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Fewer couples married with kids
©New York Times, published May 15, 2001 WASHINGTON -- For the first time, fewer than one-quarter of all households in the United States are married couples with children, new census data shows. That results from a number of factors, including that many men and women are delaying marriage and putting off having children. More couples are living longer after their adult children leave home. And the number of single-parent families is growing much faster than the number of married couples. Indeed, the number of families headed by women who have children, which are typically poorer than two-parent families, grew nearly five times faster in the 1990s than married couples with children, a trend that some family experts and demographers described Monday as disturbing. The new data offers the 2000 census' first glimpse into the shifting and complicated makeup of American families and carries wide-ranging implications that policymakers and politicians already are struggling to address. While unmarried couples represent only 9 percent of all unions, up from 6 percent a decade ago, many conservative groups point to the increase as well as the statistics on single-parent households as troubling indicators of deeper societal problems. "This data shows we need to regain the importance of marriage as a social institution," said Bridget Maher, a marriage and family policy analyst at the conservative Family Research Council. "People are disregarding the importance of marriage and the importance of having a mother and father who are married." Maher and other conservatives point to the findings as justification for the enactment of policies that they say will strengthen the family, like eliminating the so-called marriage penalty in the tax code. As more communities have fewer households with children, public schools often face an increasingly difficult time building support for renovating aging buildings and investing in education overall. Voters in Cleveland last week approved $380-million in levies to fix city schools, but only after two months of exhaustive lobbying by civic leaders. "This may have something to do with why our education system is not up to snuff," said Isabel Sawhill, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. "Oftentimes those parents who still are invested in the schools don't have the money or influence to change things." The decades-long decline in the overall number of U.S. households with children slowed during the 1990s as two of the most troubling trends -- divorce and out-of-wedlock births -- moderated, demographers said. But even with that slowdown, the percentage of married-couple households with children under 18 has declined to 23.5 percent of all households in 2000 from 25.6 percent in 1990, and from 45 percent in 1960, said Martin O'Connell, chief of the Census Bureau's fertility and family statistics branch. William H. Frey, a demographer at the University of Michigan, said, "Being married is great, but being married with kids is tougher in today's society, with spouses in different jobs and expensive day care and schools." The number of married-couple families with children grew by just under 6 percent in the 1990s. In contrast, households with children headed by single mothers, which account for nearly 7 percent of all households, increased by 25 percent in the 1990s. The new census data paints a more detailed picture of the American family in other ways. Demographers expressed surprise that the number of unmarried couples in the United States nearly doubled in the 1990s, to 5.5-million couples from 3.1-million in 1990. "It's certainly consistent with what we've all been noting, the growth in cohabitation in this country, but it also tells us how complex American families are becoming," said Freya L. Sonenstein, director of population studies at the Urban Institute in Washington and a visiting fellow at the Public Policy Institute of California. The number of non-family households, which consist of people living alone or with people who are not related, makes up about one-third of all households. They grew at twice the rate of family households in the 1990s. Demographers pointed to several explanations. People are marrying later, if they marry at all. The median age of the first marriage for men has increased to 27, from 22 in 1960; for women, it has increased to 25, from 20 in 1960, said Campbell Gibson, a Census Bureau demographic adviser. The booming economy has allowed more younger people to live on their own. Divorce, while leveling off, has left many middle-aged people living alone -- at least temporarily. Advances in medicine and bulging stock portfolios have permitted many elderly people to live independently longer.
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