Behind the closed doors and properly trimmed hedges of suburbia, America’s standard family is disappearing.

It’s true that families have evolved over time. Goodbye, stuffy arranged marriages. Hello, romance and children born out of wedlock. We can thank the enlightenment for that. And watch out for divorce; the United States seems more like the un-United States, as the divorce rate in America is greater than any other country in the world, according to nationmaster.com.

As if divorce wasn’t enough, according to washingtontimes.com fifteen million U.S. children, or 1 in 3, live without a father present. That leaves a lot of single mothers, of which 42 percent are on food stamps, according to theeconomiccollapseblog.com. While the concentration of single parent households is greater in cities, rural Harford county isn’t that far away from Baltimore, where only 38% of families have two parents.

America has to be afraid, at least a little, when one of strongest bonds among people seems all too easily broken. They must cringe a little when the young brides on TLC care more about the dress than the person waiting for them at the end of the aisle. And, they have to be concerned about the children who won’t ever feel like they really have a home where they belong.

There are approximately 1.7 million homeless teens in the U.S, according to dosomething.org. What’s worse is that over 50 percent of young people in shelters and on the streets report that their parents told them to leave or knew they were leaving and didn’t care.

It seems, perhaps, that the greatest factor in the crumbling of America’s families lies in the lack of love. A ring isn’t just a number of carats, a child isn’t something parents can ignore, and a home isn’t just the place where people sleep at night. That’s a house.

How people define “family” varies. Not every family is going to have two parents; not every family is going to have parents who are together forever; and not every family is going to be able to have enough income to support a stable home.
Hopefully despite all of the instability America’s families can find a way to pull together, before they crumble and become a way of the past.