The twenty first century has seen a great decline in family value and of the meaning of what it means to be part of a family. By the 1990s one out of every two marriages ended in divorce. Seven times more children were affected by divorce than at the begging of the century. Kids who commuted between separated parents were commonplace. The 1950s ideal of a family with two parents, only one of whom worked, was now a virtually useless way to picture the typical American household.

Traditional families were disappearing very quickly and what’s also was happening was that the rate at which marriages were happening was going down. The proportion of adults living alone tripled in the four decades after 1950, and by the 1990s nearly one-third of women aged twenty-five to twenty-nine had never married. In the 1960s, 5 percent of all births were to unmarried women. Three decades later though one out of four white babies, one out of three Hispanic babies, and two out of three African-American babies were born to single mothers. Every fourth child in America was growing up in a household that lacked two parents. The collapse of the traditional family contributed heavily to the pauperization of many woman and children, as single parents struggled to keep their households economically afloat and their families emotionally intact.

Since parents were unable to personally take care of children they would assign them to “parental substitutes” at day-care centers, babysitters, or schools. Television became the modern age’s “electronic babysitter.” Estimates were that the average child by age sixteen had watched up to fifteen thousand hours of TV, more time than spent in the classroom. Parental anxieties multiplied with the advent of the internet, an electronic cornucopia where youngsters could “surf” through poetry and problem sets as well as pornography.

Born and raised without the family support enjoyed by their forebears, Americans were also increasingly likely to be lonely in their later years. Most elderly people in the 1990’s depended on pension plans and government social security payments, not on their loved ones, for their daily bread. The great majority of them drew their last breath not in their own homes, but in hospitals and nursing facilities.

In the media there are all sorts of cases where celebrities marry one person one day and the next they are going through a divorce only to then get married to someone else and go through the same process again. People who see this think there is nothing wrong with it and end up marring someone just so they van say they are married. Marriage has been brought down from a sacred union between two individuals to a common fad. And like this there are countless other situation which keep on diminishing the role of the family. High divorce rates and increasing numbers of “blended families” in modern America have come to a point which could be confusing.

This downward spiral of family values just keeps on declining. Kids care less about their families and the elderly are being tossed aside. Middle aged people lead their lives carelessly without morals. All of this continues to lead to a very chaotic America. Family is suppose to teach a person values which will make him or her a better person without these values being carried on who know what will happen. From youth to old age, the role of the family is dwindling.