Since the Start of the Great Recession, More Children Raised by Grandparents
One child in 10 in the U.S. lives with a grandparent, a share that increased slowly and steadily over the past decade before rising sharply from 2007 to 2008, the first year of the Great Recession. About 40% of all children who live with a grandparent (or grandparents) are also being raised primarily by that grandparent.
Most ’Re-employed’ Workers Say They’re Overqualified for Their New Job
Workers who suffered a spell of unemployment during the recession are, on average, less satisfied with their new jobs than workers who didn’t. These re-employed workers also are more likely to consider themselves over-qualified for their current position. And six-in-ten say they changed careers or seriously thought about it while they were unemployed.
The Fading Glory of the Television and Telephone
The TV and the landline phone are both losing their cachet in the digital age, as fewer consider them necessities. But while phones are being dumped, Americans are stocking up on ever more television sets — especially the big flat ones
Lost Income, Lost Friends — and Loss of Self-Respect
A new Pew Research Center survey finds the long-term unemployed are more likely than the short-term unemployed not only to have lost income, but also to have lost contact with close friends, suffered strains in family relations and lost some self-respect and confidence in their long-term career prospects.
The Great Recession at 30 Months
More than half (55%) of adults in the labor force say that since the economic slump began 30 months ago, they have suffered a spell of unemployment, a cut in pay, a reduction in hours or have become involuntary part-time workers; the recession has also led to a new frugality and diminished expectations about retirement and their children’s future.
More Women Without Children
Nearly one-in-five American women ends her childbearing years without having borne a child, compared with one-in-ten in the 1970s. While childlessness has risen for all racial and ethnic groups, and most education levels, it has fallen over the past decade for women with advanced degrees.
The Typical Modern Mother: There Isn’t One
Today’s mothers of newborns are more likely than their counterparts two decades earlier to be ages 35 and older, to have some college education, to be unmarried or to be nonwhite — but not all at once.
A record 14.6% of all new marriages in the U.S in 2008 were between spouses of a different race or ethnicity from one another, according to a Pew Research Center analysis of new census data. Of all newlyweds in 2008, 9% of whites, 16% of blacks, 26% of Hispanics and 31% of Asians married outside their race/ethnicity. Patterns also varied by region (intermarriage is most common in the West) and by gender.
The New Demography of American Motherhood
Compared with mothers of newborns in 1990, today’s new moms are older, better educated and less likely to be white. A record 41% of births were to unmarried women; but most continue say this is bad for society.
The Return of the Multi-Generational Family Household
The multi-generational American family household is staging a comeback — driven in part by the job losses and home foreclosures of recent years, but more so by demographic changes that have been gathering steam for decades. As of 2008, a record 49 million Americans, or 16.1% of the total U.S. population, lived in such a household, up from 28 million, or 12.l%, in 1980. Such households had been more common a century ago, but began to fall out of favor after World War II. Now they are coming back.