The percentage of households consisting of married couples fell from 79% in 1950 to 55% in 1991.
Non-family households - mostly people who live alone - grew from 10% to 30% of households during the same period.
Between 1956 and 1990, the median age at first marriage rose from 20.1 to 24 for women and from 22.5 to 26 for men.
Thirty-one percent of one-parent families are now headed by never-married women, in contrast to 6.5% in 1970.
In 1960, family means husband and wife living together with their children, father the head, earns the income, gives his name to wife and children. Mother's main tasks: to support and facilitate husband's, guide children's development, look after the home, set a moral tone for the family.
Today, great decrease in the proportion of women favoring large family, both husbands and wives should be able to work, have roughly similar opportunities, share household responsibilities and child rearing.
Most American children spend part of their childhood in a single-parent family.
One fifth of young American children raised in poverty.
The evidence clearly indicates that men are sharing very little of the burden of raising children and care of the home. Not only are mothers home much less, fathers do not seem to spend more time at home to compensate.
Only about 5% of all American children see a grandparent regularly, a much lower level than in the past.
1. Traditional Familism: mid 1940s - mid 1960s. Married couples with children, high birth rates, low divorce rates, high marital stability.
2. Individualism: mid 1960s - mid 1980s. decline of birth rates, accelerating divorce rates, individual and social experimentation, creation of singles "life-style", idealization of career and work life, search for meaning through self expression.
3. New Familism. Leveling off of divorce rate, leveling off of participation in work force among women, highest birth rate since 1964; shift from expressive individualism and fascination with self toward greater attachments to family and commitment to others.
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