My view:
1. The productive capacities of families have been transfered over time to non-familial organizations (from family farms to corporate agri-businesses, from family businesses to non-familial business corporations, from home-based teaching to professionally run schools, from the home-based care of children to out-of-home child care, and many other examples). This pattern has been documented thoroughly, and is a commonplace notion in introductory sociology courses. Professionalizing many family functions has created many benefits for men, women, and chilldren. However, the transference has gone too far.
2. As the productive capacities of families have been transfered beyond a healthy threshold, parenthood has been thinned, divorce rates have risen, out-of-wedlock births have become commonplace, and single parenthood has become the norm for many children.
3. On average, children's problems become more prevalent in divorced families, single-parent families, and in situations in which non-married couples cohabit. Among the problems that worsen are poverty rates, education failure, substance abuse, violence, and other maladies.
4. Being productive provides more control over one's life than being consumptive. Producing is more demanding than consuming, but also more empowering: it requires the integration of more tasks, more creativity, more planning, and more control of one's time and resources. For example, growing tomatoes in the garden doesn't only "take more time" than buying them at the store, it requires more planning, patience, tending to plants, watching the weather, pruning, and harvesting. It also affords more opportunity for social interactions with children than does shopping, i.e., teaching them about the environment, nutrients, bugs, soil quality, squirrels, and salsa recipes. Producing tomatoes is a thicker task than can buying tomatoes. Generally, productive roles are thicker than consumptive roles.
5. The historical trend from thicker, productive parent roles to thinner, consumptive roles has made spouses less dependent on each other, has drawn them into independent pursuits away from the family, and has thus rendered them less able to defend their family boundaries. As a consequence, all family ties, including marital ties, have diminished in intensity and in scope. Weaker ties between spouses and children lead to more unstable families.
6. Family-based community development addresses this root cause of the family's instability -- the transference of its productive capacities -- by creating productive family roles and institutions as part of the community development process.
