In the ceaseless and accelerating change of today familiar structures and relationships, mores and meanings, are breaking down. Thus in relation to family life, it is argued that we have reached a stage where the established behavioral patterns and values of the modern family no longer have widespread currency. People are no longer content, or even discontentedly willing, to follow established customs relating to marriage, conjugal role patterns, filial or parental mores or to confine themselves within the institutionalised frameworks of conventional nuclear or extended family obligations and residential continuities. Unmarried cohabitation, lone parenting, step relationships, dual income or single person households, enduring co-residential non-heterosexual relationships and parenting have all become familiar patterns of domestic life. Some have claimed that in America the nuclear family in which children are cared for by two parents in a protective and emotionally secure environment is no longer the norm and Cheal has argued that though “the family” is a term used in ordinary everyday speech to refer to ties which people believe involve enduring intimate relations, there is no universal form or pattern that these relationships or the beliefs about them adhere to. However the postmodernist argument goes further than this. Bernardes believes that “. . . family situations in contemporary society are so varied and diverse that it simply makes no sociological sense to speak of a single ideal-type model of ‘the family’ at all.” Scanzoni and his colleagues indeed regard the term “family” to be so infused with the values and emotions of ordinary people that for the purposes of scientific discussion they propose to dispense with the word altogether. Thus not only has it become increasingly difficult to identify one pattern as typical of family life today but it has, as a result, necessarily become increasingly difficult to talk about what is happening in an unambiguous and generally intelligible way.
