Posted on 08/30/2007 9:06:05 AM PDT by qam1
As more Americans decide not to have children and boomers are living longer, we are becoming a more adult-centered nation.
Kids just aren't as big a part of American life as they used to be.
Americans' child-free years are expanding as empty-nest seniors live longer and more young adults delay -- or skip -- childbearing.
In 1960, nearly half of all households had children under 18. By 2000, the portion had fallen to less than a third, and in a few short years it's projected to drop to a quarter, according to a report from the National Marriage Project.
Suburban households trail national trends.
More than half of all households in DuPage, Kane, Lake and McHenry counties had a child under 18 years old living at home in 2005, U.S. Census figures show. Only Cook County dipped below the 50 percent threshold.
That the shift toward child-free homes has not yet gained momentum locally is not surprising, experts caution, as many families with children settle in suburban neighborhoods with larger homes, good schools and green space.
Yet suburban families are not exempt from the challenges of having -- or not having -- children.
Youngsters increasingly take a back seat in perceptions of marriage's purpose.
Since 1990, the percentage of people who said children were very important to a successful marriage tumbled from 65 percent to 41 percent, according to a Pew Research report.
For some child-free Americans, their growing numbers argue for greater equality with parents in government benefits, the workplace and social esteem. That worries family researchers and child advocates who see in the same trends a move to a more "adult-centered culture" -- one that threatens the strength of families and the social compact to provide for the next generation.
"We are getting much more of an adult-oriented culture than has ever existed arguably, and that could prove problematic," says David Popenoe, co-director of the National Marriage Project at Rutgers University in New Jersey. "You can envision a society in which children are kind of an afterthought and not in the interests of society as a whole."
He sees the priorities reflected on television: Almost gone are family sitcoms in favor of a generation of programs following the model of "Friends" and "Sex and the City."
And he worries about a shift at the ballot box. In New Jersey, voters rejected nearly half of school budgets in the state last year -- the lowest passage rate in more than a decade, according to a report from Popenoe's center.
In Illinois -- where homeowners on average fund a third of local school revenues -- swaying voter support to increase tax rates is increasingly difficult.
In April, eight suburban school districts sought higher tax rates. Voters rejected all but three. Two years earlier, half the 10 bids to increase school districts' tax rates gained the necessary voter support.
With parents a smaller presence at the polls -- just under 40 percent in the 2004 presidential election -- some child advocates say it's getting harder to win empathy on issues.
"It's not: Do people love children? It's: Are they thinking about them?" says Robert Fellmeth, director of the Children's Advocacy Institute at the University of California San Diego School of Law.
In California, older adults are not passing along opportunities to the next generation, Fellmeth said. He decries the lack of universal health coverage for children, low funding for foster-child families, and skyrocketing university tuition.
Fellmeth also sees children being jammed into extreme poverty by the growing trend of out-of-wedlock births -- which now stand at 37 percent. The Pew report found growing acceptance among younger people for childbearing outside marriage.
When child-free adults and their advocates look at the political and cultural landscape, however, they still see inequalities that favor married families and children despite the demographic shifts away from Ozzie and Harriet's day.
A major flash point: workplace benefits. Family-friendly policies such as flex leave and day-care options not only allocate more of the benefits pie to workers with children, but child-free workers also can be left picking up the slack for co-workers on family leave, says Thomas Coleman with Unmarried America, a nonprofit information service about unmarried adults based in Glendale, Calif.
Myriad government policies, he says, leave the child-free feeling like second-class citizens -- everything from the exclusion of siblings under the federal Family and Medical Leave Act to greater death benefits given to families by Social Security and the U.S. military.
But with only 35 percent of the U.S. workforce having a child under 18 at home, businesses have begun shifting to more neutral work-life programs. They include the same amount of paid time off for all workers, cafeteria-style benefits and generic benefits like gym memberships that all workers can use.
"No one is advocating ignoring the needs of children or those who are raising children. That's important to everyone in society whether you have children or not, but things have to be more balanced," Coleman says.
Part of that balancing act, he says, is taking into account the 19 percent of women in their early 40s who are childless. That's up from 9.5 percent 26 years ago.
The birth rate among twenty- and thirty-somethings nationwide was 108 per 1,000 women in 2005.
Women of the same age living in Cook County had a lower birth rate, 2005 Census figures show. DuPage, Kane, Lake and McHenry counties all eclipsed the nation's fertility rate -- in some cases, dramatically. In McHenry County, for example, 142 of every 1,000 women from 20 to 34 years old had a child.
Women are marrying later, devoting more attention to careers and waiting longer to have children, research shows, which sometimes results in them not having children at all.
Other times the choice is deliberate. According to the National Center for Health Statistics, 6.2 percent of women in 2002 between ages 15 and 44 reported that they don't expect to have children in their lifetime -- up from 4.9 percent in 1982.
It's not a widely respected choice.
"There is a social stigma, but I think it's not equally applied across the country and not equally applied to both genders," says Vincent Ciaccio, a spokesman for No Kidding!, an international group for people without children based in Vancouver, British Columbia. "I am aware of some women who just don't mention they are child-free in mixed company."
Ciaccio conducted one of the few surveys of the child-free in the United States, involving 450 individuals. The more common motivations included concerns for personal space and time, and no feeling of a compelling reason to have kids.
Among married couples in Ciaccio's survey, 62 percent said they were concerned children would undermine their relationship with their spouse.
Preserving spousal companionship ranked high in another survey of 171 child-free individuals that was conducted by Laura Scott, who is working on a documentary about being childless by choice.
In dozens of sit-down interviews with childless individuals, Scott also found generally high support for public education and community programs for children.
Ciaccio's survey highlighted certain causes among the childless, including government subsidies for birth control, holding parents responsible for their children and the establishment of child-free areas in restaurants, movie theaters, and apartments.
Also of great importance: simple respect for their decision.
"People who don't have children and parents have a lot in common. They are not natural antagonists," says Ciaccio. "If parents respect the choices of people who have not had kids, and people who have not had kids respect the choices of parents, then we can all move forward together for mutual benefit."
places like Chuck E Cheese are like hell for me.
the NAACP thing ~ sounds like a good idea. I sold my home and moved out because of “Urban Development” and section8 vouchers taking over the neighborhood.
I mena the responsibility part and there’s nothing wrong wit hbeing childliike either. By childish I mean the tendency to refuse to face the reality of one’s situation and a willingness to protect and guide one’s children.
A lot of parents have children and then decide to get involved with unsuitable people who negatively affect the future and ruin the child’s life.
” mena the responsibility part and there’s nothing wrong wit hbeing childliike either. By childish I mean the tendency to refuse to face the reality of one’s situation and a willingness to protect and guide one’s children.”
I mean the responsibility part and there’s nothing wrong with being childlike either. By childish I mean the tendency to refuse to face the reality of one’s situation and a willingness to protect and guide one’s children.
How come more and more of my behavior is being controlled by government as if I were a damn child?
Abigail Adams --> That’s a very interesting insight! You are right, it would place a burden on the kids. Kinda like they have to keep tap-dancing—doing well in sports, getting good grades, giving the parents stuff to brag about—in order to keep the parents occupied and happy.
Have been thinking all afternoon about this and have concluded that there is a lot of truth to your comments. We stood by 2 basic precepts with our kids.
#1 ~ A parent's first responsibility is to protect their child from the world.
The second is to protect the world from their child.
#2 ~ It's the parent's job to comfort their child, not vice-versa.
Hopefully, when they're grown they will return the favor.
While it's important to instill confidence in the child's ability to win and do well, living vicariously through them as if they are an extension of yourself will certainly wreck a marriage.
No, people who don’t have children because they want to have their career/vacation/house/jet skis first. Those who put kids ‘on hold’ because they want material things instead is selfish. It’s about priorities.
Everyone is given by God a natural drive to procreate. Many who choose not to are suppressing that natural impulse. I find that wierd.
>>We do the responsibility part, but I’m known to be a bit childlike<<
Childlike is good!
Childish is stupid.
I am childlike in many ways. I have lots of simple fun.
My sisters are childish and most of their grown children ignore them and love me.
The last baby born was named after me.
I work with children all day long as an English teacher in a high school. One thing is certain: a fairly large minority of students in my class come from families with parents who are unwilling or unable to act like adults. I used to joke that I understood being a teenager, since I was one for 20 years (*cymbal crash*) - a true enough expression, considering my wayward youth in the late 60s and 70s - but I’m now seeing men and women in their 40s and 50s (and one memorable a**h*l* in his 60s) who are for all intents aged teenagers, with all of the problems of teenagers, such as lack of self-control, narcissism, and neurotic self-doubt. (My old ninth-grade English teacher would go crazy trying to diagram that last sentence.)
In my case, having a son powerfully imposed on me a sense of maturity and age that was missing before his birth. No wonder a lot of us don’t want kids.
“Everyone is given by God a natural drive to procreate. Many who choose not to are suppressing that natural impulse. I find that wierd.”
When God was giving out that “natural drive” he must have missed me. I don’t have it. It takes quite a bit of courage to search your soul and realize you don’t have that desire, and then to make the right decision based on that knowledge. It would have been selfish for me to try to conform to society’s expectations and have kids that I didn’t want, making those kids and myself miserable.
Sure, it seems weird. I feel weird. But I am a Christian, read the Bible and pray daily. My husband and I spent several years praying and soul-searching about this. God knows how he created me, and he did not give me the desire to have kids. In fact, I often thank him for the fact that we have no kids!
The reason for my choice was NOT about careers or vacations or a house or a jet ski. We live in a small house, haven’t been on vacation in several years, don’t own a jet ski or any other expensive toys, and I am not working right now. My choice was based on prayer and the desires of my heart.
Just because you don’t feel the same way I do, or don’t understand how I feel, does not make you right and me wrong. Different strokes, you know!
Ooops, looks like they've done a great job of teaching feminism, liberalism, environmentalism, no God, abortion as a right, and it's all about me.
Same here in MA. As I explained to two of the young ladies on our street who are in high school, and were encouraged by the League of Women Voters to get out the vote, if the Prop. 2 1/2 override fails it's not because folks don't want them to have good schools, it's just that we don't see a good accounting of where all that money is going. We see good programs moved aside so they can have 'diversity' classes, and a lot of kids are put into "Special Ed" classes because they can get more State and Federal funds for those. The school dept is very administrator heavy, and teachers continue to get higher degrees so their pay will go up.
This most recent override effort was the third in 6 years, and in the last 15 years the town has built a new elementary school, at the cost of 12.5 million, when it was supposed to have been 9 million, and a high school that started out at 40 something million and went to 65 million! We joking call it Shrewsbury University! The builder claimed that the cost went up so much because they found 'ledge' on the property. That means that there were rocks in the way. HELLO? It was on the top of one of the highest hills in a New England town; of COURSE there were going to be rocks. He shouldn't have gotten one dime extra because it was the job of the Architect and Builder to determine the proper placement of the buildings and access BEFORE construction ever began. The first winter they were in the building, the heating units went berserk and the resulting heat melted the ceiling tiles in the auditorium. So much for all that money buying quality.
Then, of course, once the old high school closed, because it was no longer suitable for the kids, they promptly remodeled it for use as another middle school! They've been spending money hand over fist, then are totally flummoxed by folks who don't want their taxes raised even more for their new 'programs'.
The problem is that the school departments don't worry about the cost of all this construction because they know the State will reimburse the city about 65% of the cost. It doesn't occur to them that the State is getting it's money from the same place the city is getting it; US!
Freerider ping!
Boomers like me were affected, too, in that when we had our little ones, baby sitters were nearly impossible to find. On top of the "baby bust" you got the abortion holocaust; it was a demographic stack-nuke. You were born right in the middle of that.
Hahaha!! Hey, I just watch The Military Channel, Fox, Cartoon Network and The Golf Channel. Wifey watches the popular crap and I yell at the commercials....
MA sounds a lot like NJ! :-( Well, I guess that’s no surprise. But your experience with school taxes and mine are so similar: Our township built a new middle school over budget to the tune of $12 million. The township fully expected to receive state funds to offset the cost, but the state denied them! :-0
During one vote for the school budget, we encountered schoolkids, too, as they stood outside the polling place holding signs saying things like, “We need music.” (I guess they were told their music programs would be cut.) My husband joked that he should’ve brought a sign saying, “We need our home.” The property taxes were escalating so much that people were desperately trying to sell their homes. They were literally being taxed out of their homes.
Anyway, as long as we’ve lived here, the voters in our township overwhelmingly have voted down every school budget proposed. And, each time, the school board has voted to increase it, and our taxes were raised, anyway. As it turns out, our votes are merely a suggestion. The board can choose to ignore our vote. Usually, the board proposes an outrageously high budget, obviously knowing that we’ll vote against it, so they can pass a lower budget that is still too high but claim they lowered it.
After almost 20 years here, we're getting ready to leave MA to move back home to MS, and we're going to the Gulf Coast, so we're gonna be trading high taxes for high insurance rates. On the other hand, the property taxes will be about what we're paying for home insurance now. ;o)
Fellmeth also sees children being jammed into extreme poverty by the growing trend of out-of-wedlock births -- which now stand at 37 percent. The Pew report found growing acceptance among younger people for childbearing outside marriage.
But he doesn't see the connection between these two statements? Maybe the middle class doesn't want to shoulder other peoples' burdens that they have deliberately made for themselves.
>>Here in New Jersey, we’ve taken to voting down school budgets because we’re voting against high taxes. We’re not voting against children.<<
Exactly, same here in California. We’re sick of seeing the teachers association whining for more funds to fix our dying schools, not 12 months after we voted them a big fat budget that was supposed to fix everything if only we would think of the children.
Personally, I’m not going to have children until I can afford to not have them raised by someone else. 50 years ago it was a different world, where both partners didn’t have to work 60 hour weeks to just get by.
>>That’s a very interesting insight! You are right, it would place a burden on the kids. Kinda like they have to keep tap-dancing—doing well in sports, getting good grades, giving the parents stuff to brag about—in order to keep the parents occupied and happy.<<
In some situations this may be a burden, in others it may simply teach the child that they are the most important being in the universe.
I think it is good for kids to not be the central thing in the house, at least not always.
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