No typical families
I finally got a chance to look at the new Census report on America’s Families and Living Arrangements. The data on SAHMs and SAHDs is all the same material that I discussed last month when I discovered the detailed tables on their website, so instead I’m going to talk about the big drop in the fraction of all households that contain children.
According to the Census, in 2003, families with children made up just 32 percent of households, down from 45 percent in 1970. This is a big shift, driven by a bunch of factors all working in the same direction:
- More people don’t have children at all. In 2002, almost 18 percent of women ages 40-44 had never had kids, up from about 10 percent in 1976. (About 0.3 percent of women have their first child in their 40s.)
- More people delay childbearing (so they’re childless for longer)
- People are having fewer kids, even those from cultures that have traditionally valued large families. (A family with 1 child will have a child under 18 for exactly 18 years, while a family with 3 children, 3 years apart, will have one for 24 years.)
- People live longer after they’re done having kids.
- Affluence and mobility both result in more single people — both young adults and the elderly — living on their own rather than with their families. In 2003, over a quarter of all households were people living on their own. Less than 10 percent had five or more people, down from 20.9 percent in 1970.
I think these trends make it harder to convince businesses that they have to adopt family-friendly policies. But, as I’ve said before, it strikes me as utterly insane that in a potential working life of 50 or more years, it’s not feasible to take 2 or 3 off to focus on childrearing.
