[TheMole]

It's a pretty good article on an important subject, but my BS meter's needle jumps at some of the numbers. Suppose an apartment building has two suites, one housing a family with mother, father, and four children, and the other housing a retired widow. Seven people live in the building. Only one of them is a "singleton". However, single people could be said to make up 50% of the "households". In the reporting of sociologists and journalists, this is how the statistics work. If the four children leave home to go to college and live in a dorm, they now form four new singleton households. If the mother or father dies, the surviving spouse is now a "singleton", a category which in reality includes a lot of elderly women. As one of the article's own stats went, there are seven million single-person households in Britain. Yes, and there are over 60 million people in Britain. Ya gotta crunch the numbers hard.

[TopQuark]

All of what you said is true, and one could break down the categories further. Regardless of whether one does, however, in a stable society the processes you describe result in the same number of households (the four children that formed single households one year used to marry almost at once and contribute to the disappearance of single households at the same rate, for instance).

So, you do not have to cruch the numbers representing the subcategories to see the trend.