The Grandparenting Generation
“When social conservatives tell stories about the way things used to be, the nuclear family is the star of the tale. A man, a woman, with their two and half children behind a white picket fence: Nostalgia for a Leave It to Beaver way of life infuses the politics of the Christian right. More recently, that nostalgia has taken the form of a more policy-oriented approach, contributing to the idea that a decline of two-parent households creates a culture of poverty. ‘You don’t have to like the suburbs or minivans or soccer or even monogamy to comprehend that the biological nuclear family’s stability and repertoire is tops over the long run,’ the sociologist Mark Regnerus once claimed in The New York Times.”