WND EXCLUSIVE
STUDY: NUMBER OF NUCLEAR FAMILIES PLUMMETS
Expert says result will be 'the need for government'
A new study reveals the nuclear family is in decline, and a University of Maryland sociology professor, Philip Cohen, suggests that’s not really a bad thing.
But conservative icon Phyllis Schlafly, whose new book, “Who Killed the American Family?,” recently was released, says there are ramifications:
More and bigger government.
Cohen helped author a study that was published recently by the Council on Contemporary Families in which he found family structure has become so diverse that there is no such thing as a “normal” American family anymore.
In 1960, according to Cohen’s study, 65 percent of American children grew up with a father who worked and a mother who did not. That was considered a normal, or nuclear, family.
But such a family no longer represents the majority. In 2012, only 22 percent of children grew up in a male-breadwinner family. A plurality of children now lives with a married mother and father who are both employed – but that plurality is only 34 percent.
He found the nuclear family has been replaced by a variety of family types. One of the most common is the single-mother household. The percentage of children living with a single mother has risen from 7 percent in 1960 to 23 percent in 2012, according to Cohen. Nearly half of those single mothers have never been married.
Meanwhile, 7 percent of children live with a parent who cohabits with an unmarried partner. Four percent live with a mother who works and a father who does not, and three percent live with a single father.
In a report in the Maryland student newspaper, The Diamondback, Cohen indicated no concern over those numbers.
“[W]e can’t assume uniform family background. Young people already sort of understand this, but older people sometimes don’t and that’s a problem because a lot of our politicians are older men who were born in the ’50s, and when they’re making decisions for the government, they can’t assume that married people are the statistical norm, nor are they the automatic goal we should all be striving for,” he said.
Maryland family science professor Kevin Roy echoed Cohen in the same publication.
“‘People might look at this [study] and think the family is in crisis,’ Roy said, noting how it does mean fewer people are getting married and fewer children are growing up in homogeneous situations, but that this is not a bad thing,” the publication reported.
Schlafly holds a different opinion.
“The thing about the nuclear family is, it was a secure economic unit,” said Schlafly. “They didn’t need government help. … Once you break up the family and you don’t have the husband-provider and the mother taking care of the children, then you need government experts and busybodies to come and tell you what to do.”
Another one of Cohen’s colleagues, sociology professor Liana Sayer, told The Diamondback that Cohen’s data prove many women can and do support themselves without help from a man. But there’s a catch. In the study, Cohen cited the growth of Aid to Families with Dependent Children as a factor that allowed many women to forgo marriage and raise children on their own.
Schlafly is troubled by the number of single women who depend on welfare.
“It’s very difficult for a woman with children to support herself and her children without some kind of assistance,” Schlafly said. “And if she doesn’t have the husband to provide it, she looks to some of these government handouts. And that’s what has happened, and that’s why the welfare spending is growing at an exponential rate, and that’s why people have become more dependent on government.”
Cohen’s data show that the proportion of all American households occupied by a married couple has been declining since the 1960s. Meanwhile, the share of single-parent households has increased, as has the share of people living alone. Schlafly worries that the decline of marriage, accompanied by a decrease in childbirth, might collapse the Social Security system.
“The whole Social Security system was based on the assumption that people were going to continue to have children, and that the new children coming along were going to provide the income to pay for the old people as they reach retirement age, and we can see already that that’s falling off and not working out the way they thought it would be,” she said.
Beyond that, Schlafly said those who don’t marry may end up lonely and miserable because they won’t have someone to share their lives.
“Most people don’t want to live by themselves,” she said. “They want some type of companionship, and if you don’t have a husband or a wife, you may not be as happy.”
Schlafly’s influence on the conservative movement in America, according to Brent Bozell, founder of the Media Research Center, is significant.
Schlafly turned 90 in August and still is actively fighting for her beliefs, making speeches and writing. She’s known, among other things, for her intense opposition to the Equal Rights Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.
Bozell said she’s “been ‘true north’ for the conservative movement, who’s been a guiding light for conservative leaders, who has been a force of nature behind the scenes.”
Schlafly has been active in the movement since 1946, when she took a research job with the American Enterprise Institute and managed Republican Claude Bakewell’s successful campaign for the U.S. House of Representatives. In 1952, as a member of the Illinois delegation to the Republican National Convention, she endorsed conservative icon Robert A. Taft for president.
But it was in 1964, with the publication of her book “A Choice, Not an Echo,” that Schlafly vaulted into the pantheon of national conservative leaders. She has written 21 more books, authored a syndicated weekly newspaper column, founded the conservative interest group Eagle Forum and published a monthly newsletter.
She blames feminism and the interference of social workers and family courts for the decline of the family.
“[F]amily courts cling to the idea that a judge can act as a philosopher-king and decide what is in the best interest of a child,” she writes. “This cannot be done without punishing parents and others for acts that are not contrary to any laws, rules, regulations, or policies that are written anywhere.”
The book also includes is a lengthy discussion on the perverse incentives in the tax code and welfare state that discourage stable families. Schlafly reiterated this point during a recent interview with WND.
“The welfare system is giving handouts to promote women having children without husbands,” she said. “If they don’t have husbands, they’re going to look to Big Brother government, and we don’t want Big Brother government to be supporting our families.”
Schlafly had some harsh words for the parenting “experts,” such as psychiatrists, judges and social workers, who claim to know a child’s “best interests” better than the child’s parents do.
“It used to be that when a mom had a 10-year-old boy who was ‘a bundle of uncontained energy,’ the dad would teach him to play football or work on the farm to burn up that energy and make a man out of him. But now our society has convinced this mom to kick out her husband, drug the boy, and let him get fat and lazy,” she writes.
Read more at http://www.wnd.com/2014/09/study-number-of-nuclear-families-plummets/#3xMCERJWx56iGh0S.99My comments: This LIFE only works God's Way. Any other way leads to DISASTER. America is on the road to DISASTER because of her Rebellion against God, His Chrsit Jesus, His Word, His Covenant and His Commandments. The breakdown of the Nuclear Family is one among many signs of this reality.
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