This article from the Imaginative Conservative is better than most full length books on the topic of the decay of the family. Here’s an excerpt:

Each generation thus accepts as normal what would have shocked their grandparents had it happened all at once: premarital sex, cohabitation, illegitimacy, divorce, same-sex marriage, daycare, fast-food dinners. Indeed, shocking the previous generation is part of the thrill of what might be said to amount to the institutionalization and politicization of filial rebellion.

Warnings about family decline will, to the extent that it involves “culture,” simply sound to the liberal and the young as “no big deal”: these are the perennial lamentations of the hopelessly old-fashioned—the old and conservative bemoaning the good old days. Things change: “Deal with it!”

But this kind of cultural development is not all that has become accepted as normal. Filial rebellion has a political dimension. Zimmerman describes destructive family policies enacted not only during the French and Russian revolutions, but also following the American. What might shock even the liberal and the young, yet today barely disturbs the conservative and the old, are destruction of constitutional protections and intrusive invasions of personal freedom and family privacy by the government’s ever-expanding family machinery. Here we see something highly consequential, but perhaps also more susceptible to redress than what is indicated by Wilson’s cultural despair, that is, the heavy hand of the state.

G. K. Chesterton once suggested that the family was the main check on state power and that weakening it would destroy freedom. Chesterton was writing about divorce, and here another critical difference emerges between today’s debates and the way the issue was framed by Dawson and Zimmerman and theorists they cite. While homosexuality, abortion, pornography, and other cultural issues on today’s family-values agenda do appear in their writings, they are not central. The recurring issue throughout Western history that seems to be the most direct cause of marriage and family breakdown is divorce.

Most Americans know from personal experience that the most direct and common threat to the family today is not the marriage of two homosexuals but divorce within families. Divorce now threatens most families and every society in the Western world. Not only is it multiplying single-parent homes among the affluent as welfare did among the poor; it now poses a serious threat to privacy, civil liberties, and constitutional government, as children are forcibly taken from their parents on a variety of divorce-related pretexts and parents who resist are taken away in handcuffs. Most people know someone whose children and private life have been placed under government supervision through divorce, very likely without the person’s consent. Yet even many who think of themselves as conservatives do not raise as a public issue this flagrant restriction of freedom.

This has a couple strong pressures on the behavior of both men and women, particularly in the propertied classes. Lower classes of men can just go ‘deadbeat’ — crossing state lines or just chronically under-earning — while the richer classes generally are less capable of evading the collectors. This can also happen to richer men, but there’s been less attention paid to the phenomenon.

For the women, because they can no longer rely on a man to uphold his part of the social contract, they’ll often be quite a lot more frantic about building up their careers to pick up for the deficit of men who want to be ‘providers.’ Because all educated men learn in college that being a bread-winner is sexist and immoral — and many of them believe it — they’ll tend to participate less vigorously in the labor force. This gets accentuated by the lack of women interested in being reliable, submissive, and pleasant wives.

Both sides of the gender divide in the middle class and better are mostly responding to incentives. Men want to avoid expropriation, and women work harder to provide themselves with the security that most men are unwilling to give freely anymore, lacking any sort of social security for that bond to be made.

Because the idea of the happy family has been roundly attacked by everyone in respectable society for a period of decades — instead encouraging a lifestyle focused around serving the state and the corporations that the state enables — the entire appeal of family life decays. Both become less attractive to the other, and the purpose of family life becomes muddled.

The left has attempted to float a new conception of marriage to the middle class called the ‘equal partnership’ — in which two equals with no fixed roles collaborate to earn lots of money and have an exciting lifestyle. If children are involved, part of what they earn money to achieve is to send their children to ‘great schools,’ where they themselves will also become over-achieving strivers, finishing their educations in their late 20s or early 30s before jumping into equally high-intensity careers. Any shortfall in middle class births can just be replaced by people from Asia, or by the emerging class of Black and Hispanic Head Start geniuses which are sure to turn up any time now.

These people are wildly outnumbered by the slackers, but the state prefers to encourage achievement within its own frame of reference, and tends to look down on those who are neither hyper-productive nor on welfare.

When people can be assured that their children will be obedient, pleasant, and positive for their families, they will be eager to have those children. When it’s more likely that those children will be rebellious, ungrateful, and unstable, people will be more inclined to jam in the Nuvaring and watch Netflix instead.

The despair around this state of affairs, though, is both sinful and misguided. And the despair often espoused by critics of that state, in effect, keeps that state on life support for much longer than it would be otherwise. This isn’t a state on particularly strong foundations, and the people who keep whining and moaning about how big and powerful and scary that it is aren’t being creative enough about how to get out from underneath it.

As much as the state might want to create ‘reproduction’ by importing millions of foreigners, or by pursuing inferior science fiction substitutes which have major costs and side effects, the family is still the only institution capable of healthy, reliable reproduction. A weak state is incapable of restraining its own agencies from usurping authority from families — which is, in effect, eating the future human seed corn. The cannibalization was slow before the 1960s, but it has reached a rate which will actually be fatal, causing effective death rates similar to those last seen in major wars, even leading to severe depopulation in states like Germany and Western-mimicking states like Japan.

Blacks, unlike most other ethnic groups in the United States, enjoy some cultural privileges that other groups can’t claim access to.

The most significant one is effective immunity from the demands of political correctness in most of their cultural products. The most famous Black comedians, for example, use the word “nigger” as an anchor for their routines. For a White or even Jewish comedian to use that word is grounds for the destruction of your career, as happened to Michael Richards (AKA Kramer from Seinfeld) in 2006.

The privileges are a bit more profound in terms of creative liberties allowed to rappers and sports figures. Since the integration of professional and college sports in the mid-20th century, expectations of good behavior by athletes has been downgraded. Ideas of sportsmanship have gone to the wayside, for the most part, replaced by a sort of Black machismo. You hear sports fans of all races embracing Black patois when talking about sports — from the announcers to the fans.

The decision by American elites to roll back mass conscription — and the adoption of Freudian and post-Freudian ideas, so much so that Freud is essentially the font of modern pseudo-religious thought, no matter how many times that he’s discredited — has made it so that most masculine personality archetypes have been defined by academic and medical authorities as pathological.

Part of this definition has been justification for the creation of endless new cultural artifacts which are ‘progressive’ to replace the cultural record with new cultural products that reflect the ideas of equality more perfectly. Most of these cultural products are highly perishable, tending to fall out of fashion within months, to be replaced by another expensive production soon afterwards.

The idea of a man as tough, morally resolute, with the capacity to lead, protect, and create order — came to be seen as the font, also, of ‘authoritarianism.’ And the critics weren’t entirely wrong about that. What they were wrong about was in portraying authority — particularly paternal authority — as something evil.

Blacks, as a sort of compensation for their low position in integrated, post-Civil Rights society, get some special room in the culture that they probably wouldn’t be accorded otherwise. Although the critical establishment tends to marginalize Black film-makers, they do tend to elevate a small number of stars here and there. Music has been rather the opposite — as rock became niche, most of the biggest pop stars are either Black or Black-inspired.

What this results in is a White-centered culture which is effete and weak, because depictions of that might smack of the ‘authoritarian personality’ tend to receive severe criticism. When a few slip in through the cracks of censorship, they’ll be subjected to withering criticism later on. This same standard isn’t applied to Black culture, in part because it’s seen as a corrective to the past ‘crimes’ of White male authorities.

It’s not really possible for American conservatives to criticize this effectively, because they tend to accept the Freudian and post-Freudian critiques of Christian family life and paternal authority. When they criticize dysfunctional Black culture and cultural products, they tend to do it from the same frame as the people who critique them. They notice an inconsistency and see an opportunity to score irrelevant rhetorical points in a debate where the score doesn’t matter. Conservatives may also criticize the Black ‘fatherlessness’ epidemic, while simultaneously decrying the idea of paternal authority more generally.

Just about across the spectrum, even and perhaps especially on the alt-right, there’s a discomfort in straying from the Freudian-therapeutic frame — because outside that frame lies the buried lands of religion and philosophy.

What this has lead to is a coarsening of the general culture down to the ghetto standard, while feminine crackers hector one another for deviations from the anti-authoritarian ideal. The culture elevates the idea of the thug — even showering some of them with billions of dollars in illogical corporate mergers — while denigrating the more traditional alternatives, praising the soft, supplicating, nonviolent man-thing who’s more comfortable with spreadsheets than authority.

Due to its particular circumstances, the US needs both conflicting cultural concepts. It needs spreadsheet-man and hipster-man to go to college and hopefully to produce tax revenue. It needs thug-man to fill the prisons and to justify the vast administrations of the welfare state. And also, occasionally, to keep the weak men in line — which they are happy to have happen to them, because they’re so easily intimidated into compliance, being terrified of all kinds of violence.

Civilization demands actions of both creation and destruction, often within the same people. After World War II, Westerners progressively became terrified of both of these elemental forces, and hoped to tame them, to take the edge off of them, under the myth that apocalypse would result if this spiritual advance couldn’t happen.