One of the major causes of the prevalent anxiety about the future of the family is rooted not so much in actuality as in the tension between idealized expectations for the family in American culture and the reality itself. Nostalgia for a lost nonexistent family tradition has prejudiced our understanding of the changes that families are experiencing in contemporary society. Furthermore, the current anxiety over the family’s fate reflects not merely problems in the family itself, but a variety of other social problems that are ually projected on the family. The real problems that the American family is facing today are not symptoms of breakdown, as is often suggested. Rather they reflect the difficulties that the family faces in its adaptation to recent social changes, particularly in the loss of the flexibility in household membership that the family had in the past, the reduction of the variety of its functions, and to some extent the weakening of its adaptability.
Current anxieties also reflect the difficulties that American society has been experiencing in accepting a great diversity in family life and alternative family forms. The idealization of the family as a refuge from the outside world has lessened its ability to cope with diversity. The continuous emphasis on the family as a universal private retreat and as an emotional haven (安息所) is misguided in light of our knowledge of the past. Early American families fulfilled a broad array of functions that went beyond its more restricted emotional functions in the present. Most of the family’s roles in the past were intertwined with larger community. Rather than being the custodian (管理人) of privacy, the family prepared its members for interaction with the larger society. Family relationships were valued not merely for their emotional content but for a wide range of services and contributions to the collective family unit. According to the author, one of people’s misunderstandings of family is that ______.