July 12, 2006
 

Society switches focus away from children

By Sharon Jason
USA Today

The USA is becoming a much more adult-focused society after being child-centered for decades, a report suggests.

Longer life expectancy, delayed marriage and childbearing, and increased childlessness add up to a longer life without kids, says the analysis, released today by the non-partisan National Marriage Project at Rutgers University.

Child-rearing occupies a smaller share of a person's adult life because there are longer periods before and after raising children compared with previous generations, says Barbara Dafoe Whitehead, the project's co-director and author of the study. It is based on U.S. Census data as well as cultural and social research.

"It's almost as if raising children, which used to become the common lot of most adults, now has become more of a niche in your life rather than one of the main features of adult life," she says.

In 1970, for example, 73.6% of women ages 25-29 had at least one minor child at home; 30 years later, 48.7% did.

In 1990, the most common household type was married couples with children. Now, single, childless households are the most prevalent.

And today, more women in their 40s are childless, the report says. One in 10 were childless in 1976; in 2004, it was about one of five.

Although Whitehead says Americans aren't "anti-child," she suggests that a society indifferent to parenting will further aggravate current attitudes and account for what Whitehead calls "the cultural devaluation of child-rearing."

"People who are rearing children and have children in the household no longer represent the dominant force in society or politics," she says.

The shift also is evident on TV, says William Douglas, a professor of communication at the University of Houston and author of Television Families: Is Something Wrong in Suburbia? "The plot more often than previously focuses around parents. Children simply no longer hold this elevated status where the plot is necessarily around them."

Workplace policies also reflect the greater attention to adults, says Thomas Coleman of Unmarried America, a Glendale, Calif., group, formerly the American Association of Single People.

"The so-called family-friendly programs that emerged in the '80s and '90s are being replaced with work-life programs," he says. "The terminology is changing to be more generic."

Isabel Sawhill of the Brookings Institution's Center on Children and Families is not ready to sound any alarms yet about what this adult focus suggests for child well-being.