Today, family members support the family less because it is now much less necessary to their own successful economic survival. Men end up having strong economic incentive to bail out of family relations and responsibilities because they raise their own standards of living when they do so. Whether it is by fathering a family without being willing to be a father, by divorcing and being unwilling to pay alimony or child support or by being a guest worker from the Third World and after a short time failing to send payments to the family back home, men are opting out. Women get welfare only if no man is present in the home. Children's economic standards of living are often higher as wards of the state in foster care than they would be if they stayed in their disintegrating families.
Values follow economic realities.
Competitive individualism' grows at the expense of 'family solidarity'. The ideal is 'choice,' not 'bonds'. In the language of capitalism children have ceased to be profit centres' and have become 'cost centres'. The response quite naturally is to form fewer families and to have smaller numbers of children. When children do exist, parents spend less time with them -40 per cent less than they did 30 years ago.