ABSTRACT
The decline of the two-parent family and of marriage itself has begun to be taken seriously, and a new consensus has emerged about the need to strengthen families. Concerns about what is happening to the American family are nothing new; indeed, they go back almost to the nation's founding. The letters to the editors published subsequently, from well-known family scholars, indicated that the war over the family was far from over. The most vivid culmination of the intellectual shift in favor of marriage and the family appeared in August 2001, in a page-one article in the New York Times entitled "2-Parent Families Rise After Change in Welfare Laws". With the social science community and the media finally coming around to the importance of married two-parent families, and the national family wars thus essentially ended, the federal government has also come on board.
