Reknown sociologist David Popenoe was interviewed by "Academic Questions" in 2008. I'm posting snippets from his remarks about the decline of the family in our culture.
Check back from time to time because I will be updating my list of blospots, "here."
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Interview with Professor Popenoe:
Signs of Family Weakening During the 1960s.
The family is not easy to define, but I define it as group that includes dependents, children. Thereby, I have been in trouble with people who look at the family just as two people who happen to love one another. Throughout history the family has consisted of a group of people related through blood and marriage, often including more adults than just the parents.
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The family began to weaken significantly beginning in the late 1960s. By that I mean the marriage rate started to drop, the divorce rate began to go up, and the out-of-wedlock birthrate increased. When this happened there was almost no reaction in the academic community of a negative sort.
This wasn’t seen as any kind of special problem. In fact, the thinking often was, isn’t this new family diversity wonderful? We now don’t just have a single kind of family but we have all kinds of families. In the 1980s, when I wrote the book about cross-national family decline, Disturbing the Nest, and then in 1993, when I wrote the article for the Journal of Marriage and Family, “American Family Decline, 1960-1990,” even using the word “decline” caused consternation in many academic quarters. This was at the beginning of what became known in academia as the “family wars.”
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Early Studies Reported No Disadvantages.
Noticeably fueling the debate was that a number of studies done in the seventies and eighties purported to show that family change was not really having any negative effects on children.
A widely-discussed, front-page article in the Washington Post in 1992 stated that social scientists had concluded the so-called nuclear or traditional family wasn’t that important after all, that other family forms were just as good, or something to that effect.
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A Huge Problem.
This kind of staggered me because I was beginning to see in all the societies I was studying, including the United States, that in fact family weakening was becoming a huge problem, with the rise in all sorts of child-related issues such as juvenile delinquency, dropping out of school, unplanned teen pregnancies, and the like. Several major books at the time advised, basically, not to worry as the family was only changing, and not getting any worse.
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So I stuck out like the proverbial sore thumb. The Journal of Marriage and Family wouldn’t publish my article “American Family Decline” without including several respondents who slammed it.
The early studies had been short-term with relatively primitive methodologies, such as asking the divorcing parents “how are things going with the children?” and vague things of that kind.
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Longitudinal Studies Begun in 1980s.
But, fortunately, in the eighties long-term empirical studies were begun in which one could actually follow kids over time, both here and in other countries. By the nineties, the conclusions of these studies began to be revealed in the literature, and they were quite different from the assertions of the earlier studies.
In fact, they agreed essentially with what I had been saying, which was that these new “alternative family forms” have serious disadvantages for children.
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My Brief Comment:
During Popenoe's professional lifetime, the consensus moved from the speculative "the kids are alright" to the evidence-based assessment that the kids are seriously disadvantaged by non-standard family structures.
Popenoe is now retired. But he has much more to say in the rest of his interview about the accumulated evidence on family decline from the past five decades and his view of current trends.
Please stay tuned.
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Return to "Professor David Popenoe: Decline of the Family."
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