ABSTRACT
There is, to say the least, considerable disagreement about the state of the American family. While some observers, most notably Popenoe (1988, 1993a, 1993b, 1995, 1996), interpret the structural and demographic changes that have occurred in the family during the past 50 years as evidence of deterioration, others view those changes as the inevitable imposition of more compelling and more enduring social trends. In brief, Popenoe (1988, 1993a, 1993b, 1995, 1996) has argued that such factors as increased divorce rate, decreased fertility rate, and the disappearance of the two-parent family reveal, in an almost commonsense way, the erosion of the American family. In contrast, other observers have argued that the postwar family is obscured by nostalgia but, too, deviated from an established and ongoing trajectory of family change so that its use as a baseline in discussions of family health is misleading and encourages the erroneous conclusion that the family is in decline.
