As of today, the traditional U.S. family consisting of a mom, the breadwinner dad, and children is no longer the norm, with the majority of families now consisting of both a working mom and dad, a single or a cohabiting parent.

The Washington Post is reporting on a new study by Philip Cohen, a sociologist at the University of Maryland which found a dramatic change in the makeup of the U.S. family since the 1950s.

“At the end of the 1950s, if you chose 100 children under age 15 to represent all children, 65 would have been living in a family with married parents, with the father employed and the mother out of the labor force,” Cohen writes in the report. “Only 18 would have had married parents who were both employed. As for other types of family arrangements, you would find only one child in every 350 living with a never-married mother!”

Things have changed dramatically since then.

“Today, among 100 representative children, just 22 live in a married male-breadwinner family, compared to 23 living with a single mother (only half of whom have ever been married). Seven out of every 100 live with a parent who cohabits with an unmarried partner (a category too rare for the Census Bureau to consider counting in 1960) and six with either a single father (3%) or with grandparents but no parents (3%).”

While the single largest group of children – 34 – live with dual-earner married parents, that group actually comprises only a third of the total, so it’s simply not possible any more to pinpoint a “typical” U.S. family.

“There hasn’t been the collapse of one dominant family structure and the rise of another. It’s really a fanning out into all kinds of family structures,” said Philip Cohen, a sociologist at the University of Maryland. “Different is the new normal.”

Instead, he sees the decline of marriage as the big story.

“That’s what’s really changed,” he said.

In the 60-odd years between the 1950s and the year 2010, married couple families dropped from two-thirds of all households to less than half (45%) today.

Even more troubling is the rapid rise in single parenting which is associated with higher rates of poverty.

So how did we get here? Cohen cites various reasons from birth control to social programs for this dramatic cultural shift.

“For example, technological innovations made women’s traditional household tasks, such as shopping, preserving food, house-cleaning, and making clothes, far less time-consuming, while better birth control technology allowed them to control the timing or number of their births.”

This corresponded to a sharp increase in employment rates for both married an unmarried women which would culminate in moving women’s work primarily from home to office.

“The shift to market work reinforced women’s independence within their families, but also, in many cases, from their families. Women freed from family dependence could live singly, even with children; they could afford to risk divorce; and they could live with a man without the commitment of marriage.”

For younger adults, the combination of expanding work opportunities for women and greater welfare support for children made marriage “less of a necessity,” Cohen found.

The researcher said people shouldn’t be discouraged that the long-term, stable married family unit is no longer the norm. He cited the work of radical feminist Betty Friedan who alleged that inside that model “was a lot of suffering, heartache and exploitation.”

There was also a lot of stability, joy and personal satisfaction in the traditional family unit according to more reliable research, with children reaping benefits that remain unsurpassed by the “new normal” families of today.

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