Yeah... he's wrong.
I'll pick out a few of his wrong-ideas:
During this period, a certain family ideal became engraved in our minds: a married couple with 2.5 kids.
Throughout the 70s, the ideal family had 4 or more children. It was only once we got to the 90s that people thought 2.5 was right.
For one thing, most women were relegated to the home. Many corporations, well into the mid-20th century, barred married women from employment: Companies would hire single women, but if those women got married, they would have to quit. Demeaning and disempowering treatment of women was rampant. Women spent enormous numbers of hours trapped inside the home under the headship of their husband, raising children.
Uh-huh. And would you say women are happier, on average, now? (I'll give you a hint, the answer is a resounding no.)
For another thing, nuclear families in this era were much more connected to other nuclear families than they are today—constituting a “modified extended family,” as the sociologist Eugene Litwak calls it, “a coalition of nuclear families in a state of mutual dependence.” Even as late as the 1950s, before television and air-conditioning had fully caught on, people continued to live on one another’s front porches and were part of one another’s lives. Friends felt free to discipline one another’s children.
Oh look! It's an issue with DISCONNECTED people, NOT the nuclear family. But if he'd have made that argument, he'd not got to pretend the family is the problem.
Eli Finkel, a psychologist and marriage scholar at Northwestern University, has argued that since the 1960s, the dominant family culture has been the “self-expressive marriage.” “Americans,” he has written, “now look to marriage increasingly for self-discovery, self-esteem and personal growth.” Marriage, according to the sociologists Kathryn Edin and Maria Kefalas, “is no longer primarily about childbearing and childrearing. Now marriage is primarily about adult fulfillment.”
Yeah, that's a problem with the FAMILY, oh yeah.
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I'm not going to fisk the whole article, but he catalogues a huge number of SOCIETAL issues that have attacked the family and claimed it shows how the "nuclear family" is a failure.
Ok, one more, I loved this one:
But these conditions did not last. The constellation of forces that had briefly shored up the nuclear family began to fall away, and the sheltered family of the 1950s was supplanted by the stressed family of every decade since. Some of the strains were economic. Starting in the mid-’70s, young men’s wages declined, putting pressure on working-class families in particular. The major strains were cultural. Society became more individualistic and more self-oriented. People put greater value on privacy and autonomy. A rising feminist movement helped endow women with greater freedom to live and work as they chose.
Hmm.... Soooo.... we increased by almost DOUBLE the number of young people available for the workforce and we saw young men's wages decline, significantly.
WOW, that's just a head-scratcher on how that could have happened.
Seems to me we have a big problem in how society views and supports the family AND how we encourage people to think of themselves first, their children... well, probably second, but way farther away, and their spouse, if they feel like they love them right now.
THEN we also tell people, (as Mr. Brooks cohort Kevin Williamson gleefully has written) to just let their awful little towns die and just move somewhere else. Leaving behind all the family structure and built up social capital.
Seems we have an issue with valuing the family, not an issue with the nature of the family.
