The U.S. is facing a much less dramatic decline in birth rates
than other OECD members. That means that the proportion of households with
children will remain relatively high and the U.S. will not experience as severe
a shortage of young consumers and workers in the coming decades. But, even as
the quantity of young people remains relatively strong, the quality of
family life is eroding. As a result, millions of children are likely to be
ill-prepared to enter the 21st century workforce.
What’s going on? For at least the last half-century, Western
society has put individual freedom ahead of family responsibilities. Without
making moral judgments, it’s fair to say that the primacy of individual freedom
has led to levels of divorce, promiscuity, and illegitimacy that were unheard
of prior to World War II. In turn, the high divorce rate has led to explosive
growth in the number of fractured families. Data shows that the children of
those broken homes are at several disadvantages: economic, educational, and
social.
According to the U.S. Census Bureau report titled America’s
Families and Living Arrangements: 2007,1 there are now 11.7 million
households with a single unmarried parent living with his or her own children
who are under the age of 18.
Thirty-one percent of them, or 3.6 million American households,
are living below the poverty level. In fact, 16 percent of unmarried
single-parent households, or nearly 1.9 million households with children, earn
annual incomes of less than $10,000.
In addition, millions of couples live together without getting
married. The Census found 6.5 million households consisting of unmarried
couples of the opposite sex. In roughly half of those households, neither
partner has ever been married. In more than 45 percent of the co-habiting
households, or 2.5 million homes, the unmarried couple has at least one
biological child of either partner under the age of 18 living with them.
The growth in the number of co-habiting households has been
rapid. Since 1996, the earliest year for which Census data on unmarried
households is available, the number of unmarried couples living together has
grown by more than 100 percent, from 2.9...
