‘Does the family [in the West] face complete collapse?’, asked Ferdowsi in 1970. Although the question was somewhat sensationally posed, in the West, from the mid-1960s, social commentators, politicians, the mass media, and trends in public opinion increasingly pointed to perceived signs of rapid family decline emerging at the top of the family structure – rising rates of divorce and deteriorating parenting as fathers and mothers became more concerned with conspicuous consumption and sexual hedonism than with child-rearing. These factors, it was argued, played a key role in the rise of youth antisocial behaviour, violent crime, sexual licentiousness, and drug addiction. These issues were increasingly discussed in Iranian popular and political spheres as Iranians again regarded tendencies in the West as bellwethers for Iran.