ABSTRACT
In the national task of rebuilding the nest, there is one goal that the new familism movement should not pursue—the goal of trying to reconstruct the traditional family of the 1950s. In the past thirty years the American family has been buffeted by a series of what many observers refer to as social revolutions. Many scholars have worked overtime to demonstrate that everyone has benefited from recent family changes, even including children; at least, they argue, children have not been seriously hurt. Two key characteristics of the traditional nuclear family should be restored or preserved at all costs, however: an enduring sense of family obligation, and the desire to put children first. The family's decline since the 1950s has been particularly dramatic because that era was an especially familistic period, a time of very high marriage and birth rates and relatively low divorce rates.
