The number of marriages and cohabiting relationships that do not progress to childrearing has undermined society's intent that domestic couples should have special benefits because they are rearing children. To further complicate matters, nonmarital childrearing families have become more visible and numerous, revealing that marriage is not essential for meeting the developmental needs of children and parents. The number of single-parent childrearing units in particular has increased dramatically. In the process, the developmental needs of children for both mothering and fathering has been obscured, as has been the importance of the relationship between a child's mother and father for both the children and the parents. Parenthood is a more appropriate basis for defining a family than are social and political definitions of the family based on competition for financial and resource benefits.
Parenthood focuses on the developmental needs of children and parents.
Top of Page Childrearing Parents susceptible to trends currently are foundering because they fail to recognize that childrearing requires both an authority line that permits parents to guide their children and mutual respect that permits children and parents to grow together. The linear model of parents as caregivers to children needs to be replaced by a more realistic paradigm in which parents and children are seen as interdependent with parents in charge of the childrearing family. Parental authority over children has been supplanted by the dispersion of authority among family members. In fact children today are under much greater stress than were children a generation ago, in part because the world is a more dangerous and complicated place in which to grow up, and in part because their needs for protection, nurturance, and guidance are being neglected. 2 Mutual authority is needed in matters of taste, preference, and style.