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American society is currently at a unique juncture with regard to families. On the one hand, there is a widely shared assumption of the importance of family contexts for individual happiness and well-being accompanied by an overwhelming concern for the quality of family life. At the same time, family contexts have changed and are changing drastically-resulting in more variation in family life than ever before. Thus, we know little about how best to promote the well-being of family members in these new family forms.
It is also important that the social-structural contexts in which family life is situated (and thus the family itself) have changed in significant ways throughout American history. For example, when life expectancy was much lower (around age 40 or so), early marriages (what we now call "teen marriages") were the norm rather than the exception. Moreover, such marriages did not, in fact, last very long, both because of the reduced life expectancy and the large numbers of women who died in childbirth. Thus, the notion of the "intact" family," in which parents are married for long periods of time (i.e., 20 years or more), is actually a fairly recent invention (Coontz, 1992). Similarly, the nuclear family is a relatively recent invention since "family homes" often included maiden aunts, orphaned cousins, and bachelor relatives as well as unrelated borders who simply had no other place to live. Times and cohorts change. Recently, some have noted that the rise in children born out of wedlock is due to the fact that young adults are much less likely than they were in previous eras (particularly the 40s and SOs)...