(LifeSiteNews) – One of the best pieces of evidence for the fact that progressives care more about the tenets of the sexual revolution than the wellbeing of the masses is the fact that the resolutely refuse to face the glaring problem of family breakdown. The condition of someone’s family is one of the most useful sociological predictors of their success or lack thereof, but for the most part, progressives prefer to talk about other things – race, sexual identity, or some other minority status. The oppressed versus oppressive narrative must be maintained.
This is not to say that there are no connections between racial injustice and family breakdown. There is – and in the case of residential schools in Canada, that family breakdown was mandated and enforced by the state. It is to say that the best privilege one can be blest with is to have a mother and father who stay married, love one another, and create a home for their children. I believe I have been privileged above the majority of people in the society in which I live simply because that is something I received.
Consider, then, the recent news that a staggering news that of 130 million households in the United States, a mere 17.8% contain married parents with children – a drop, according to the Census Bureau, from over 40% in 1970. These numbers mean that increasingly, the United States is in almost every way a functionally different country than it was less than a half-century ago. The way humans have lived for generations is disappearing.
As the Daily Mail put it, only 23.1 million American homes feature “nuclear families,” the smallest number since 1959. Factors include the widespread abandonment of marriage, the now standard delaying of marriage, and a decades-long drop in the birthrate. From the Mail:
The average age of a woman at her first marriage is now 28.6 years. In the 1950s and 60s, women typically married at 20.4 years old. The average age for men to marry for the first time in 2021 was 30.4 years old. America’s fertility rate dropped to 55.4 births per 1,000 in the second quarter of 2021, down from 58.5 in the same period of 2019.
Americans are also living alone at a higher rate than they used to. The percentage of adults in the US living with a spouse was 50 percent, down from 52 percent 10 years ago. Over 37 million adults lived alone in early 2021, up from 33 million in 2011. As far back as 1960, 87 percent of adults lived with a spouse.
There are many additional factors, of course. The rise of the “nones” – those who affiliate themselves with no religious group – is one. Another is the fact that as large or even medium-size families increasingly become a rarity, we are facing generations of young people who simply believe that it is impossible to have multiple children. We are losing the skills that it takes to have large families because it is becoming such a rare experience. As our lived experiences change, the range of what we believe we can cope with or accomplish narrows.
Knowledge and experiences that were once simply facts of human existence – marriage, life-long partnership, multiple children, family life – are disappearing. I wonder if those of us who grew up in large, loving families can comprehend the extent to which our experiences aren’t necessarily frowned upon by the majority so much as they are fundamentally foreign. For many, we represent a way of life abandoned a couple of generations ago in favor of hyper-individualism, total personal freedom, and consumerism in all things (including people).
As Mary Eberstadt explained recently in her book Primal Screams: How the Sexual Revolution Created Identity Politics, those reverberations will continue to roil our culture for generations to come.
