Listen to this article Like the community, the family is a social institution. Long ago, human beings lived in loosely-related groups. Each group had a common ancestor (a family member from the distant past). But for over a millennium (a thousand years), there have been two main types of families in the world: the extended form and the nuclear form. The extended family may include grandparents, parents, and children (and sometimes aunts, uncles, and cousins)--in other words, relatives living in the same house or close together on the same street or in the same area. In contrast, the nuclear family consists of only parents and their biological or adopted children. Because of the, industrialization in the nineteenth century, the nuclear family became the most common family structure.
Today there are many different kinds of families around the globe. Some people live in traditional families--that is to say, a stay-at-home mother, a working father, and their own biological children. Others live in two-paycheck families--that is, both parents work outside the home. There are many single-parent families; in other words, only a mother or a father lives with the children. Still others have adoptive or foster families (i.e., adults take care of children not biologically theirs) or blended families--in other words, divorced or widowed men and women marry again and live with the children from their previous, or earlier, marriages. There are also same-sex partnerships--with or without children, childless marriages, unmarried live-in relationships, and so on.
What caused the structure of the family to change? In the early 1900s in the United States the divorce rate (i.e., the percent of legal endings compared to the number of marriages) began to rise, and the birthrate (i.e., the number of births per 100 or 1000 people) began to decline; in other words, couples stayed married for fewer years, and they had fewer children. Women often chose to get an education and take jobs outside the home. Decades later, the same changes began to happen in other industrialized countries, Today, they are happening in many of the developing nations of the world as well.
The decades of the 1930s and 1940s were difficult years in the industrialized world. Many families faced serious financial problems because the heads of households lost their jobs. During World War II (1939-1945), millions of women had to take care of their homes and their children alone. Because so many men were at war, thousands of these "war widows"--that is to say, women whose husbands were away at war--had to go to work outside the home. Most women worked long hours at hard jobs. There weren't many "perfect families."
During the next decade (a period of ten years), the situation changed in many places. There were fewer divorces, and people married at a younger age and had more children than in the previous generation. Men made enough money to support the family, so a mother seldom worked outside the home when her children were small. Children began living at home longer--that is, until an older age, usually after high school or even college. The traditional family was returning in the United States, it seemed--as in many other countries.
In the years between 1960 or so and the end of the twentieth century, however, there were many new changes in the structure of the family around the globe, From the 1960s to the 1970s, the divorce rate greatly increased and the birthrate fell by half. The number of single-parent families rose, and the number of couples living together without marriage went up even more.
Many people today would like the traditional two-parent family back--that is to say, they want a man and a woman to marry for life; they also think the man should support the family and the woman should stay home with the children. However, few families now fall into this category. In fact, if more women decide to have children on their own, the single-parent household may become more typical than the traditional family in many countries. Also, unmarried couples may decide to have more children--or they might take in foster children or adopt. And because people are staying single and living longer (often as widows), there may be more one-person households. On the other hand, some people believe similar events happen again and again in history: if this is true, people may go back to the traditional extended or nuclear family of the past. Others think the only certainty in history is change: in other words, the structure of the future family could begin to change faster and faster--and in more and more ways.
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