All Our Families

All Our Families, a project of the Berkeley Forum on the Family, takes a hard look at contemporary families and family structure. The book challenges the conventional wisdom that the American family is disintegrating. Its essays argue that comparing today's family to an imagined typical family of the past - stable, middle class, working father, stay-at-home mother, is dishonest and wrongheaded. Most American families are not, and never were, like that. In contrast, All Our Families considers seriously all of today's types of families, not just the "ideal" ones or the "failures". For the second edition, all essays have been revised and updated, and two new essays - one on immigrated families and one on ambiguous-father families - have been added.