In class this week we read and talked about trends concerning children, family, and the world. There were many surprising things that I learned and thought that should be shared with others. I think it would make a huge difference if people were taught the correct statistics and trends about the family and why it is important to have children. I think it is extremely important for people to know the research on controversial topics and understand what the research means. I'm grateful I get to take this class and learn about research involving the family. I am also grateful that I have an opportunity to share it with you on this blog. For this post I am going to be talking about some of the trends that were talked about in my class concerning marriage and family. All these trends that I am going to talk about are all interlinked somehow and affect each other.
The first trend that I want to focus on is that the number of people getting married is declining due to some of the other trends that occur and myths that have been created. Marriage is declining because more and more people are choosing to cohabit (60-80% of unmarried couples) instead of getting married. Young adults are choosing their careers or education over marriage. The majority of people still get married but they wait until later in their lives to get married. Women tend to get married at 28 and men tend to get married at 30. You may ask, "Well why is that so bad?" It has been proven that those who are married tend to be happier, healthier, financially better off, and live longer than those who are unmarried. It is also a problem because the longer a person waits to marry the less time, they will have to have children and the less children they will have. With less children being born the population will eventually start to decline making it to where we will have to work harder and smarter.
The second trend I want to talk about briefly is the divorce rate. Many people think that 50% of all marriages end in divorce but that is just a myth. The divorce rate is still quite high, but it has decreased over time to be about 24% of all marriages ending in divorce. Part of the reason for less divorces is because there are less marriages occurring as I talked about previously. It is important for people to understand that the divorce rate is not at 50% because it would help people to not be so hesitant about marriage.
The third trend that I want to touch on is about childbearing. Since many people are waiting to get married until later in their life it means that they are having children later in their life as well. The age of childbearing has increased to a woman's mid to late 30's. At that point most women have a short amount of time to have children which means they will have less children. With women having less children the birth rate and fertility rate decline. The definition of birth rate is the number of births out of a thousand people in an area. The definition of fertility rate is the number of children a woman will have in her lifetime. The current fertility rate in the United States is 1.8 children per woman and it needs to be at 2.13 in order for the population to replace itself. If the fertility rate continues to decrease, there will be more people in the older generations and less people in the younger generations when it should be the other way around.
These trends are important to understand because it is our future and the future of our children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren, and so on that it will affect. We need to be willing to protect our family and the idea of family so that we can always have love and support from those we care about.
Please feel free to comment any thoughts or questions you may have! I would love to hear your thoughts on this topic!
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