Study: The Number Of Traditional Families Has Drastically Declined

A new study has revealed that the nuclear family has drastically declined. In fact, one professor who helped author the study, Philip Cohen, suggests that it’s not a bad thing.

However, conservative icon Phyllis Schafly has a much different take on the issue.

Cohen found that the traditional, nuclear family in which there was one male breadwinner and a mother to take after the children has been dramatically transformed in modern America.

Now, the plurality of children (34%) live in a family in which both the father and the mother are the breadwinners as opposed to only 22% traditional male breadwinner families.

Much more disturbing is the prevalence of single mother households and households where the partners cohabitate  as oppose to marry. In fact, the percentage of families with a single mother has risen from 7 percent in 1960 to 23 percent in 2012.

While this presents no problem to Cohen, Schafly spoke about the importance of the nuclear family unit:

“The thing about the nuclear family is, it was a secure economic unit. They didn’t need government help. … Once you break up the family and you don’t have the husband-provider and the mother taking care of the children, then you need government experts and busybodies to come and tell you what to do.”

Furthermore, she is concerned about the dependence of single mothers on welfare: “It’s very difficult for a woman with children to support herself and her children without some kind of assistance. And if she doesn’t have the husband to provide it, she looks to some of these government handouts. And that’s what has happened, and that’s why the welfare spending is growing at an exponential rate, and that’s why people have become more dependent on government.”

Schafly takes a dim view of the experts who are proclaiming how the results of the study are good:

“It used to be that when a mom had a 10-year-old boy who was ‘a bundle of uncontained energy,’ the dad would teach him to play football or work on the farm to burn up that energy and make a man out of him. But now our society has convinced this mom to kick out her husband, drug the boy, and let him get fat and lazy.”

What do you think about the decline of the traditional, nuclear family? Is there any way to reverse the recent troubling statistics?

BCN editor’s note: This article first appeared at Western Journalism.