Finding Home: Changing Families, a Changing Planet, and Impacts on Young Children

Home can be many things: a place, a feeling and, often, a group of people. Whatever form it takes, a supportive home provides a sense of stability, belonging, and identity, all of which contribute to healthy development for young children. Young children’s connections to other people and to their hometowns, states, and countries are in flux due to shifting family structures and climate change. While it is clear that these shifts will affect young children, their exact outcomes and implications remain uncertain. However, exploring uncertainty can illuminate possibilities and insights that can help anyone who hopes to create flourishing futures for young children and families set a path forward, no matter which future comes to pass.

Family Configurations: What’s Changing, What’s Clear, What’s Uncertain

Family configurations in the United States have been shifting away from the so-called traditional nuclear family configuration since 1960. Some of those trends continue today, and some signals of change – early indicators that suggest glimpses of what might be to come – illustrate other ways American families are in flux.

What’s Changing

The nuclear family has a strong hold on the collective imagination in the United States. However, households with two married parents living together with their children make up less than 20% of all U.S. households, down from 40% in 1970. Part of this change has been related to the ways people approach marriage and childbearing. Marriage rates among middle-class and low-income people have been decreasing. Fewer adults over the age of 18 live in a household with a spouse than in past decades, while more live with an unmarried partner, live alone, or live with their own parents. The number of births in the United States is decreasing across racial and ethnic lines.

“Households with two married parents living together with their children make up less than 20% of all U.S. households, down from 40% in 1970.”

But even families that do include children are configured in a wide variety of ways. Thirty-eight percent of Black children and 62% of Hispanic children live with two married parents, compared to 76% of white children. Single-parent families have been on the rise for decades (though the numbers have stayed mostly steady since 2010) as have the number of children being raised by grandparents. The number of children living with two unmarried parents has increased since 2007, the first year the Census Bureau even recognized unmarried, two-parent households as a category. More than half of those children are age five or younger. Hispanic children are the most likely to live with two unmarried parents, while white and Black children have similar rates of living with unmarried parents. Most LGBTQ millennials plan to have children for the first time or have more children in the future, indicating a likely increase in the number of children with LGBTQ parents.

These family configurations reflect a continuation of several long-running trends. Other signals of change can indicate potential shifts in the ways people are forming families and might continue to do so in the future. Household size and multi-generational living have begun increasing after decades of decline. Those increases are not entirely unexpected, as the U.S. continues to diversify, and Asian, Black, and Hispanic families are more likely than White families to have multiple generations under one roof. The COVID-19 pandemic and the increasing cost of housing have added additional incentives for more families to explore that kind of living arrangement. Some multi-generational households formed in direct response to the COVID-19 pandemic, and many of those families intend to maintain those arrangements.

Other emerging examples of non-traditional family formation include platonic parenting – raising children not with a spouse or romantic partner, but with a friend – and three-parent families. Even families that follow relatively traditional configurations have been developing different conceptions of themselves, increasingly eschewing words such as “husband” and “wife” for “partner” or engaging in new takes on age-old practices of communal living and collective child-rearing.

“Other emerging examples of non-traditional family formation include platonic parenting – raising children not with a spouse or romantic partner, but with a friend – and three-parent families.”

Some of these shifts come out of necessity. Marriage and nuclear family configurations are most accessible and sustainable to those with the most resources and privilege. Other shifts come out of choice, as people forge new ways of creating connection and home.

What’s Clear: Broader Views and Experiences of Family

Family configurations will continue to shift and diversify, and many children growing up today will hold a broader view of family norms than older generations did. They will be more likely than their parents, and significantly more likely than their grandparents, to personally know many different types of families, to see them represented in popular culture, and to find them increasingly included in schools and other institutions. Even as community segregation by race, class, and political views – sometimes as a result of structures and policies and sometimes as a result of self-selection – limits some children’s firsthand exposure to a broad range of family types, the concept of a “normal” family will continue to diversify for today’s youngest generation. How family configurations affect children’s outcomes has been the topic of a great deal of research, and further exploration of this topic is likely to continue. The question is unlikely to be entirely resolved, nor would any new findings outweigh the myriad reasons people find themselves forming families in diverse ways.

What’s Uncertain: Independent or Interdependent Families?

People are clearly forming families in a range of ways, but whether and how the concept of families might evolve remains uncertain. Though family configurations are shifting, many families – whether multigenerational or headed by same-sex partners, unmarried partners, or a single parent, to name a few forms – still operate as an independent family unit, reflecting the American value of individualism. However, people in all types of families are pushing against the narrative that a family should be a fully independent entity and are looking to create more interdependent networks. In the future, will the independent nuclear family still be held as a cultural ideal or might a more interdependent approach to family formation take hold?

Signals of a Future of Independent Families

“The independent, nuclear family unit holds a unique place in the American imagination that may never be dislodged, no matter how many ways families change.”

When the Supreme Court legalized same-sex marriage, some people who lauded the decision also expressed discomfort. The decision revered marriage as the “most profound” union, and debate continued as to whether folding LGBTQ+ relationships into an institution that had been weaponized against them was a route to true liberation. Many members of that community had found new ways of being together through chosen families and networks of support, and some lamented the replacement of that ideal with one that had not been made for them. This example demonstrates that even as new types of family configurations have emerged, the underlying beliefs about what makes a family have remained strong. These beliefs are woven into the tax code and neighborhood designs, among many other systems and structures. The ideal of the independent nuclear family is also a powerful tool for maintaining existing social hierarchies and power structures. If low-income families, families of color, or immigrant families are configured in ways outside that stated norm – either because that norm is inaccessible or undesirable to them – then they can be perceived and treated as inferior and more easily marginalized. More recently, when families were offered guidance on where to draw their boundaries to keep people safe during the pandemic, much of the advice assumed more traditional configurations that only involved parent caregivers and a single household. The independent, nuclear family unit holds a unique place in the American imagination that may never be dislodged, no matter how many ways families change.

Signals of a Future of Interdependent Families

The nuclear family is a relatively recent invention, so its future as a cultural norm is not a given, and questions about the viability of the independent family unit have arisen. The effects of the pandemic – the isolation and stress of juggling work, parenting, and education while being vigilant about health – demonstrated once and for all that no family can sustainably function without help from supportive people and responsive institutions. The deep cultural myths of self-sufficiency and hard work as the primary variables determining success and failure were shown to be false: even very privileged people struggled to do it all alone, and those who had already been marginalized experienced even deeper levels of difficulty despite often serving as “essential” members of society. In addition, a national reckoning with the racism and harms perpetuated by white supremacy have brought to the forefront the ways in which systems of the state such as law enforcement, immigration, education, housing, and child welfare can destabilize low-income families and families of color and go on to punish those same families for the effects of that instability.

As such, more people have been seeking more interdependent ways of life. For example, interest in mutual aid networks has soared, and even some relatively traditional nuclear families are engaging in more connected ways of living. And private industries and government systems are taking notice. Caregivers beyond parents are being increasingly recognized and supported. Though an interdependent way of life is in fact more common throughout history and in many communities and cultures, its resurgence and emergent role in the mainstream narrative illustrates the possibility for this idea of family life to take stronger hold.

Possibilities for the Future

In the future, children will live in and among many types of families. But the ways in which these shifts will affect how children understand the bounds of family, form relationships with adults within and beyond their families, and go on to eventually form their own families have yet to be seen.

Climate: What’s Changing, What’s Clear, What’s Uncertain

Climate change is not a future threat; it is a reality that is already affecting young children and families. However, they will feel more intense and different kinds of effects as the planet continues to warm and as the impacts of certain climate actions – or inactions – take hold.

What’s Changing

Climate change and the resulting destruction will undeniably shape the futures of today’s children and those yet to be born. UNICEF reports that nearly every child has experienced or is at risk of experiencing a climate-related hazard – extreme weather, air pollution, and breakdowns of food or water supply systems are only a few examples – and that one-third of all children globally face four or more climate-related hazards. In the United States, the most climate-vulnerable region, the South, saw the largest growth in its under-18 population and has the highest proportion of young people of any region. It is also home to more than half of the nation’s Black population. We can assume that many children will face the consequences of continued climate inaction while they are still young, and that, for many children, these consequences will exacerbate the negative effects of systemic racism and other forms of marginalization.

“We can assume that many children will face the consequences of continued climate inaction while they are still young, and that, for many children, these consequences will exacerbate the negative effects of systemic racism and other forms of marginalization.”

One of the most drastic consequences of climate change, displacement, is being experienced by more and more children and families. In 2020 alone, 30 million people around the world were displaced due to climate-related disasters, and nearly 10 million of them were children. In comparison, 11 million people were forced from their homes due to the effects of climate change in 2015. Sea-level rise alone could put more than 13 million U.S. residents at risk of displacement by the end of the century. Looking to other forms of displacement to understand how people might experience life after relocating somewhere new, communities that accept refugees or other displaced people often do not have the structures in place to support them properly. People forced to leave their homes can struggle to meet their basic needs, and the trauma caused by displacement and its aftereffects can undermine physical, emotional, and mental health. Communities of color and people who are poor, non-English speaking, or who make their living in a way that depends on natural resources are most vulnerable to environmental threats. Often they have been systemically locked out of the opportunity to build up financial and social resources to face those threats.

Many cities, counties, and states have climate action plans. But many lack attention to climate-related migration, relocation, and the important-but-often-overlooked need to support displaced people’s connection to their culture and heritage. At the same time, some communities in particularly climate-vulnerable locations have been taking proactive steps and receiving support to relocate in a way that keeps their bonds intact and preserves what they can of their cultures. In 2016, Isle de Jean Charles made headlines for receiving $48 million in federal funding to support the community’s relocation to mainland Louisiana, the first example of the U.S. government supporting an effort to address climate displacement proactively.

What’s Clear: More Instability for Children

Children will continue to experience disruptions in their daily lives, and the life trajectories of many of them will be forever altered by the effects of climate change. Children need stable environments for healthy development and thriving. The negative effects associated with the trauma of natural disasters are clear, and the future will hold more of these types of events that will too often intersect with other challenges that already-marginalized yet resilient young children and families face.

What’s Uncertain: Severed or Preserved Ties to Place and Culture?

“Because children’s relationships to place and cultural identity contribute meaningfully to their development of a sense of self, dislocation could have dire consequences for identity formation.”

Climate-related instability will continue to increase, but how it will shape young children’s relationships to place and culture are uncertain. Because children’s relationships to place and cultural identity contribute meaningfully to their development of a sense of self, dislocation could have dire consequences for identity formation. However, awareness of the coming threats is leading some people to invest more deeply in the places they live, even as those places face increasing risk. In the future, will climate change cut children and families off from their connections to home and heritage or might it prompt deeper relationships with culture and tradition?

Signals for a Future of Severed Ties to Place and Culture

Displacement often happens suddenly when people are caught off guard by climate-related disruptions such as extreme weather events or wildfires. In these situations, people may be unable or unwilling to return to a place where they have had personal and cultural ties. In addition, meaningful features of the place, whether physical or relationship-based, may be lost forever.

“New Orleans, a city known world over for its dynamic culture lost many of the elders who held the culture and many of the young people who had been set to inherit it.”

For example, Hurricane Katrina forced more than half of the 485,000 people who lived in New Orleans to leave the city either temporarily or permanently. In 2015, a University of Houston professor noted that the least likely groups to return had been older residents and families with young children. In other words, a city known world over for its dynamic culture lost many of the elders who held the culture and many of the young people who had been set to inherit it. And white residents were more likely than Black residents to return to New Orleans in the immediate aftermath of the hurricane, highlighting racial disparities in who can maintain connection to their homes. More starkly, the 2018 Camp Fire nearly wiped out the town of Paradise, CA. It had once been home to 26,000 people; as of 2019, only 3,000 people lived there. Furthermore, nearly 20 percent of California’s iconic giant Sequoia trees were lost to fire in slightly more than one year.

Even when cities and towns aim to preserve elements of their cultures and to relocate in a relatively coordinated and connected way, the logistical, political, and personal challenges can be immense. Hulhumalé, an artificial island built six-and-a-half feet above sea level in The Maldives, is a physical refuge for people whose island homes are at risk from sea level rise and a success story of intentional and future-oriented planning. However, people who have relocated from other islands now live primarily in high rises and aspects of island life have been lost.  As more and more children and families are displaced due to climate change, fewer and fewer people will be able to form and maintain strong bonds with the places they are from, particularly people who have been denied the financial and social resources needed to support those bonds.

Signals for a Future of Preserved Ties to Place and Culture

At the same time, many places that are vulnerable to climate-related disasters and disruptions know what is at risk and what might be lost. They are working not only to protect their homes and towns through new infrastructure and technology but also to strengthen their communities’ bonds with their place and cultures. For example, a citizen science project in Scotland is engaging people in documenting changes to coastal heritage sites and reflecting on those sites’ cultural meanings. The project is creating new knowledge and understanding of the risks to, and opportunities for, the preservation of those sites while inviting community members to interact with those meaningful places. And Gullah/Geechee Nation, approximately 1 million people who descended from enslaved Africans and have lived on coastal land that stretches from North Carolina to Florida for centuries are working to preserve their history and heritage, including from climate change. The Chieftess of Gullah/Geechee Nation is active in climate advocacy, and other members are advocating for policies that will help Gullah/Geechee people who live in more urban areas prepare for the effects of climate change. More broadly, efforts and organizations that work on issues related to climate displacement are becoming increasingly attentive to the importance of displaced people’s continued relationships with their cultures and heritages in efforts to support healthy resettlement.

Possibilities for the Future

In the future, climate-related displacement and instability will touch many children’s lives. But the ways in which it shapes their connection to where they are from and who they are is still unfolding.

Finding Home: Four Futures

The future holds a wide range of possibilities regarding how interconnected families might be and how displacement might shape children’s connections to place and culture. These critical uncertainties intersect to create four scenarios for young children’s sense of home in the year 2040.

Described below, these four scenarios represent different futures for how young children might experience where they are from – and how those experiences might affect their development.

On My Own: Severed Ties/Independent Families

This is a future in which many families are displaced due to climate change. Many of their children only have vague memories of where they are from. It has become the norm for families to have diverse configurations, and immediate family bonds are revered and respected. However, the trauma of the displacement prevents many parents from sharing stories of their homes and cultures. It also puts a great deal of pressure on just a few relationships, leading some families to separate and dissolve. Children who do not fit in well with their families do not have many other close ties and are sometimes reluctant to build new connections out of fear of future displacement. Racial, cultural, and language hierarchies persist, and many communities of color have been fractured and their residents have dispersed. Many families of color find themselves living in predominantly white communities or communities that abide by white cultural norms. Displaced residents are expected to assimilate and grieving the loss of their homes and cultural connections is seen in many cases as ingratitude. Children growing up in this environment can struggle to form strong, authentic identities.

Recreating Our Story: Severed Ties/Interdependent Families

This is also a future in which many children and families have been displaced due to climate change. Many landmarks and official cultural records have been lost. However, people maintain their heritage, heal from traumatic separation from their homes, and find support through relationships. Practices and policies allow networks of care to proliferate – including multigenerational connections, caregiving and peer networks, and child-focused playgroups. With people from all over having been displaced, children and families are likely to live, learn, and work alongside people who have different traditions and ways of life than they do. This diversity leads to discord in some places where fear of others and of change has remained strong. In other places, it leads to robust and diverse chosen families, with displaced residents and residents of the receiving communities developing new bonds based on the mutual sharing of cultural traditions and oral histories. While some children struggle to find their footing in new places, webs of support that extend their sense of home beyond family boundaries buffer their challenges.

Out of Many, One: Preserved Ties/Independent Families

This is a future in which children and families have a strong sense of where they are from and a desire to return home after displacement. Before they had to leave, many communities spent time attending to what they might lose and developing multigenerational connections to the places they were from. New family configurations, based more on shared heritage than biological relation, emerged from these efforts, and those families go to great lengths to remain intact and close knit, sometimes to the point of becoming insular after displacement. Even communities that did not previously have a strong sense of identity developed one as they attempted to preserve what they could prior to relocating. Children were involved in these processes, and many of them have high levels of nostalgia for the places they are from and strong sense of individual and shared identity. Families are diverse in configuration and deeply connected to each other but all are struggling with their feelings of loss of home and do not always have the capacity to support their family members dealing with similar grief. They rely on one another and seek support where they can, but few resources for such support exist. Some receiving communities feel threatened by the displaced people’s strong sense of heritage and culture, leading to increased tension. As a result, many children learn to put themselves first. Many also end up developing a very personal sense of home.

Wealth of Connections: Preserved Ties/Interdependent Families

This is a future in which migrating families have strong connections to the places they are from as the result of intentional effort at preservation. They bring their cultural pride and traditions to their new homes. They also bring their grief of having to leave. Some communities prepared themselves to become the new homes of climate migrants and worked to develop a culture of solidarity. Cross-cultural family formation becomes common. Children become adept at navigating culturally complex environments, which is an asset but also requires codeswitching. Institutions sometimes struggle to keep up with the unique needs and desires of interconnected families with many diverse configurations, reverting to old assumptions and harmful norms that exclude or marginalize some children and families. Sometimes the pendulum swings back toward more insular groups, when old fears from receiving communities are re-stoked, or when the desire to retain the spirit of the homes left behind leads people to seek out others like themselves. Despite these challenges, children grow up with high levels of self-awareness and empathy and confidence in who they are.

Reflecting on the Scenarios

These scenarios represent possible lived experiences of children and their families. The work at hand today is for stakeholders to understand which aspects of these experiences they hope to enable and which they hope to prevent. Then they can set out to create new systems and new cultures that can support the flourishing of young children and families, no matter which future comes to pass.

Support Children’s Connections to People and Place

“The work at hand today is for stakeholders to understand which aspects of these experiences they hope to enable and which they hope to prevent.”

When young people feel grounded in their relationships, their homes, and their sense of self, they are relatively well positioned to weather trauma and difficulty. While we should aim to prevent that trauma whenever possible, many children will experience climate-related disasters and disruption. Being able to draw upon robust networks of people within and beyond their families and develop a strong sense of identity that is tied in some ways to where they are from can only help. Knowing that many children will face displacement that may take away their homes or the people they love, our society also needs to be prepared to support them in processing and recovering from loss regardless of their family structure.

Build Cultures of Solidarity and Social Cohesion

“People who care about the flourishing of young children and their families must work urgently to address underlying fears, mindsets, and structures that other anyone outside a place’s dominant culture.”

In any scenario, people will be moving into and out of a wide range of places. They will need strong connections to other people and to networks of support, and they may be leaving those behind in some cases. In the current state of polarization and division, the onus is almost always on the people who have the least power and resources to gain acceptance into a new community. But people in receiving communities, along with societal systems, have the opportunity to find ways of supporting newcomers and the greater health of the community. People who care about the flourishing of young children and their families must work urgently to address underlying fears, mindsets, and structures that other anyone outside a place’s dominant culture.

Create Adaptable Systems of Support

Different types of families moving to new places will have unique needs, and no current system or institution is equipped to meet those. And if efforts to support climate migrants’ ties to their homes and heritages are successful, systems of support will also need to account for a wide range of cultural practices and expectations. Too often, policies and public institutions are driven by assumptions about an “average” family. In the case of widespread displacement of many different types of families, such an approach would lead many young children and their families to be poorly served, particularly those that are starting from marginalized positions in society. Leaders and policymakers must find new ways to create solutions, using strategies such as human-centered design and targeted universalism, for example, that aim to create universal flourishing through focused approaches.

Taking It Forward

In the future, children will need to be able to find a home in new neighborhoods and alongside a variety of people. They also need leaders willing to anticipate the realities in which they will live and courageously create the conditions that will help them flourish.

About the author

Katie King, Director of Strategic Foresight Engagement, KnowledgeWorks

In her role, Katie manages externally facing strategic foresight projects and partnerships, co-designs and delivers workshops and contributes to KnowledgeWorks’ publications about the future of learning. Katie has previously served as a consulting futurist for various nonprofit organizations and taught middle school English in Texas and California.

Katie holds a bachelor’s in journalism from the University of Southern California and a master’s in foresight from the University of Houston. She is a member of the Association of Professional Futurists and co-author of The Futures Thinking Playbook.

The policy recommendations and views expressed in this essay are those of the author and not necessarily the views of the organization, staff, Board of Directors, funders, or other stakeholders.

In the spirit of creativity and the free exploration of ideas, Capita commissions products from diverse viewpoints exploring how the great social and cultural transformations of our day affect young children, and to foster new ideas to ensure a future in which all children and families flourish. The products we commission are intended to contribute to a public dialogue and foster debate about securing a future in which all children and families flourish.