ST. PAUL PIONEER PRESS

HEADLINE: SHRINKING OF EXTENDED-FAMILY HOUSEHOLDS ADDS ANOTHER WRINKLE TO SOCIAL WOES\ Wednesday, February 23, 1994 Section: Editorial Edition: Metro Final Page: 8A BYLINE: D.J. Tice, Editorial Writer Memo: First of two parts\ TEXT: I grew up in an extended family household, and until recently I never gave it much thought. My great-great Aunt Lena was just always there. Her presence in our home seemed as natural and unremarkable as my own. But I've been thinking of Lena lately with a fresh appreciation, inspired by new research suggesting that my family was one of the last of a vanishing breed.

``In the 20th century,'' says University of Minnesota historian Steven Ruggles, ``the multigenerational family has virtually disappeared.'' This ``radical transformation of residential preferences,'' he adds in a new paper, is another sign that ``in every sphere of family life, there has been a loosening of bonds of obligation among kin.'' In the past several years, America has been stricken with a rare epidemic of common sense, leading to a surprising degree of consensus that the breakdown of family is a genuine phenomenon in our society, and a genuine disaster for many children. Yet family decline is almost always discussed solely in terms of the rapid recent increase in single-parent homes. Ruggles' research reveals an even more comprehensive collapse of family as the basic organizing principle of society, the social body's core connective tissue. He describes an essentially complete transformation in the nature of growing old in America. That transformation, tragic for some elderly, clearly seems desirable to others. But it has, without doubt, all but extinguished the role older Americans once played in society, and not least in the lives of children. My great-great Aunt Lena, an archetypal family spinster, filled an enormous, loving role in the lives of three generations. Over more than half a century, she lived with my grandmother and then my mother when they were girls, and moved in with my parents shortly after my eldest brother was born. She stayed with us until she died, when I was 19 and Lena was not quite 90. As near as I can tell, Lena spoiled all three generations shamefully. She served as a slightly mutinous assistant mother - slipping us kids bonus spending money on the sly, occasionally covering up our misdeeds and doing our chores. Children were literally her whole life, her best friends. Her lasting gift was a bonus allowance of unconditional love. Such lives as Lena's, and such childhoods as mine, are almost entirely artifacts of the past, according to Ruggles. Using newly available census data, he has shown that, in 1880, roughly 20 percent of all white households in America were extended family households, usually containing grandparents. That figure had fallen below 7 percent by 1980, and has surely declined farther since. What's more, Ruggles says such figures have long been misinterpreted. Many scholars have assumed that because extended households were always a small minority of total households, this proves that the independent nuclear family was always the preferred living arrangement, and that little, in fact, has changed. Ruggles says this is wrong, for the simple reason that a century ago, people had more children and died younger than they do today. Since elderly people can live with only one of their children, and can't live with any once they're dead, society a century ago couldn't possibly contain a large proportion of extended households. But, unlike today's society, America used to have nearly the maximum possible number of multigenerational households. By studying living arrangements from the elderly's point of view, Ruggles says, we see the true scale of the change. In 1880, 75 percent of all white elderly, including elderly couples, lived with relatives. By 1980, barely 23 percent lived with relatives. And figures from 1992 suggest the proportion may now have fallen as low as 11 percent. For women like Lena, especially, life has grown more solitary. In 1880, among widowed or unmarried elderly white women, fewer than one in 50 lived alone. By 1980, two out of three of them lived alone. Interestingly, the extended family household has not vanished so rapidly and completely among minorities. But Ruggles says the declining pattern is the same. In 1880, 70 percent of nonwhite elderly lived with younger relatives. The figure was 43 percent (and no doubt falling) by 1980. This casts doubt on the argument that stronger extended families among blacks should put our minds at rest about the very high rates of single motherhood among African Americans. Today, Ruggles reports, single black mothers are less than half as likely to live in an extended household as they were in 1940. Still, it's true that if blacks are ahead of whites in the loss of two-parent families, whites are well ahead of blacks in dismantling the extended household. And in both cases, both races are headed hell-bent in the same unnerving direction - toward increasing isolation, of the old, of parents and of kids. Next week: Causes, benefits and costs of the extended household's demise.

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