Week 15 Article: Future of the Family to 2030

David Komorowski
The Future of the Family to 2030
Article for Week 15


I found a very interesting article online today which paints a pretty convincing picture of what the family could be like in 2030. To many it may seem hard to predict in 20 years what factors will affect and shape families into what they will become. Although this article is extremely interesting, it is also 169 pages long so sadly I cannot go over the entire thing.

The first major part of the article I will talk about, which I also believe to be very important, are factors that will shape the family to what it will become. The first factor mentioned is population in which I can see why it is a big factor. As most people know, population tends to keep rising from year to year due to lowing of mortality and raising ages of life expectancy (the article states that people in their 80s and 90s will be much more likely to survive to that point as medical technology advances) which means numerous amounts of things—less people dying, more elderly to take care of, more struggles for limited resources, etc.
Another big factor discussed in the section was immigration which I believe to be completely true. With the amount of illegal as well as legal immigrants the U.S. has seen many changes in its demographics. For instance, the 2nd most spoken language in the U.S. is Spanish and for good reason seeing as how many years people struggle to come into the U.S. from the south for a better life. With that being said, whenever immigration occurs in a certain place—as proven many times within countries in the Caribbean—there is also an integration and assimilation of different foreign cultures that occurs as years go on. As integration occurs the immigrants also sometimes try and preserve their culture while adapting to the dominant one they have moved into. This causes globalization as well as a blending of cultures that will also change the way in which families are made up.
Although the article also describes external factors that will cause the family to change—economy, rise or lowing of crime and violence, etc.—I would like to move now to the projections that this article blatantly states to what its writers believe to be true. Within the projections the article states that:

- More young people preparing for higher education
- Smaller (one parent or cohabitating) families interacting at a higher rate
- There will be less competition for jobs than today but competition will remain fierce for “high quality” jobs
- Security will remain the same if not heightened by parents due to the increase of alcohol and drug use by their children.
- The family will be seen to be as big as 4 to 5 generations as opposed to 1 or 2 due to longer life expectancy.

I believe this article was very informative and had plenty of good points to share. It is impossible to know exactly what will shape the future for families and how but I believe their article did a really good job in trying to explain a possible way in which the future will pan out. If anybody wants to take a look and let me know what they think I posted the link below. Have a look.
http://www.oecd.org/dataoecd/11/34/42551944.pdf