The Current View of the Family Household

The mission of the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) is to promote policies that will improve the economic and social well-being of people around the world. The origins date back to 1960, when 18 European countries plus the United States and Canada joined forces to create an organization dedicated to global development. There are 34 member countries today that span the globe, from North and South America to Europe and the Asia-Pacific region. This organization includes many of the world’s most advanced countries but also emerging countries like Mexico, Chile and Turkey. The OECD works closely with emerging giants like China, India and Brazil and developing economies in Africa, Asia, Latin America and the Caribbean.

Summary:

The OECD has a view of what the family household of OECD countries looks like today. The most dominant features of the family household composition for the entirety of the OECD area is the progressive decline in the average size of households, the rapid rise in one-person households, and the increase in single-parent households. In the European Union average household size has been falling for some time. About twelve percent of the population are now living in one-person households, and over four percent are lone parents. In the United States, average household size has fallen from 3.29 in 1960 to 2.59 in 2000. The baby boom had a great effect on the 1960 statistic so the fact that it has decreased only this much is not that harmful.

These trends are pretty international and can be largely explained by a combination of ageing of the population, lower birth rates, increasing divorce rates and break-up of co-habiting relationships. Marriage and birth rates are declining across Europe. Unmarried cohabitation and divorce are widespread and the number of re-constituted families is on the rise. However, rates of unmarried co-habitation vary widely from more than twenty percent in Sweden to between one and five percent in Southern European countries. The ratio of children being born to cohabitating people range from a high fifty percent in Sweden and Latvia to low single figures in Greece and Italy. Great Britain has witnessed an explosion of non-marital childbearing rising from 9% of all births in 1975 to 43% in 2004.

Divorce remains the main cause of the rise in lone parent families, but the sharp increase in births to cohabiting mothers has also been an important contributor (due to the high rates of break-up of such unions). Also, a recent study estimated that about three in every 20 men and women aged from 16-59 are in a relationship best described as “living apart together.” There is also an important ethnic dimension. Again, in Great Britain, household and family structures of ethnic minority groups tend to be rather different from the White group who made up some 92 percent of the population according to the 2001 census. Even after taking account of different age structure, Black and Mixed ethnic groups for example are much more likely to live as lone parent families, while those of South Asian ethnic background tend to live in larger units. However, despite the turbulences of recent decades, the family household has far from disappeared. In the United States around 70 per cent of all households are family households in; the EU-25 in 2004, over 45% of all private households corresponded roughly to the traditional notion of the nuclear family; and in Great Britain, most people still live in a family set-up (despite the growth in one-person households).

My Questions:

Do you think this is an accurate description of today’s families?

Do you think that the recent stability indicates a new equilibrium or just a lull?