17
Apr

UK: Death of the traditional family

   Posted by: Joshuah   in Family Life

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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

This entry was posted on Friday, April 17th, 2009 at 7:19 am and is filed under Family Life. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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