ABSTRACT
In Neil Howe and Bill Strauss’s 13th Gen: Abort, Retry, Ignore, Fail? there is a cartoon depicting a confused teenager in a card shop asking the clerk a question: “Do you have a card for a half-sister’s biological father’s permanent companion?” (1993, 15). Though the authors’ attempt to present a picture of family change may be labeled unrealistic, extreme, or even outrageous by some, the cartoon does grab one’s attention and demands that at least some thought be devoted to the changing family as a new millennium begins. An excerpt from Judith Stacey’s In the Name of the Family: Rethinking Family Values in the Postmodern Age (1996) produces a similar response. Her description of a wedding she attended in California’s Silicon Valley in the 1980s is an animated version of Howe and Strauss’s cartoon.
