22 July 2011

Married, no kids. The most common California family. And a new poll for TYWKIWDBI readers.

Excerpts from an article in the Los Angeles Times:
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...

Indeed, interviews with numerous families in Southern California reveal a generation of parents and children who still view the family as the building block of society but no longer view the nuclear family as the ideal. By and large, those interviewed insisted that their non-nuclear lives do not reflect a weakening of society but a fluidity and complexity that echoes a modern world...
I'm not positive why the numbers in the figure above don't add to 100%.  Perhaps the other 32% of households are single persons living alone?

This seems like a good time for another TYWKIWDBI reader poll.  At the top of the right sidebar is a poll asking you to identify your living arrangements.  This will obviously sample people worldwide, rather than the U.S., and will have no scientific validity whatsoever.  It's just a way to satisfy one's curiosity about who else is reading this blog.

Addendum:  Oops.  I knew I would overlook some possible categories, some of which have already been pointed out within the first few minutes.  Unfortunately I can't add choices to the poll without losing the early votes, so I guess the nonlisted options will have to be grouped under "other."

Addendum:  The final data, based on 766 responses by TYWKIWDBI readers:
  • 222 - Married with kids
  • 220 - Single without kids
  • 134 - Married without kids
  • 103 - Unmarried, living with partner
  • 28   - Single parent
  • 26   - Same-sex partner
  • 9     - Same-sex marriage
  • 24   - other

7 comments:

  1. Missing categories (more accurate for us):
    * Married, with adult relatives.
    * Married, with adult children.
    Yes, from California Bay Area = $$$$! (but check out Humigeddon on TYWKI to find out why we stay!!).

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  2. What about mixed families? My wife and I are raising each other's children, but have none of our own together. (5 is plenty, thank you)

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  3. Wasn't Senator Franken interpreting nuclear families to mean two adults raising their biological or adopted children?

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  4. My opposite sex partner and I are not married and live together, so I marked that option. However, we share a house with several other graduate students which seems worth mentioning.

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  5. Single here, living alone, unless you count two cats. And I do.

    I know you have your preferred pronunciation for the blog, and since it's your blog, well...

    But when I first started reading a while back you hadn't posted that, so I pronounced it more like it reads, tew-kewd-bee, which I liked because it was like 'too cute be'. :-)

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  6. As our lifespans extend, so many of my friends are taxed with the care of their parents (and some the care of their own kids AND their parents). My parents did not have me until they were 40 and so they passed before I was old enough to truly appreciate them as one adult to another. But in trade, they afforded me a freedom - I was able to leave my hometown and make decisions completely free of their religeon, predjudices, and such. I can only pity these men and women who are single and lonely and sacrificing their youth to care for their parents. I want to believe that this a burden few having children in their teens and 20's consider. However, I cannot count how many times the comeback to my saying, 'no, I probably will not have kids' is, 'but who is going to care for you when you are old?'.

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  7. And how do you answer that question?

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