FAMILIES OF THE FUTURE
The technologically advanced nations today are honeycombed with a bewildering array of family forms: Homosexual marriages, communes, groups of elderly people banding together to share expenses (and sometimes sex), tribal groupings among certain ethnic minorities, and many other forms coexist as never before. There are contract marriages, serial marriages, family clusters, and a variety of intimate networks with or without shared sex, as well as families in which mother and father live and work in two different cities.
Even these family forms barely hint at the even richer variety bubbling under the surface. When three psychiatrists— Kellam, Ensminger, and Turner—attempted to map the “variations of families” found in a single poor black neighborhood in Chicago, they identified “no less than 86 different combinations of adults,” including numerous forms of “mother- grandmother” families, “mother-aunt” families, “mother-stepfather families,” and “mother-other” families.
Faced with this veritable maze of kinship arrangements, even fairly orthodox scholars have come around to the once radical view that we are moving out of the age of the nuclear family and into a new society marked by diversity hi family life. In the words of sociologist Jessie Bernard, “The most characteristic aspect of marriage in the future will be precisely the array of options available to different people who want different things from their relationships with one another.”
The frequently asked question, “What is the future of the family?” usually implies that as the Second Wave nuclear family loses its dominance some other form will replace it. A more likely outcome is that during Third Wave civilization no single form will dominate the family mix for any long period. Instead we will see a high variety of family structures. Rather than masses of people living in uniform family arrangements, we shall see people moving through this system, tracing personalized or-“customized” trajectories during the course of their lives.
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