TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/101592/10159915.000

Text File | 1993-04-08 | 12.7 KB | 248 lines

                                                                                SPECIAL ISSUE: MILLENNIUM -- BEYOND THE YEAR 2000 

THE CENTURY AHEAD, Page  42

The Nuclear Family Goes Boom!


Loosely knit clans will become the norm as single parents,
confused kids and more oldsters compete for love and support

BY CLAUDIA WALLIS - With reporting by Ann Blackman/Washington,
Ellis E. Conklin/Seattle and Janice M. Horowitz/New York


    When cartoon-show creators William Hanna and Joseph
Barbera strained their imaginations (ever so slightly) to
picture the family of the future, it was a pretty simple
exercise. Take your basic nuclear family: the modern,
shop-happy housewife, the corporate-drone dad, two rambunctious
kids and a dog; house them in a spacy-looking split-level; power
their car with atomic energy; equip their home with a robot
maid; and, whammo, you had it -- a space-age Cleaver family
named The Jetsons.

    In an age of working mothers, single parents and gay
matrimony, George Jetson and his clan already seem quaint even
to the baby boomers who grew up with them. The very term
nuclear family gives off a musty smell. The family of the 21st
century may have a robot maid, but the chances are good that it
will also be interracial or bisexual, divided by divorce,
multiplied by remarriage, expanded by new birth technologies --
or perhaps all of the above. Single parents and working moms
will become increasingly the norm, as will out-of-wedlock
babies, though there will surely be a more modern term for them.
"The concept of the illegitimate child will vanish because the
concept of the patriarchal nuclear family will vanish," says
Leslie Wolfe, executive director of the Center for Women Policy
Studies.

    The clock cannot be turned back, despite the current
political exploitation of old-fashioned family values. "The
isolated nuclear family of the 1950s was a small blip on the
radar," says Wolfe. "We've been looking at it as normal, but in
fact it was a fascinating anomaly." While a strict
reinforcement of traditional family roles is already under way
in parts of the Muslim world and a backlash against feminism has
occurred in the West, such counterrevolutions are likely to
fail. "The fact of change is the one constant throughout the
history of the family," says Maris Vinovskis, a professor at the
University of Michigan. "The family is the most flexible,
adaptive institution. It is constantly evolving."

    The rise of divorce in the late 20th century will be a
primary influence on the family in the century to come. Divorce
rates have recently stabilized, but they have done so at such a
high level -- 50% of marriages will end in court -- that
splitting up will be considered a natural thing. One reason the
rate of divorce will remain high is that people will live
longer. At the last turn of the century, at least one partner in
a couple usually died before age 50, so husbands and wives were
preoccupied with child rearing for nearly the entire length of
their union. Now and in the future, "you may find yourself empty
nesting at age 45, with 40 years of life to go," observes Ken
Dychtwald, a San Francisco consultant specializing in the impact
of longevity. As a result, he says, "it will become more normal
to have several marriages. Divorce will not be seen as a failure
but as a normal occurrence at various stages of life." Marriage
contracts might be revised to include sunset clauses that would
enable aging couples to escape an until-death-do-us-part
commitment.

    Dychtwald cites the late anthropologist Margaret Mead as a
pioneer of the kind of serial monogamy that may become popular
in the next century. Mead liked to say that she was married
three times, all successfully. Mead's husbands suited her needs
at different points in her long and varied life. Her first
partner, whom she called her "student-husband," provided a
conventional and comfortable marriage. As her career
progressed, however, she sought a traveling partner who was
interested in her fieldwork. Finally, she found a romantic and
intellectual soul mate.

    It will still be possible for a husband and wife to endure
together the vicissitudes of many decades, but Dychtwald
believes such couples will be rare. Once society has lost most
of its taboos against divorce, it will take unusual commitment,
flexibility and loyalty (perhaps fortified by a religious vow)
to stick it out. Couples who endure to celebrate their golden
anniversaries "will have mastered marriage," says Dychtwald.
"It will be like mastering the violin or the cello."

    The nonvirtuosos will spend significant stretches of their
adulthood rediscovering the single life. Current trends suggest
that this will be particularly true of women, both because they
live longer than men and because they are less likely to
remarry. Women will adapt by developing new types of
relationships: dating younger men, seeing more males in
platonic friendships and living together in groups with other
women, not unlike the Golden Girls model. Computer and
videophone dating services will help with matchmaking far more
than they do today.

    Serial monogamy will make family structures a great deal
more complicated. The accretion of step-relatives and former
in-laws will be legally messy and increasingly bewildering to
children, who will have to divide their loyalties and love
among stepmothers, birth mothers, biological fathers and
ex-stepparents. An entire new body of case law will unfold as
courts try to settle complex custody disputes and determine
where a child's best interest may lie in a forest of hyphenated
relatives.

    The growth of the extended family does not mean that huge
clans will gather under one roof. "They'll want intimacy at a
distance," says Andrew Cherlin, a sociology professor at Johns
Hopkins University. The extended family will be more of a
network of crisscrossing loyalties and obligations. As
life-spans lengthen and marriages multiply, middle-aged couples
could find themselves crushed by the responsibilities of caring
all at once for aging parents, frail grandparents, children
still completing their education and perhaps even a
stepgrandchild or two. In short, the "sandwich generation,"
already feeling so much pressure in the 1990s, could give way to
a multilayered club sandwich.

    As family relationships grow more complex, role confusion
is bound to become epidemic. More battles will be fought over
household turf, inheritance and rivalries for affection. Even
incest, long considered an absolute taboo, will become a more
complicated issue because the fracturing of families will make
it harder to define. If nonrelatives within a family have sex,
is that incest or something else?

    Many of the biggest changes in the next century, at least
in the developed world, will be driven by the demographic tilt
away from children and toward the elderly. A snapshot of a
family gathering in 2050 will show lots of gray hair and not
too many diapers. Even now, for the first time in history, the
average American has more parents living than children. People
age 65 and older, who constitute 11.3% of the U.S. population in
1980, will make up 22% of the country by 2050. Moreover, in the
next three decades the number of Americans age 85 and older is
expected to increase fivefold, to 15 million.

    That growth will spur a boom in the development of
retirement communities. Those catering to the affluent will be
highly sought after by regional civic boosters. "I can envision
countries competing for these luxury communities in the same
way they used to compete for auto plants, because they are such
wealth engines," says William Johnston, a fellow at the Hudson
Institute. A new, economical form of elderly residence called
"assisted housing" is likely to be popular as well. In these
complexes, the elderly are supervised but allowed to live
alone. "It's not like a nursing home," says Karen Wilson, whose
company, Concepts Community Living, operates two such
residences in Oregon. "These are places where older people can
live independently and where their family can come and do their
laundry, bathe them and even stay with them."

    Some people in America will be unable, either emotionally
or financially, to meet their family obligations. "We cannot be
hopeful about their ability to preserve or create any kind of
family structure, unless we step in to change their
circumstances," says Margaret Mark, director of the Young &
Rubicam Education Group. The worst victims may be children.
"You may see kids trying to survive on the street," says Edward
Cornish, president of the World Future Society in Bethesda,
Maryland. "Think of Dickens' London. Worse, think of Brazil,
where there are armies of children with no place to go."

    New technology and social institutions will have to emerge
to help the fractured families of the future. Some forecasters,
like Mark, predict that in poorer neighborhoods, schools will
become 24-hour family-support systems offering child care, quiet
study places, a sanctuary for abused or neglected youngsters,
even a place to sleep for those who need one. At the same time,
government computers will be far more efficient about tracking
the legal obligations of citizens. Parents who fail to meet
child-support payments will find it hard to hide.

    As corporations become more dependent on women workers and
staffed by female executives at high levels, policies will
become more accommodating toward families. Video-conferencing
and other improvements in communications technology will make it
easier for work to be done remotely from home, though it remains
to be seen whether this would be truly a boon for family life.
While work will be less tied to the office, it will also be more
international and therefore more round-the-clock. Making a clear
separation between work life and home life may actually become
more difficult.

    With women constituting nearly half the work force, the
remaining vestiges of gender inequality will gradually
disappear, according to most forecasters. Slowly but
inexorably, as women continue to move into fields once dominated
by men, the gap between male and female wages will close. As it
does, power balances will shift not only at the office but also
in the kitchen. When both sexes have equivalent jobs and
equivalent paychecks, it won't always be the woman who works
"the second shift" of housework after hours or who stays home
when a child is sick. Nor, for that matter, will it generally
be the woman who receives child custody in a divorce.

    To help families cope with ever more intricate obligations,
the government should allow large, extended families to
incorporate themselves as businesses, suggests David Pearce
Snyder, a consulting futurist. This would make families more
productive and independent by giving them huge tax advantages
that corporations enjoy: generous write-offs for helping each
other with new business ventures, tuition funds and the ability
to transfer wealth among members without being taxed. Such
families would then be much better equipped to look after all
their members, relieving the government and other institutions
of that burden.

    On the other hand, an even more radical approach may
evolve. It is reasonable to ask whether there will be a family
at all. Given the propensity for divorce, the growing number of
adults who choose to remain single, the declining popularity of
having children and the evaporation of the time families spend
together, another way may eventually evolve. It may be quicker
and more efficient to dispense with family-based reproduction.
Society could then produce its future generations in
institutions that might resemble the state-sponsored baby
hatcheries in Aldous Huxley's Brave New World. People of any
age or marital status could submit their genetic material, pay
a fee, perhaps apply for a permit and then produce offspring.
"Embryos could be brought to fetal and infant stage all in the
laboratory, outside the womb," says Cornish. "Once ready, the
children could be fed by nurses or even automated machinery."

    In any event, as the nuclear family dissolves, what is
likely to evolve is a sort of make-your-own-family approach,
which Dychtwald calls "the family of choice." Institutions,
employers, neighbors and friends will take on roles once
dominated by relatives. "The need and craving for family has
not diminished," he says. "It's just that people are forming
their own little tribes based on choice and affinity and not on
blood." These new pseudo-relatives could overcome the one
immutable truth about families: you can't pick your parents.
Someday, maybe, you will be able to.