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Title: How Americans Lived: Families and Life Courses in Flux

Citation Type: Miscellaneous

Publication Year: 2005

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Abstract: WHEN THE Census Bureau released its findings from the 2000 census, newspapers and magazines featured articles on how "the American family" was disappearing.A dwindling proportion of households contained married couples with children, and a growing proportion of households contained only single individuals, unmarried partners, or one-parent families. "'Married with Children' Still Fading as a Model," read a Los Angeles Times headline on May 5, 2001.This familiar plaint about the family in decline lacks both analytical and historical perspective. Analytically, the statistics count homes rather than people; historically, it contrasts the contemporary family with that of the 1950s, an unusual era in American history.The full record, once closely examined, reveals some dramatic changes in American family life, but not necessarily the ones the media reports have focused on. Also, there was much continuity in family patterns over the century. Most important, there is no-and never was a-prototypical American family, only a mix of families and households. In this chapter, we describe how that mix changed over the century.The key findings are: Twentieth-century Americans predominantly lived in two-parent nuclear families, especially in the 1950s, though that was an unusual period. The greatest change over the century for Americans under fortyfive years of age was that those living outside a nuclear family increasingly lived as single adults rather than in a larger, extended household. The greatest changes in family life happened to middle-aged and older Americans.They increasingly lived in empty-nest households-as a couple without children in the home-or as single persons. Americans traveled through the life course in increasingly similar ways as variations narrowed among them in how long they lived, how many children they had, and when they made key transitions. Nonetheless, substantial differences in family life opened up between African Americans and whites and between the less- and the more-educated. After 1960, the married-couple household became atypical for African Americans, and by 2000 it was atypical as well for white high school dropouts. We begin by describing the diversity of family patterns at the end of the century.

Url: http://www.census.gov/population/socdemo/hh-fam/tabUC-1.pdf;

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Authors: Fischer, Claude S; Hout, Michael

Publisher: University of California Berkeley

Data Collections: IPUMS USA

Topics: Aging and Retirement, Family and Marriage

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