To be sure, like other ancient life forms that have managed to survive, SF has mutated over time. Although virtually no one today would call her or himself a functionalist, SF stands unchallenged in terms of sway it holds over the realm of research and theory about families. Despite the range of theories that ostensibly replaced it (Doherty 1999 Vargus 1999), SF remains tenaciously in place. Indeed, there is no other single theoretical perspective that seriously rivals it. Its continuing influence on the ways research and teaching are carried out, and its impact on public policies for families, are as robust as ever before. Nevertheless, the fact that by the early twenty-first century SF was formally eradicated in no way diminished its potency.

Subsequently, in today's articles and books about families, the explicit use of functionalist jargon has largely vanished.

She did not, however, attempt to account for that contradiction and, in any case, by the 1970s, functionalist theory was overtly abandoned throughout the social sciences. Although only a relatively few researchers in the 1960s labeled themselves as SF-types, the great bulk of published work in the study of families was, she noted, shaped by SF assumptions, perspectives, and views of the social world. Jennie McIntyre (1966) was the first scholar to discern the curious paradox of structural functionalism (SF) within the realm of research and theory about families.

Structure function theory