouse before getting married.

   But the LTA (Living Together Arrangement) hasn't improved marital stability. Census Bureau statistics cited by Barna indicate that people who cohabit before marriage are even more likely than others to divorce.²⁹ Nevertheless, families will surely be in conflict over these premarital living situations well into the next century despite what seems to be a gradual, and perhaps resigned, acceptance of the practice even in conservative church circles. Whether such couples will generally be welcome as active members or leaders remains to be seen.

Solo Singles and Childless Couples

   By 2001, more than half of all American adults will be single. Older single women, either divorced or widowed, are the fastest-growing household group in the nation.³⁰

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   Because of this growing number of singles, vital congregations will need strong singles ministries that provide a sense of family and a network of support.

   One that already does is Second Baptist Church in Houston, a city where 53 percent of the population is single. The congregation, pastored by H. Edwin Young, boasts the nation's largest church program for singles. It has an enrollment of 3,600 in just it's singles ministries and twenty-two age-graded singles classes!³¹

   But while a number of churches have effective singles programs, few are doing much, if anything, for another increasing segment of the population: the many couples who are choosing not to have children.

   Recently a young Catholic couple without children, friends of ours, lamented that their church has nothing designed for them. In fact, they say, they feel an inhospitable environment there.

   Perhaps what they sensed was a reflection of the view prevalent in Catholicism, Judaism, Mormonism, and Protestant fundamentalism: that bearing children is "essential and central to marriage."³² If that attitude persists through the decade, don't be surprised to find few childless couples coming to church.

Divorce, Remarriage, and Blending

   Pennsylvania lawmaker George Saurman introduced a bill on the last day of the 1990 legislative session that would give the clergy power to divorce couples. Although he admitted his measure had little chance of passing — at least not very soon — he reasoned that if clergy are entrusted to create legal marriages, "we could entrust them to dissolve them legally."³³

   That's going too far, in my opinion, even in a country where divorce and remarriage are accepted by seven out of ten people.³⁴ Better would be the proliferation of clergy-led services there couples recommit to their wedding vows on important anniversary dates — say at ten, twenty, or twenty-five years and in five-year increments beyond that. It would be a celebration that "we've made it" in a divorce-prone era and at a time when typical longevity means that couples have the potential for a longer married life than ever before.

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   Divorce rates in the United States doubled between the 1950s and the 1980s, from 2.5 per thousand to 5.2.³⁵ Then in the late 1980s and early 1990s there was disagreement over whether the divorce rate had leveled off or was even dipping slightly. Optimists cited the availability of many more materials to help hurting families and the accessibility to more and better-trained counselors. They saw these as signs that the incidence of splitting up was slimming down.

   But two University of Wisconsin researchers claimed that the government was "seriously underreporting" divorce and separation and predicted that two out of every three currently married couples would break up.³⁶

   Whether the Wisconsin researchers are right or wrong — hopefully wrong — many family analysts say the biggest marital change of the 1990s will not be fewer married people. Rather, it will be acceptance of "serial monogamy" — people consciously planning to have different mates for each stage of life. "Term" marriage options will be a reality, predicts Fay Angus.³⁷

   "By 2000," says George Barna, "Americans will generally believe that a life spent with the same partner is both unusual and unnecessary. We will continue our current moral transition by accepting sexual relationships with one person at a time . . . to be the civilized and moral way to behave. But we will not consider it at all unusual to be married two or three times during the course of life."³⁸

   Since these predictions already appear to be materializing, we can expect the number of remarriages and "blended" families to skyrocket.

   The authors of Lifetrends suggest, not facetiously, that a child of divorced parents whose grandparents have also separated may need a computer program to tell which relatives are where in his or her family. "In fact," they write, "making family trees may take on a much greater — and more practical — importance for this generation of grandchildren. It would not be surprising to see a standardized form, not to mention computer software, readily available for families that want to teach their grandchildren how they are related to everyone else in their family."³⁹

   The Stepfamily Association of America estimates that in 1990 there were 35 million stepparents and that 1,300 new stepfamilies are

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formed each day, with 10 percent of all children under the age of eighteen living in stepfamilies.⁴⁰

   The question for the church is: While still championing the nuclear family as the ideal, are they offering effective curriculum, counseling, and family services to help those — both children and adults — dealing with divorce, single-parenting, remarriage, and blended family situations?

Adoption and Foster Parents

   Although the adoption option is nothing new, in recent decades it has undergone major changes that will persist into the next century if other lifestyle trends discussed here remain in place. Because more young mothers with unplanned pregnancies either abort or keep their babies, adoptive parents often wait years, hassle with incredible paperwork, and spend thousands of dollars before they succeed in securing a child. And the children who can be adopted tend to be "older children, handicapped children, sibling groups, or international children."⁴¹

   Foster parenting bears similarities to adoption, but the care is usually temporary (eighteen months is the median length of time a child remains in continuous substitute care). Also, foster families, who must be legally certified, receive modest compensation.

   The possibility for short-term investment in a child's life through foster parenting can be rich and rewarding. I'll never forget the six months I was a foster father to a high school senior when I was in my early thirties and my wife and I also had two toddlers of our own. Penny won a permanent place in our hearts and stayed on until she turned eighteen and was married.

   Don and Helen Gibbs, both in their fifties and with three grown children and three grandchildren, cared for more than ten youngsters in their Southern California home over a three-year period. They were enticed to try foster parenting by a program at their neighborhood church.

   "We wanted to do what we could for children who are often abused, nearly starved, molested and hungry for love," said Helen.⁴²

   More foster parents like the Gibbs will be needed as court-ordered care increases during this decade. Nationwide about 300,000

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children under eighteen were in substitute care in 1988; more than half were teenagers.⁴³

   One innovative Christian group doing something about abandoned children is Child S.H.A.R.E. (Shelter Homes: A Rescue Effort). Child S.H.A.R.E. draws together foster-parent "shareholders," volunteers, consultants, and financial partners and networks with about fifty Los Angeles-area churches.

   Foster care for babies born with AIDS is another crying need. Health officials estimate that one-fourth of such infants will not be cared for by their biological parents.⁴⁴

   Joyce Pilotti is a mother of three whose husband died from AIDS. She says God led her to found Arise and Shine Ministries to assist special-needs children by identifying Christian families to serve as transitional homes for children who are in the foster-care system. These "branch homes" — named for the scriptural metaphor of the vine and the branches — "provide Christian care for children whose mothers may be hospitalized or in drug rehabilitation programs, or who have been orphaned and will go on to be adopted."⁴⁵

"Intentional" or Extended Families

   Another family type that will blossom in a variety of shapes and hues as we approach 2001 is the so-called "intentional" family — a grouping of persons with or without children who share a common residence. There is nothing new about this style, of course, cooperatives, communes, and enclaves of various sorts have flowered for years across social, racial, and economic lines. Many have also faded.

   Some of the more promising models for the 21st century will involve intentional families clustered around religious commitments, pooling resources and housing for ecological as well as financial benefit. Other extended families will evoke multigenerational models and cross-cultural units. Insights from Asian or African family patterns, for example, may be incorporated.

   Ken Dychtwald, a well-known consultant on issues of aging, thinks the "child-focused nuclear family" will increasingly be replaced by the "matrix family, an adult-centered, transgenerational unit bound together by friendship and choice as well as by blood and obligation."⁴⁶

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   Family experts Richard P. Olson and Joe H. Leonard suggest that church leaders attempt to raise the consciousness of their congregation regarding intentional families. If this happens, they aver, folks can be found who would benefit from new alliances:

For example, a lonely older person needing attention but living in a spacious home might be teamed with a young family needing a place to live. Churches may be led to understand clearly that they are actually a larger intentional family (filled with adoptees), an extended family that includes all family units, including those units with one member.⁴⁷

Chapter Nine  ||  Table of Contents