Families...The New Minority Group?

We were shocked to see recent 2005 U.S. Census tabulations revealing what we had suspected for some time now based on our ethnographic work…Families are no longer the dominant social formation at the household level.

Defining ‘family’ loosely as any household with 1 or more minors living in it…(including single Moms here as well as 2 parent families), families now constitute a mere 34.8% of all households in the U.S. (based on data released in the 2005 American Community Survey).

The inverse finding, for those researchy geeks out there, is that most of us, at any given, time, either live alone, with a partner or with various #s of room-mates…As marriages continue to falter, childbirth gets delayed and people live much longer after their children leave the ‘nest’, the proportion of our lives spent inside a domestic ‘family’ unit with kiddies around will continue to shrink and shrink…unless we somehow adopt the joint family model of many traditional Asian societies….uuuuhhh…thanx but no thanx...

What, we wonder, will CPG brands that have spent decades marketing to ‘Mom’ as the key purchaser of their products (e.g. Procter and Gamble, SC Johnson, Unilever, Kraft, etc.) now do as they cope with this stunning confirmation of the drastically altered sociological landscape of American households…

Food for thought…

Comments

[Cathy James]

Be careful to distinguish between married couples and families with children. Only 35% of HH are families with children, but more like 50% (depending on how you slice the data) of adults are married. There are many, many DINK households out there. "Live alone, with a partner, or roommates" makes it sound like none of the childless couples are married.

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