America's Trendiest Families

We are blessed to live in a land where there is so much research being done around marriage and families. We can see how family trends have changed even in the last hundred years. When looking at the relationships between these trends, it is quite clear that many of them are connected to one another. Some of these trends include the age of marriage, cohabitation rates, number of working mothers, and divorce rates.

There has been an increase in single mothers throughout the United States. We’re seeing that 40% of the children being born do not have a father-figure to come home to. This quite seamlessly goes along with the next trend we see in families. More and more mothers have the need to work during their children’s adolescence. 63% of mothers with children under the age of six, are a part of the work force. These working moms must be at work even though their children are not yet full-time students.

The age of marriage has greatly increased in recent years. The average age for men was 29.5, while it was 27.4 for women. It isn’t too shocking to see people waiting longer and longer to get married in order to create a more financially stable environment. This leads us to the next trend where couples are waiting to have children. With these delayed births, we can see where the fertility rate of the US is dropping. The replacement birth rate is 2.1, which means a population needs women to have an average of 2.1 children in her lifetime to maintain the current populate. The fertility rate of the US was 1.8 births per woman in 2016. 

Now, you may be asking yourself, “Brianna, if the fertility rate is less than the replacement rate, how is the population still growing?” That’s a great question! We see so much immigration that our population continues to grow. We can look at Japan for an example of just how quickly a country can depopulate. The Baby Boomers, the first huge growth in the population. Most of the world experienced their own population boom, but Japan did not. It took 60 years for their population to show just how badly they needed more youth. It wasn’t until very large amounts of their elders started passing away in 2005 that Japan’s population started to drop, and drop rapidly.

On the opposite side of the marriage spectrum, there has been a rise in cohabitating couples. 60-80% of US adults cohabitated before getting married to their spouse. Once the definition of marriage changed, we saw a slight decrease in cohabitating couples because same-sex couples were now able to legally get married instead of simply cohabitating. With more and more people living together, we see a decline in marriages, which resulted in a decrease in divorce rates. I’m sure most of us have heard the scary statistic that 50% of marriages end in divorce. This has never been a true statistic. An article was written in the 1980’s that said if the divorce rates continued to grow at the same rate, it would reach a 50% fail rate in just a few short years. 

Not gonna lie, I’m having a hard time forming an opinion on everything I learned this week. Somethings I agree with and others make me sit and scratch my head in deep thought. I do know that marriage is something very special and should not be jumped into. Marriage takes work. If marriage takes work, I can only imagine how much work and dedication goes into raising a family. I can’t even begin to imagine how to be a wife and mother right now (school is hard enough as is!) I know these trends seem overwhelming, but they are trends for a reason. The world we live in is ever changing, and marriage and family are obviously not untouched. I’m hoping through my classes I can become more educated on how to help realign these trends and create more happy and forever families.