America has changed in so many ways since your time. People and society have many differences than those in the past one hundred years. Family, transportation, and communication are just a small number of factors that have altered since the years in of your lifetime.
First, family life is a bit more complicated and complex than it was in your day. Families come in all different varieties, consisting of interracial marriages, stepparents, grandparents. There are many different cases and reasons why the biological mother and father aren't always taking care of their children. Personally, my family that I live with includes my father, my stepmother, and my grandmother. When I was about five, my mother and father had a divorce, and my mother decided to move to Florida with my little brother. Since my father was in the Army and never home, I was sent to live with my grandmother. Once my dad retired, he moved in with us and bought the house off of my grandma. Just last year, my dad decided he would marry, so my stepmother moved in with us to help take care of me. In society this is quite normal to have families split apart from divorce and many other reasons, unlike in your time. When people got divorced it was difficult to begin their life again with someone new. It was frowned upon at that time, but now society has opened to the fact that not all marriages go as planned. So ,when a person gets a divorce from someone they are not looked down upon. It was just marriage that didn't work out, and both people will find someone new.
Second, transportation has speed up quickly. Transportation has gone from horse and buggy, which would take days to get to a city, to fast cars, which race and can get to cities in a matter of hours. Also, we have airplanes which can get a person anywhere in the world even faster than cars. In your day, if a person wanted to travel from Britain to America they would travel by ship for a month or more.