American Families Past and Present: Social Perspectives on TransformationsAmerican families today are noted for their wide variety of guises. Among the mix are single parent families, childless by choice marriages, nuclear families, multigenerational families, and same sex couples. Although this diversity has come under the scrutiny of everyone from politicians to the media, family diversity is not a recent development of contemporary culture. While nuclear families with a mother, a father, and children are the presumed