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(Source: The Howard Center for Family, Religion, and Society.)

"'The academic work produced by the [Howard] center, as well as the World Congresses of Families, have had a  huge impact,' said Ellen Sauerbrey, U.S. representative to the United Nations Commission on the Status of  Women. 'Part of the fallout of the center's work is networking of people around the world with shared values  and concerns about the deterioration of the family structure.'"  

(Source: Edith Webster, "Family Values: Howard Center works quietly in Rockford to influence global change,"  Rockford Register-Star, July 18, 2004;  http://www.rrstar.com/apps/pbcs.dll/section?Category=THEMES&theme=HOWARD%20CENTER .)

In the transformation in family life witnessed in the Western world over the last two hundred years, scholars  now confront something of stunning scope and gravity. Indeed, sociologist William J. Goode of Stanford  University believes that "changes in family and family law over the past two centuries" are of such  "importance and scale" as to "place it in a special category of historical inquiry, like the Islamic  expansion or the rise of Western science." Goode suspects that "we might have to go back as far as the  centuries preceding the Council of Trent to find a long-term social and legal process of comparable magnitude  in the West."

Goode explains that "the great engine" driving the transformation of the family has been "industrialization."  Industrialization has caused "the disintegration of the family," because it has changed society so that  "people gain their living from jobs, not land"; so that individuals are "hired and paid for competence or  merit" irrespective of social status or family connections; and so that "it is the individual who receives  the salary, not the family elders." Because industrialization has robbed modern families of their ability "to  protect their inept," industrialized nations have seen a marked reduction in their citizens'  "willingness...to make long-term investments in the collective of the family."

The changes that have reduced the number of people willing to commit strongly to the family have  simultaneously multiplied the number of laws enacted to try to deal with the social dynamics let loose by  familial erosion. Goode marvels at how "the sheer number of family laws and codes that have been created in  all parts of the world has increased (i.e., a larger number of them have been proclaimed or adopted per  year)." Also marvelous, from his perspective, is the way "people almost everywhere have come to expect that  the government and thus the new laws must try to solve an expanding array of problems that are related to the  family, from welfare to gender equality." Citizens in industrialized countries now see "laws cover[ing] more  types of behavior, partly because new types of behavior have arisen and partly because people increasingly  believe that laws might be used to solve problems."

Though some commentators respond to the decline of the family and the explosion in laws with optimism, Goode  warns that "if present family trends continue, other social institutions will function less well." Indeed, he  argues that if families fail to perform their traditional roles, "a society cannot go on functioning  well...and hence the disintegration of the family is a threat to social cohesion itself."

Goode concedes that "it is difficult to see any present social trends that might reverse the direction of the  changes" in family life in the industrialized countries. "Nevertheless," he asserts, "I still believe, as one  might about any organic curve, that somehow humankind will slow or stop some of those trends."

Much may depend on the reversal Goode hopes for.