ABSTRACT
The traditional family is not all that traditional, its most basic features emerging out of certain transformations in social life occurring in Western Europe and North America during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. While by the late nineteenth century such transformations had resulted in an ideal of family life in rough conformity with the version familiar today, it was only in the immediate post-World War II period that a specific form of this ideal became a mass phenomenon, particularly in the United States. The small size of the 1990s traditional family also places heavy emotional and psychological burdens on its members. For children, it means that if one or both of their parents are emotionally or physically abusive, there is little recourse to other adults to mitigate the abuse. For the adult members, heavy expectations are placed on the other partner to satisfy needs for companionship and love.
