[Vision2020] New Census Numbers Show Recession’s Effect on Families

[Art Deco]

  [image: The New York Times] <http://www.nytimes.com/>

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August 27, 2013
New Census Numbers Show Recession’s Effect on Families By SAM
ROBERTS<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/r/sam_roberts/index.html>

The portion of American households made up of married couples with children
under 18 fell to 20 percent from 40 percent from 1970 to 2012, the Census
Bureau<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/c/census_bureau/index.html?inline=nyt-org>said
Tuesday as it detailed other fundamental changes in family life.

The share of people living alone, meanwhile, rose 10 percentage points, to
27 percent.

The analysis<http://www.census.gov/newsroom/releases/archives/families_households/cb13-149.html>also
found that the recession profoundly affected American families from
2005 to 2011, resulting in a 15 percent decline in homeownership among
households with children and a 33 percent increase in households where at
least one parent was unemployed.

The recession also saw more mothers enter the work force and an increasing
dependence on food stamps.

The number of households with an unemployed parent soared by 148 percent in
Nevada and by more than 50 percent in California, Colorado, Connecticut,
Florida, Hawaii, New Jersey and North Carolina in those years.

“During the recession, economic well-being worsened for families with
children,” said Jamie Lewis, a demographer in the bureau’s Fertility and
Family Statistics Branch who helped write the analysis. “Even after the
recession officially ended in 2009, these measures remained worse than
before it began.”

The severity of the decline often depended on whether the parents were
married. Nine percent of married families were living below the poverty
line and receiving food stamps. The proportion among single-mother
households was four times greater.

In another shift that might be recession related, a higher percentage of
adults ages 25 to 34 lived in their parents’ home in 2012 than in the early
2000s. The share among men increased to 16 percent from 13 percent; among
women, it rose to 10 percent from 8 percent.

Among people 18 to 24, women were more likely to be living with a spouse or
an unmarried partner. Eleven percent of women and 6 percent of men in that
age group were married; another 12 percent of women and 8 percent of men
were cohabiting.

Of the nation’s 115 million households, 56 million were married couples and
32 million were people living alone (12 million of whom were 65 or older).
Married couples made up 48.6 percent of households, compared with barely
short of 50 percent as recently as 2010.

The analysis, drawn from the American Community Survey and the Current
Population Survey, found the proportion of women ages 65 to 74 living alone
had halved, though only 45 percent of women in that age group lived with
their spouse, compared with 72 percent of men.

Divorce rates may have been accountable for a sharp rise in the share of
men ages 15 to 64 living alone, to 34 percent, from 23 percent in 1970.

The census found stark differences in family structure by race and
ethnicity. Married couples made up 81 percent of Asian, 80 percent of
non-Hispanic white, 62 percent of Hispanic and 44 percent of black family
groups.

Twenty-eight percent of children over all live with one parent — 55 percent
of black children, 31 percent of Hispanic, 21 percent of white and 13
percent of Asian. Still, 64 percent of all 74 million children lived with
married parents — a decline from 69 percent just a decade ago.

“Over the last half-century, the trend in the U.S. has been toward smaller
households, fewer family and married-couple households with children, and
more people living alone,” said Jonathan Vespa, another co-author of the
report. “Many of these trends reflect a rising age at first marriage and
older adults who can live in their own home for longer.”

“A family postponed is not necessarily a family forgone,” he said.

Sixty-six percent of households in 2012 were family households — two or
more people related by birth, marriage or adoption — compared with 81
percent in 1970. Among cohabiting couples with children, 51 percent lived
only with the biological children of both partners.

The census survey found 605,000 same-sex couple households, married and
unmarried, of whom 321,000 were female and 284,000 were male. Same-sex
couples were more likely than opposite-sex married couples to both be
college graduates (31 percent) and more likely to be of different races (12
percent).


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Art Deco (Wayne A. Fox)
art.deco.studios at gmail.com
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