Industrialization and the Family

As we close the Second Christian Millennium, this natural family is disappearing as a culturally significant presence in most of the Western world. Declining rates of first marriage, soaring divorce, low levels of births within marriages, mounting illegitimacy, rampant promiscuity, cohabitation, and abortion, and the sexualization of popular culture: These developments have been especially pronounced in the very nations where the triumph of industry has been most complete.

- Allan C. Carlson, in Toward a Family-Centered Economy