Marriage and Family Change

For a brief window in the mid-twentieth century, a highly specific family form became statistically dominant across North America and Western Europe: the male-breadwinner nuclear family — a legally married heterosexual couple, cohabiting, raising biological children, with the husband in paid employment and the wife in full-time domestic labor. Talcott Parsons's structural-functionalist sociology in the 1950s treated this arrangement as the functional adaptation of the family to industrial society, with clear expressive and instrumental role specialization. William J. Goode's World Revolution and Family Patterns (1963) predicted that this conjugal nuclear family would spread worldwide as industrialization advanced, displacing extended kin systems.

Subsequent decades proved the functionalist consensus badly wrong. Starting in the 1960s, and accelerating through the 1970s and 1980s, the standard family rapidly lost its statistical dominance in every industrialized country. The divorce rate roughly doubled in the United States between 1960 and 1980. Age at first marriage rose sharply. Birth rates fell below replacement in most of Europe and East Asia. Non-marital cohabitation, rare in 1960, became the majority first-union form in Scandinavia by the 1990s and a plurality almost everywhere in the West by the 2010s. Non-marital childbearing, once heavily stigmatized, rose to around 40% of U.S. births and over 50% in France, Sweden, and several other countries. Single-parent and blended households multiplied. Same-sex relationships moved from criminalization through decriminalization to full legal marriage in dozens of countries between 2001 and the 2020s.

Andrew Cherlin, in The Marriage-Go-Round (2009) and earlier work, has argued that the United States now exhibits a distinctive pattern of high family turnover: more frequent union formation, more frequent dissolution, and more transitions experienced by children than in any other rich democracy. Cherlin's central concept is the deinstitutionalization of marriage: marriage has lost its status as the near-universal, taken-for-granted container of adult intimate life and parenthood, becoming instead one option among several, chosen (when chosen at all) later and often after cohabitation and childbearing have already occurred. This reshapes how sociologists must study family.