The Dysfunctional American Family

The U.S. is facing a much less dramatic decline in birth rates than other OECD members. That means that the proportion of households with children will remain relatively high and the U.S. will not experience as severe a shortage of young consumers and workers in the coming decades. But, even as the quantity of young people remains relatively strong, the quality of family life is eroding. As a result, millions of children are likely to be ill-prepared to enter the 21st century workforce.

What's going on? For at least the last half-century, Western society has put individual freedom ahead of family responsibilities. Without making moral judgments, it's fair to say that the primacy of individual freedom has led to levels of divorce, promiscuity, and illegitimacy that were unheard of prior to World War II. In turn, the high divorce rate has led to explosive growth in the number of fractured families. Data shows that the children of those broken homes are at several disadvantages: economic, educational, and social.

According to the U.S. Census Bureau report titled America's Families and Living Arrangements: 2007,¹ there are now 11.7 million households with a single unmarried parent living with his or her own children who are under the age of 18.

Thirty-one percent of them, or 3.6 million American households, are living below the poverty level. In fact, 16 percent of unmarried single-parent households, or nearly 1.9 million households with children, earn annual incomes of less than $10,000.

In addition, millions of couples live together without getting married. The Census found 6.5 million households consisting of unmarried couples of the opposite sex. In roughly half of those households, neither partner has ever been married. In more than 45 percent of the co-habiting households, or 2.5 million homes, the unmarried couple has at least one biological child of either partner under the age of 18 living with them.

The growth in the number of co-habiting households has been rapid. Since 1996, the earliest year for which Census data on unmarried households is available, the number of unmarried couples living together has grown by more than 100 percent, from 2.9 million to 6.5 million.

Furthermore, between 1968 and 2007, the total number of American children, defined as under the age of 18, increased by 3.4 million. In 1968, there were... To read the full article, you must be a Trends Magazine Subscriber. To learn more, click here