Afew years ago, after my daughter's marriage, a friend remarked that the wedding had been very unusual. “It was a first marriage,” she explained, “and the parents of both the bride and groom were still married to their original partners.” Pointing out that my husband and I, unlike most of our friends, had avoided the exquisitely delicate questions of etiquette that complicate the weddings of children of divorced or “blended” families, she asked, “How does it feel to be an anomaly?”

This anecdote may reveal only a glimpse of life among a certain segment of the middle class in New York City in the mid-1980s. There can be no doubt, however, that across the nation American families have changed, are changing, and will continue to change. A statistical snapshot of American families today documents the shifts. Data from the 1980 United States census show a sharp rise from the 1970 figures in the number of single-parent families, nearly all of them headed by women. Almost 20 percent of minors live with one parent, an increase from 12 percent in 1970. The number of people living alone also increased by 64 percent over the previous census. The number of unmarried couples living together almost tripled from 523,000 in 1970 to 1.56 million in 1980, and increased another 63 percent from 1980 to 1988 (U.S. Bureau of the Census 1981, 1988). In 1988, the proportion of households accounted for by married-couple families with children under the age of 18 present in the home had declined by 13 percent since 1970 (U.S. Bureau of the Census 1988).