Redrawing the Family Debate - NYTimes.com NEW YORK - When the television series "Mad Men" debuted in 2007, virtually everyone it portrayed was steadily (if not thrillingly) married, children tended to grow up with their fathers, women kept to their place, and nobody was known to be gay. And then, over eight plot years, the future happens. Women rise and seek equality. Marriages are fled more easily. Children start to grow up without fathers. Grandparents step in to help single mothers. Gay people peek out of the closet, and some straights seem unfazed. Marriage and childbearing are delayed for careers. Couples cooperate in child rearing without marrying. Double-income households let children slip through the cracks. For a fictional series set half a century ago, "Mad Men" does a remarkable job of reflecting America's present-day struggles with changing family patterns. It takes care to show how progress and decay walk arm in arm, how good change can sour into bad. Alas, this nuance and complexity are virtually absent from the nonfiction realm of the national political conversation. In a period of stunning change in the structures of family life, America isn't having an honest, broad-based discussion about how to cope. In part, that's because same-sex marriage has consumed so much of the oxygen surrounding the issue. With the Supreme Court this past week giving a pair of victories to proponents of such marriage, it may be time to have the rest of the discussion. Of course, the conversation has also been limited because of polarization. Whether on Capitol Hill in Washington or at dinner tables from coast to coast or in the blogosphere, Americans are bitterly divided over how to talk about the changing family. Discussions on the right typically narrate a nostalgic story centered on the collapse of marriage. It used to be strong and stable, the story goes; now it's threatened by gays, premarital sex, careerism, divorce, absent fatherhood and a too-permissive culture. This worldview tends to see other social problems - like crime and the drug war - as inevitable byproducts of weak families. "Communities, neighbors, states and nations bear large costs at the collective levels when families break down," W. Bradford Wilcox, director of the National Marriage Project at the University of Virginia, has said. Evidence suggests to us that intact, biological marriage is still the gold standard. Discussions on the left tend to be haunted by history. For too long, the story goes, state power has been used to sanction one type of family life, at the expense of all those who failed to conform to that standard: gays, minorities, the childless, divorcés. Far better, the logic goes, to leave people to make their own choices and provide government support so that families are luxuries, not economic necessities. Where the fraying family is discussed, it tends to be presented as a consequence of other social problems - like unemployment and mass incarceration - rather than a cause. "Surely a country that claims compassion and democracy as core values should reject as inadequate and misleading the marriage and fatherhood formula as a response to poverty," said a report published in 2008 by the liberal groups Political Research Associates and the Women of Color Resource Center. True compassion and democracy would respect the right of low-income women to make their own decisions and provide proven pathways out of poverty as the first line of assistance. Starkly opposed positions may be good for think-tank fund-raising, but they do not a good society make. Is there a middle ground between doing too much and doing nothing? Between family conformity and family dissolution? Between nostalgia for a perfect family that's never coming back (and may never have existed) and a refusal of the idea that life is easier when you're not alone? That middle ground may be found by thinking of the family as, in effect, a huddle: a way of sharing risk and joy, having others to lean on when life makes it hard to stand. It will be hard for the extremists to swallow, but it may be possible to argue, in the very same breath, that the huddles people form are inevitably growing ever more diverse; and that huddling makes life easier than not. "Is "the family" a barbaric, premodern holdover institution, perpetuating irrational relations and inherited forms of inequality?" Philip N. Cohen, a University of Maryland sociologist who studies the institution, writes on his blog. "Or is it a "haven in a heartless world,"" he asks, "one of the few places where people still have any loyalty to anyone but themselves? If that is so, it is worth continuing to argue, as we have been, about the appropriate forms, legally and otherwise, of huddle. But the more urgent discussion may be about the unhuddled. Gay or straight, old or young, a staggering number of Americans live isolated today. They struggle to make reliable commitments and to have reliable commitments made to them. They create children they cannot raise. They grow up with too few hours of devoted parenting. They live alone, one doctor's bill from ruin. Everyone has their preferred culprit: welfare, bad schools, tax policy, drug laws, hip-hop, the vaporization of manufacturing jobs. Perhaps all these things are involved. But if the national dialogue continues to dwell on what forms of huddling should be legal, it risks missing the forest for the trees - leaving behind the millions whose problem is having no one with whom to huddle.