All hail the family: trend-sniffing on the eve of the next millennium.

The first would be our family. Your family, my family, which is composed of an immediate family of a wife and three children, a larger family with grandparents and aunts and uncles. We all have our family, whichever that may be.

--Danforth J. Quayle

candidate for vice-president of the United States in a 1988 campaign speech to schoolchildren in Virginia

Since the dawn of time, the world's deepest thinkers have applied their faculties to understanding, analyzing, and rhapsodizing about society's most basic building block. As our maiden box along the organizational chart of life, the family has always reflected the priorities and peccadilloes of its time and place. Over the last generation, more opportunities for women, shrinking after-tax incomes, shifting demographics, more liberalized divorce laws, and deferred marriage and child-bearing have combined to rock the family boat.

So how will this venerable vessel fare in the wave of hyper-techno, mega-globalized, information-mania sweeping us towards the gurgling brink of a new millennium? Invoking the spirits of shamans long past, modernday seers like Dan Quayle, and futurists who have yet to be born, we proffer the following five fearless predictions.

Prediction number one: the traditional family will not go the way of the pogo stick.

That's right, and you heard it here first. If this leaves you apoplectic, you're probably limiting your definition of just what a traditional family is. Self-obsessed baby-boomers with rosyhued scrapbooks of nuclear families and nuclear bomb shelters might be forgiven for forgetting that both tradition and the family unit are fairly fluid. For instance, generations used to think nothing of living together under one roof -- at least those who could afford one. Blended families were novel enough to warrant progressive tv sitcoms 20 years ago. And extended families are still the norm in homes around the world. Sure, Statistics Canada says that more single parents, common-law couples, and childless marriages entered the nation's family portrait last year. And there's the time-honoured lament about families dissolving in a sea of irresponsibility, social chaos, and bad luncheon meat. But we also have a 1994 Angus Reid poll suggesting that more than two out of three gentle Canucks believe that having one parent stay home is the best way to raise children. And a recent landmark survey by Statistics Canada found that 80% of Canadian children under 12 still live in families with two parents, the vast majority of them biological, rather than reconstructed by remarriage as trumpeted by the media.. (The American figure is about 70%, and the British total is more than 80%.) The inescapable fact is that the family will prevail, in whatever form it takes. Despite the doubling of the available field of human knowledge every five years over the last decade or two, we still haven't found a better way to reproduce, muddle through our lives, or devise a guest list for the holiday dinner table. Family lawyers and mediators can relax.

Prediction number two: science will confuse families even further.

The advent of genetic engineering hatches more medical, legal, and moral issues than you can shake a test tube at. Debates over designer jeans, Adidas and spelling tests will graduate to litigation over designer genes, fetuses, and DNA tests. Clever teenagers will mutate themselves and fight with their parents over the patent rights. Family films will score big laughs around the Send in the Clones theme. Bizarre biological sampling will create blended families, drawing from a gene pool so vast that they'll have to book Nuremberg Stadium for summer reunions. And humanitarians will zero in on robots' rights as a labour issue.

Prediction number three: the extended family will rise again.

You don't have to be a demographic doyen to divine that the baby boomer generation is on its way back to diapers, and fast. After monopolizing the media for years with everything from surfing tunes and psychedelia to marathons and mutual funds, they'll inspire a brave new geriatric jamboree of issues, demands, and consumer products. But when the witching hour comes, not everyone in this mammoth mix will be able to afford a pricey condo, deluxe health care, or even a spectacular suicide leap into an active tropical volcano. At least some of them will move back in with the kids that they unleashed on the world, or some other kin. (This is not a bad thing. Witness the old Chinese proverb: a family that has an old person in it possesses a jewel.) This will cultivate fertile ground for folks like estate planners, family counsellors, and primal scream therapists. More families will look on a partly filled glass of water not as half-full or half-empty, but as a great place to park their elders' teeth. And just wait for the explosion in seniors' lawyers.

Prediction number four: the family business will see a new heyday.

The family business is a huge part of our economy. According to the Canadian Association of Family Enterprise, 45% of our national Gross Domestic Product and 50% of workers' pay cheques come from family businesses. That's likely to increase, given the rise in home-based business. Between 1991 and 1994, more than one out of every two new businesses started in Alberta was home-based. And that figure isn't falling. Since these entrepreneurs are likely to recruit close-knit associates, it follows that growing numbers of new businesses will be staffed by people swinging on the vines of a common family tree. Parents will hire their offspring, generating both work experience and income-splitting. And entrepreneurs will retain their own parents, getting valuable help and counsel, while giving the seniors yet another chance to build sweat equity. Employment standards and tax people will be busy. Divorce lawyers will celebrate the added pressure on spouses who work together. Mediators will book luxury cruises.

Prediction number five: people will keep flogging the family

The family will continue to be a lightning rod for statisticians, politicians, sociologists, lawyers, and legions of other special interests. We'll continue to regard the changing family portrait with caution, if not pessimism. And civilization will press on inexorably. It's a brave new world out there for families. And we'll all be paying attention. Even Dan Quayle would agree with the timeless wisdom of the Russian proverb, "As the family is, so is the offspring."