Men Women and the Family - Declining Birth Rates, Artificial Reproduction, Women Redefine Their Role, Working Families, Custodial Parents
Three trends greatly changed the composition of the American family beginning in the early 1960s: a lower fertility rate; an increase in the number of births among young unmarried women; and women—especially working women—delaying childbearing.
According to data from the National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS), in 2002 there were 4,021,726 live births in the United States, 136,485 fewer than 1990. Between 1990 and 2002 the crude birth rate fell 17%, from 16.7 to 13.9 births per one thousand population. The fertility rate declined 9%, from 70.9 to 64.8 live births per one thousand women aged fifteen to forty-four. The most dramatic decline in fertility rate was the 24% drop among African-American women. (See Figure 2.1.)
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The National Vital Statistics Reports, published by the NCHS, showed that birth rates shifted significantly by age groups between 1990 and 2002. Teenage birth rates dropped continuously in the twelve-year period. For the fifteen to nineteen age group, the rate of first births reached a record low of thirty-four per one thousand births in 2002. The decline in first births applied to teenagers of al…
In the late 1980s and early 1990s, when an estimated four thousand women became surrogate mothers by being artificially inseminated with sperm from men whose wives were infertile, many people were concerned that surrogate motherhood might threaten family stability. Who would be considered the child's mother? Also, some surrogate mothers refused to relinquish the child after delivery, result…
While the husband's main role had traditionally been that of breadwinner, by the 1960s many women were redefining their own roles as homemakers. Women who had experienced the economic independence of a paying job during World War II, and who had attained personal satisfaction from working, reentered the labor force. The availability of contraceptives enabled many young married women to post…
According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) report "Employment Characteristics of Families," in 2003, 82% of families had at least one employed member. Asian families were most likely to have someone in the family working (89.1%), followed by Hispanic families (86.1%) and white families (82.3%). African-American families were the least likely to contain an employed member (77.9…
Custodial parent is the term used by the government to describe a single parent who has been awarded legal custody of one or more of his or her children, usually as part of a divorce. The Census Bureau reported that in the spring of 2002 an estimated 13.4 million parents had custody of 21.5 million children under the age twenty-one. About 84% of custodial parents were mothers and 15% were fathers,…
A somewhat unexpected result of better medical care and increased longevity is the phenomenon of the "sandwich generation"—adults who still have children living at home but who are also attending to the needs of their aging parents. While an increasing number of men had primary parental responsibility, women remained the traditional caregivers, according to a survey published …
In a "Facts for Features" press release for Father's Day 2004, the U.S. Census Bureau provided a profile of contemporary fathers. Of the 25.8 million fathers who were part of a married-couple family with its own children under age eighteen: Of the two million single fathers with their own children under age eighteen: Researchers believe that more changes would occur in the rol…
In September 2004 the Bureau of Labor Statistics released the first of a series of new studies tracking trends in how Americans spent their time. For the American Time Use Survey, twenty-one thousand participants kept a record of how they spent every hour in a single twenty-four-hour period. The survey confirmed that many traditional divisions of labor between men and women had not changed very mu…
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