The Unfinished Revolution: How a New Generation is Reshaping Family, Work, and Gender in America

by Kathleen Gerson

For this generation, relationships, not roles, make families, and ties of ongoing support, not formal legal obligations, bind them. Redefining families in this way better fits the new options and new uncertainties young adults now face. They hope to find a “haven in a heartless world,” but this haven does not take the same form for everyone at all times.38 Indeed, no one type can possibly meet individuals’ varied, developing needs or families’ changing contingencies. In a new twist on the classic argument that homemaker-breadwinner households provide the best “fit” for modern societies, postindustrial conditions actually make it more “functional” for people to have a variety of family options as their lives unfold.39 While a concern for the quality of relationships rather than the composition of a household may seem to some to be a sign of family decline, it actually reflects a more optimistic view. Even those with difficult family experiences prefer to see families as ties that support and uplift as well as bind.