Marrying at thirty-one, living alone, moving back in with your parents — each of these feels like a private decision made in a private kitchen. Stack sixty years of them together and they become a line on a chart, which is exactly C. Wright Mills’ difference between a personal trouble and a public issue. Step a block of twenty households through four decades, find the six forces doing the pushing, then test eight claims about how family life has changed — some true, some things everybody knows that are not so.
A block of twenty households
Each house is 1 in 20 U.S. households. A solid bar between two figures is a legal marriage; a dotted bar is a couple living together without one.