Families with children

How many parents do children typically live with? Today, it is still the case that most children (almost 60%) are in families with two parents.

Of course, some of these families have a mother who is married to someone other than the biological father of their children. In this case, the family would be a married couple family, according to the census bureau definitions. It's still relatively rare for children to live with unmarried fathers, but it's only about half the percentage living with lone mothers (12 versus 22 percent). The difference is (as explained here) that many of the lone fathers are cohabiting with the child's mother.

Maternal employment

Today, most mothers are employed, and the majority of employed mothers are working full time. This is especially true of mothers of older children, but even among mothers of infants, half (51.9%) are employed and by far most of these mothers are employed full-time.

These high levels of maternal employment reflect a substantial social change since the 1960s and 70s. Yet, maternal employment has not grown substantially since the late 1990s, despite the passing of legislation (e.g. the Family Medical Leave Act, 1993) that should have improved women’s ability to combine paid work with child rearing.

Trends in maternal employment spark intense controversy between those who argue that women should work, either for greater self-fulfillment or because it is very difficult for most families to make ends meet without the mom working. Others, take offense at the notion that caring for children is not noble or worthy, sometimes demeaning mothers who do decide to take one paid employment. I can understand this perspective, since we often devalue care work.

A consequence of this controversy is that we often scrutinize trends to find evidence that women are starting to forgo career for family (or vice versa). Either out of economic necessity or philosophical differences, diversity is here to stay.

Marriage again

Last Friday I showed a graph depicting the increasing age at marriage. The interesting aspect of this trend is that it means that we are delaying an event that nearly everyone looks forward to. Typically we like to “eat dessert first” so to speak, so this is a bit of a departure from the norm. For a minority of folks, gays outside of Massachusetts and California, perhaps legal constraints account for the delay, but for most this isn’t a good explanation.

Up to a point, delayed marriage is wise. Waiting until age 21 substantially decreases the chances of divorce.After age 21, delays don't do much to reduce the risk of divorce, but the median age at marriage is over 27 for men and over 25 for women. So, why wait 4-6 years after age 21?

Could it be that we actually value something else more than marriage? Or is it just that we’d like to marry, but the right person hasn’t appeared….yet.

Family Life

An interesting trend in family life, one that almost everyone knows about, is the growth in single parent families. So, it isn't much surprise to anyone that many households (60 percent in 2006) with a female householder contain children. It might be slightly more surprising to know that almost half of households with an unmarried male householder have children. Some might see this as evidence for a sudden increase in men taking custody of children in the event of divorce. It is not. No, this is because of an increase in unmarried couples living together with children, sometimes their own children, sometimes children from a previous relationship.


















What I find surprising in the above graph is that the household type that is least likely to have children is a married couple household. You might think then that most children are raise in single parent families. This would be wrong...By far, most children live in married couple households. This is possible because most households, with children or not, are maintained by a married couple.

Family Life

A long-term trend in family life has been the increase in the labor force participation of mothers. Given these changes in behavior, it isn’t surprising that most people disagree with the statement that “Family life suffers when mothers work full-time.” Yet in recent years, there has been a notable increase in the proportion agreeing with this statement among both men (solid lines) and women (dashed lines). Source: General Social Survey.














Recently many have tried to link concerns about the growing obesity problem with growth in mother's employment. Of course, we all know that correlation isn't causation. Also, I think some people forget that many more two-parent families would be in poverty if mother’s didn’t work.

Monday we'll post a comment on North Carolina demographics and exactly how bad this Rev. Wright affair would have to be to lead to an Obama loss in that state.

Family Life

In recent years, one of the most impressive trends in family life has been the increase in the proportion of births that are to unmarried women. In 2005, just under 37 percent of births were to a woman who was not married.

Source: for 1970-1990, 1995, 2000, and 2005.

Family Life

In 2006, the median age at first marriage was for men 27.5, and for women 25.9. ¹ In 1998 the General Social Survey asked respondents whether, "If the right person came along, would you like to be married." Eighty percent of those ages 18-24 answered "yes."

Sources:

http://factfinder.census.gov/servlet/GRTTable?_bm=y&-geo_id=01000US&-_box_head_nbr=R1204&-ds_name=ACS_2006_EST_G00_&-_lang=en&-redoLog=false&-format=US-30&-mt_name=ACS_2006_EST_G00_R1205_US30&-CONTEXT=grt

http://sda.berkeley.edu/cgi-bin/hsda?harcsda+gss06