The Family - Households In The U.s., Family Households With Children, Mom, Dad, And Two Children — Does The Pattern Still Hold?

Early in the 20th century, the Census Bureau used to keep track of families with their own households and those who lived with others. Young couples were often living with one of the parents in the ancestral household — the farm. As the century closed out and the Census Bureau took the 2000 census, bureaucrats recorded same-sex partner households for the first time ever. Things have changed a great deal in a hundred years, indeed, in 50 years. And there might be a return to the older ways as well. In the 12 panels of this chapter, we attempt, briefly, to encapsulate a lot of change, a lot of trends.

We start by looking at households — how they have changed in definition and why. Non-family households (predominantly single people) are a new and growing phenomenon — of which the gay-couple household is a tiny subset. Next we look more closely at family households and note the rise of the single-parent phenomenon. Most affected by these changes are children — and so we look at how children are distributed across the family spectrum.

The dramatic rise in single-parent families prompted a searching look at the state of marriage — and what has become, of late, its lengthening shadow: divorce. The demographics of marriage show interesting patterns — in the exploration of which we look at when people marry. Why do we, these days, marry as late as people did in the late 18th century? Are the same factors at work — or new ones? Rather startling differences in the view of marriage show up between whites and blacks. We explore these next. And then we look at marriages between members of different races — which is on the rise.

While, on the whole, marriage appears to be alive and well, how we reach that state — and why some of us never do — is the subject of some panels. We look at cohabitation, single-parent families, and the prevalence of same-sex households across the nation.

Throughout, we report on children and how they fare. The final panel gets right down to business. How much does it cost to raise a child? Have costs gone up? Where does our money go, now as opposed to a few years ago?