The diversity of modern family forms is a myth

I think you'll find it's a bit less complicated than that

Here is a standard spiel about modern families. The old one-size-fits-all nuclear family has been replaced by a diversity of family forms, including single parents, blended families, children conceived via IVF, gay parents, adopters, foster parents, families of different cultures, communal living arrangements, and so on.

Some examples:

“The nuclear family is not that old, is deeply flawed, and is very broken,” [Alvary Kent of the AltParenting movement] said. Villages, communities, multigenerational living setups: they’re the way we’ve lived for millennia, and are deeply rooted in our cores.

— The Guardian 2021

To me, the decline of the nuclear family isn’t only a story of chaos or trauma. For people who never fit comfortably into those nuclear-family structures, it’s liberating and opens up a whole panoply of options. The way I think about those options is in terms of the big components of our life—getting married, living together, having sex, having kids. It used to be that these components all came packaged together, and now they’ve all come apart. People can pick and choose whatever components they want.

— Bella de Paolo in The Atlantic 2020

The post-nuclear family: UK TV’s Rainbow

“I cannot count the number of times people have asked me if I want a ‘normal life,’” said Matan Inbar-Hansen, 20, who was raised in two households by three moms.

— New York Times 2019

Three! Gosh, Matan, it’s not a competition.

The picture of modern families painted by these stories is like this:

a diverse rainbow of different forms.

Looks nice! Let’s take this story to the data.

The 2011 Census gives these percentages of households with dependent children in England and Wales.¹

“Others” aren’t split up in the figures, but I put them multicoloured just to keep a bit of rainbow.

We can learn more by separating male from female lone parents. Guess what?

By the way, gay civil partnerships aren’t separated from married couples in this data, but if they were plotted, they would be an infinitesimal sliver of the pink slice: about 6800 out of 3.5 million.

This isn’t a rainbow of diversity: it’s really pretty simple. Of households with children:

• About half are married couples;

• About 15% are cohabiting;

• About a quarter are lone parents, the vast majority women;

• These three categories cover 90% of the population.

The policy implications of this picture are vastly different from the policy implications of the imaginary rainbow. Almost all households with dependent children are two parent households or single parent households. The difference from the “traditional picture” is just that one quarter of households are single parents. (Sometimes they are called “single parent families”, a phrase which obscures the fact that almost all of these children have two parents in their family: it’s just that one isn’t living with them.)

This difference is not really something to celebrate. A recent paradox from the social science literature on happiness is that children appear to make parents less happy. The resolution of the paradox is that children especially make single parents less happy.² Presumably, that is because bringing up a child on your own often makes you exhausted and poor.

Why does the myth of family diversity persist? Why does Bella de Paolo imagine people choosing from a smorgasbord of life components, when what’s really on the menu is more like “Staying in this Friday night, and every day ending in Y, because your kid is too young to be left alone”?

I’ll guess two reasons. The first is that elite opinion-formers really do live in a world of diverse families. They have the options. They might delay childrearing and have IVF treatment. They might decide to have a child on their own: if you’re rich enough, it gets a lot easier. If you’re a charismatic person on the West Coast, you really might live in a commune and practice polyamory. People with safety nets can afford to experiment.

The other reason is simple hope. It’s like the famous joke slogan, SMASH CAPITALISM AND REPLACE IT WITH SOMETHING NICE. We broke the nuclear family. We aren’t sure what has replaced it, but wouldn’t it be great if it was… something nice?

It turns out that this hope does not correspond to reality, and anyone can check that in five minutes with an internet connection. But the hopeful story circulates, and perhaps it will keep circulating. It feels good!

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1. Tables KS105EW and KS107EW from the link.

2. For couples with their own children the effect is about 10 times smaller, and once you control for finances, children seem to make these couples happier.