Current American family trends show decrease in size

by Jenna-Leigh Tracy Scroll Staff

The size of families in the United States has decline in the past decades.

“The average number of persons per U.S. household, among whites and African Americans, has declined over the past three decades from 3.1 in 1970 to 2.6 in 1998,” according to the Web site, www.usinfo.state.gov, an annual study, reflecting the current family trends in 1999.
There are many theories of why the current trend of declining numbers in the last three decades is because of the rate of divorces, out-of-wedlock births and common law residing.

“You can’t have three [or more] decades of high divorce rates — as we have — and as many as five decades of rising out-of-wedlock births and not see a change [in the family,]” Douglas Besharov, resident scholar at the America Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research, said.

Just over half the households in

merica have a married couple as heads of the household.

“53% of the households in the United States were headed by married couples in 1998,” according to the Web site www.usinfo.state.gov. “This compares with 78.2 percent in 1950 and 61 percent in 1980.”

The reduction of size of american families should not affect how the family functions.

“As we begin to understand the range of sizes, shapes and colors that distinguish families in the United States today, we find that the differences within family types are more important than the differences between them,” Stephanie Coontz, author of The Way We Really Are and a professor at Evergreen State College, said .

There is not one particular guarantee that a family functions well.

“No particular family form guarantees success, and no particular form is doomed to fail,” Coontz said. “How a family functions on the inside is more important than how it looks from the outside.”

The most serious threat to the family structure in america is out-of-wedlock births.

“I think the greatest concern is that young people ... are having babies outside of marriage without the wherewithal to take proper care of them,” Besharov said. “We used to call this ‘children having children.’”

With the improper properties to care for children, the mother feels held back.

“[The] high component of poverty ... drives [the helpless feeling,]” he said.

“It's a bad development for the lives of children and is not good for their mothers’ lives either. It holds them back. That is the most serious problem facing post-industrial society worldwide,” Besharov said.

Overall, however, the ‘traditional’ family has declined.

“All in all, 36% [of families] could be considered ‘traditional,’” according to www.usembassy.de. “Since 1970, the [numbers] have declined 14%. However, since 1990, the rate has dropped one percent.”