There is no such thing as a traditional family pattern! How can there be traditional family value?
There are family patterns that have lasted a long time, but the ideal that is put forward Male Dominated, Female as Housekeeper children bearing the father's name, is a concept of the family that is less than four thousand years old and took root only among a minority of the worlds population.
More ancient than Patriarchy, there prevailed a more egalitarian form of family, some in which lineage was traced through the women, but all in which both men and women were equal in law and practice.
In English speaking colonial America, the male owned all property,and marriages were arranged by men, to facilitate property arrangements. That was a "traditional" family, for the male property holding European settlers in North America. The European who settled in North American brought their family pattern with them, but on this continent with lots of land to steal, and so the children were not as dependent on inheritance for land.
In the decades prior to the American Revolution, a radical change in family relations began to emerge. We see it in the church records of marriage and baptism. In Concord, Massachusetts in decade of the 1760s, more than half of the first born children baptized at the church, were born less than seven months after their parents were married! The diaries also indicate considerable concern, anxiety, "what is going on with the children, they are so defiant." Unlike their parents, they were choosing who they would marry, and defying the arrangements made between patriarchs.
With two generations beginning in New England, the old Patriarchal arranged marriage system collapsed in America, and a family formed on the basis romantic love and self initiated courtship emerged.
In the 1840s we begin to see another big change in the family, men going off to work.....for millennia in Europe and Asia, the patriarchal household had been the center of economic work. Silversmiths for example worked in their shops and their residence was attached. Bankers had offices in their residences, as did lawyers. Pastors lived in pastorates, next to the church. Farmers lived in a farm house on the farm, or walked out to their plot from a nearby village.
In the 1840s that pattern broke down, and males began to spend hours away from the residence, in offices, in shops, in factories and middle class women ecame the de facto head of the household, and child rearing The resident patriarch that had been the basis of the European traditional marriage was no longer resident.
The new division of roles for men and women began to become articulated. women as nurturers, men as bread winners. We do not find those ideas before, most women worked in their husbands trade in the centuries before, men had supervised children.
In the twentieth century a new pattern emerged, becoming significant in the middle decades of that century. We see middle class women going off to work, women pursuing careers children being cared for in the day time by institutions and service providers. Again a new pattern, a new way of being family.
I have not surveyed the change in Native American family patterns, the change in African American family patterns, or the changes in the family patterns of Europeans who became industrial workers. Each of these are significantly different from what was considered to be ideal by the dominant groups in American society both in the past and in the present. I have only surveyed the changes in what was considered "ideal" by the white people of property.
But even with those limitations, I believe we can see from this very brief trot through the family history that family patterns change, family dynamics change. There is no one way of being family in the United States today, no singular way of being family that is embraced by a majority, and none of the many ways of being family we see in the United States have sufficient antiquity to claim to be the traditional American family.
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