The Changing American Family

22      We can also expect to see an increasing number of "electronic cottage" fam­ilies—families in which one or both spouses work at home instead of commuting to the job. As the cost of gasoline skyrockets and the cost of computers and com­munication plummets, companies will increasingly supply their employees with simple work-at-home electronic equipment.

23      In such homes, we may well find husband and wife sharing the same work. Even children and old folks might pitch in, as they once did in the agricultural household. In our day, such "electronic cottage" families are as much an out­growth of changes in energy, technology, and communications, as the nuclear fam­ily was a response to the factory system at the time of the Industrial Revolution.