New census figures show that the percentage of Californians who live in “nuclear family” households ”” a married man and a woman raising their children ”” has dropped again over the last decade, to 23.4% of all households. That represents a 10% decline in 10 years, measured as a percentage of the state’s households.
Those households, the Times analysis shows, are being supplanted by a striking spectrum of postmodern living arrangements: same-sex households, unmarried opposite-sex partners, married couples who have no children. Some forms of households that were rare just a generation ago are becoming common; the number of single-father households in California, for instance, grew by 36% between 2000 and 2010.
Interesting. I see that the LA Times reported the significant relative increase in same sex households in CA (25%) between 2000 – 2010. They didn’t find space to note that in CA same sex households form 1% of all households.
A good thing Californian schools lead the nation.
I think this article would be better served by acknowledging why this demographic shift is taking place. As this article from the same paper indicates: http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-0525-usc-report-20110525,0,367814.story
the change is not so much because of an explosion of non-traditional families, but because of a significant drop in the number of children. The article suggests cost is the key issue, but I wonder whether there could be cultural factors – California just isn’t strongly family focused, so fewer people start families, more who do move away, and more who want a non-family ethos move there. That kind of dynamic should be self-reinforcing to a point, and after a while will begin to show up in the kind of statistics LA Times mentions in the above article.
The article doesn’t need all of that, but just a sentence or two would seem to be in the interest of good journalism. As it stands, it reads almost like cheerleading for non-traditional households. Which, ironically, would be itself a factor in encouraging fewer Californians to have children or to remain when they do. It’s a clear sign that they aren’t really wanted if they are a ‘boring’ household made up of kids and their biological parents when LA Times seems to celebrate their ongoing disappearance.