The museum is also the place they assign for God.

The traditional nuclear family – Mum, Dad, 2.4 children – is a shrinking minority. In less than 40 years, the proportion of households fitting this description has dropped from 52 per cent to 36 per cent, according to the latest social trends report from the Office for National Statistics. "The nature of family life has changed significantly in the past 40 years. The traditional family has become a museum piece," said Dr Richard Woolfson, a family expert and child psychologist.

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But according to new research published tomorrow, more than half of the parents questioned admit they don’t spend enough quality time as a family, with work, money and housework blamed most often for this.

Source/Full Story:  The Independent

There is a war going on, and this is part of it indeed.  The  reprobate wax worse and worse…

The pregnancy was unexpected, and for one 32-year-old single mother in Syracuse, New York, the ailing economy became a factor in her decision to have an abortion.

“More so now that we are in a recession … I felt I had to go through with the procedure because I cannot afford another child,” said the woman, a registered nurse who spoke on condition of anonymity because she was worried about job security.

“People say, ‘You’re a nurse, you’ll always have a job.’ I think it’s not as true as people think it is.”

The recession may be a factor influencing more Americans to opt out of parenthood with abortions and vasectomies, although there is no data available yet to suggest a trend

Even so, there is some anecdotal evidence that would-be parents are factoring the rough economic times into the most personal of reproductive choices, some experts said.

In 2005, the last year for which data is available, the U.S. abortion rate fell to the lowest level since 1974, according to the Guttmacher Institute in New York, a nonprofit group focusing on reproductive issues.

But at the National Abortion Federation, a hotline for women seeking abortion information has been “ringing off the hook,” according to the group’s president, Vicki Saporta.

“We are currently getting more calls from women who report that they or their partner have recently lost their job, and we are also hearing from more women facing eviction,” she said.

Source/Full Story:: news.yahoo.com

More people are living alone, more children are being raised by single parents and more grown-up children are living with their parents than ever before, according to the Office for National Statistics.

One expert said that the in-depth annual study was final confirmation that the nuclear family had become “a museum piece”.

The wide-ranging report also showed that Britain had become a nation of people who travel longer distances to work, take more foreign holidays and fill their homes with electrical gadgets.

The Social Trends report made clear, however, that the most radical changes had been to child-rearing and marriage.

Its figures showed that 30 per cent of women under 30 had given birth by the age of 25, while 24 per cent had married: the first time that having children had become the first major milestone of adult life, ahead of marriage. This was in sharp contrast to their parents’ generation. In 1971 three-quarters of women were married by 25, and half had given birth. The statistics also showed that:

Š the number of adults living alone doubled in a generation, from 6 per cent to 12 per cent, because of a combination of death, divorce and marrying at a later age;

Š single-parent households nearly tripled from 4 per cent of the total to 11 per cent between 1971 and 2008;

Š the percentage of households comprising the traditional nuclear family – a couple with children – fell from 52 per cent to 36 per cent over the same period;

Š the number of married couples hit the lowest level, in real terms, since 1895, with 237,000 marriages in England and Wales in 2006, down from a peak of 471,000 during the Second World War;

Š some 1.66 million children were being brought up by an unmarried couple, up from one million 10 years ago. The number brought up by married parents dropped from 9.57 million to 8.32 million.

The figures were published two months after official statistics showed that the annual rate of teenage pregnancy in England had risen to 42 in every 1,000, despite a £286 million government campaign to tackle the problem. The figures reinforced Britain’s position as the teenage pregnancy capital of Europe.

Source/Full Story@:  Telegraph