their own chance" (Coontz, Stephanie 58). Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, there was a gradual shrinking of the family in America from exten!
             ded to nuclear. In the 1970's through the present single parent households have become not only much more common, they have become an acceptable family structure. It used to be somewhat of a stigma if you were a child of a broken family, " Only slightly more than one in four marriages ended in divorce during the 1950s. Very few young people spend any extended period of time in a nonfamily setting" (Coontz 59). "Ninety percent of all the households in the country were families in the 1950s, in comparison with only 71% by 1990" (Coontz 60). With the loosening of America's so called moral standards from the late 1960s to the present, there have also been a greater acceptance of alternative families. The stigma placed on homosexual lifestyle's has relaxed somewhat introducing publicly same sex unions with adopted children. This is a new phenomenon, which is still under societies microscope to understand if there is an effect on these children's development. Before the civil rights!
             movement of the late 1950s and early 1960s, the occurrence of interracial marriages and mixed families was almost non existent. In America, today there is an ever-increasing amount of families of mixed racial backgrounds. Some might say this is the epitome of the melting pot of the United States. Another type of alternative family unit, which is reaching epidemic proportions, is that of an unwed mother and her illegitimate child or children. Charles Murray states in his essay " The Coming White Underclass" that " In 1991, 1.2 million children were born to unmarried mothers, within a hair of 30 percent of all live births. How high is 30 percent? About four percent points higher than the black illegitimacy
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