This is just a natural change in society. With technological and economic progress, people want different things from their living and family arrangements than they used to. Those who are constantly wailing about how awful it is that the "nuclear family" is increasingly scarce, are conveniently forgetting that most of the people who are now choosing NOT to participate in such arrangements, did grow up in a "nuclear family" household. It must not have been nearly as wonderful as its cheerleaders claim, or more young adults would have fond memories of living in such families, and want to form similar ones. They certainly aren't making their choices out of ignorance of what "nuclear family" life is like.
The name of that "natural change" is "death". Not many children, and the children there are will be raised without fathers. Plenty of evidence that fatherless kids end up with all sorts of issues not conducive to civilized behavior.
You want to see the ultimate result of that "natural change"? Look at New Orleans when the lights went out.
The change is natural, it is called the death of Western Civilization. Not by the sword, but by suicide. We in the west have simply decided not to continue on beyond ourselves. Most have become so short sighted that raising the next generation is viewed as a threat.
So revile in the past, and realize that the future has been aborted.
a) The Muslims are having a lot of babies
and
b) The Social Security ponzi schemes
This wouldn't necessary be a bad thing. There's already too many people on this planet.
Huge numbers of those kids grew up in broken homes, have come not to trust relationships. It's not a natural shift, although it's happened in the past, too, especially near the end of the Roman empire when it became really a pain to try to raise a family because of the economic strictures the later emperors put on economic development...it's a shift away from the future, spawned not by the Xers, and not started by the boomers, although they were involved in it, but by a self-indulgent meme that perculated through a lot of the 20th century that decided a person's right to self-fulfillment meant that they could dump on the backs of their kids, leaving their kids in precarious situations.
Societies with weak family structures and no kids tend to crash when crisis time comes. The future will see if this paradigm holds true this time around.
I think you nailed it.
Growing up I had a wonderful, blessed "nuclear family" life.
But I have never, and I mean never, wanted children.
My spouse is pretty much the same.
We may get a cat or two someday. :o)
I wonder how many who opine that the nuclear family is overrated will still feel that way years down the road, sitting alone in a nursing home with no children and extended family to take them in and give them dignified care in the final, often difficult, years?
Like in ancient Rome. At some moment Romans stopped to have children and they got replaced by the barbarians.
Ok, I'll bite. What do you think is a better arrangement?
Marriage is not simply a pact between two people.
Rather it is a pact between two people and society.
The decline of marriage in the West has more to to with the unfaithfulness of society to marriage.
When one examines history, one sees that this decline of traditional values is always accompanied by the fall and/or conquest of that society.
Societies, like individuals, grow soft and weak without the exercise of struggle, and are soon replaced by struggling societies that are lean, hungry, tough, fit, and aggressive.
People and society are both destroyed by ease.
But I do agree with you, qam1, that the earth is overpopulated.
And that overpopulation means there is shortage in the world, which means somewhere people are struggling and becoming lean, hungry, tough, fit, and aggressive.
The current crop of would be choice-and-master-spirits of our age, hope by spreading prosperity to all nations to thereby enervate them, and so bring peace to mankind by making the world too fat for war.
Anyway, that's their scheme.