Commentary

The American Family in the 21st Century

The USA population has reached 337 million in 2024.This increase of the American population is too small to maintain the population growth that at one time allowed the USA to become a major power. The reason for this population stagnation it that the average birth rate per woman age 15 to 45 consists of only 1.9 children. Evidently, any generation must exceed a birth rate of 2.1 in order to replace the previous generation. There are couples who have no children, so that a birth rate of only 2 children cannot maintain the level of population needed to replace the previous generation. 

The age at marriage in the USA has increased from 24 for men and 20 for women in 1950 to 30 for men and 28 for women in 2024. There are now about 22 million Americans age 19 to 22 and about 2.2 million annual marriages. Divorce has become so popular that somewhat more than 689,000 women divorce each year. This means that 52% of married men and women divorced during the current century. As a result of this high divorce rate, 20% of children live only with their mothers. In addition, numerous children live with a stepfather and their mother. A common belief among the 48 percent of cohabiting couples is that these "trial" associations reduce the divorce rate. The fact is, however, that unmarried couples who live together without a marriage have a higher divorce rate than those who did not live together until married.  Evidently a ceremony is a public commitment which serves as a means of holding a marriage together. 

In 2024, 118 million or 46 percent of adult Americans are single. A rather recent development in the American family among the upper middle class of college educated Americans is a high vertical and horizontal rate of mobility. Vertical mobility refers to migration from the parental home to other towns and cities, often far from birth families. Vertical mobility relates to efforts to attain higher incomes and more prestigious occupations than are available at home. Horizontal mobility refers to the migration of job seekers to far away places. The abandonment of the parental family results in the destruction of family life altogether. Many grandparents do not know their grandchildren, who do not know their grandparents. 

A more recent development among the married couples in this country is so-called intermarriage. This refers to religious intermarriages as well as racial intermarriages. The marriage of a Protestant to a Catholic is intermarriage within Christianity. It is nevertheless intermarriage, as Catholics live in a different world than Protestants. Catholicism is a unified system that protects the individual from becoming lonely and makes him less likely to use drugs, drink too much alcohol, committing suicide, or commit crimes than is true of Protestants. Emile Durkheim, one of the most prolific sociologists of the nineteenth century, shows in his book Suicide that the uniformity and the religious requirements of Catholicism give the believers a sense of security which the numerous Protestant denominations cannot emulate. Jewish-Christian intermarriages have risen immensely in the 21st century. Seventy percent of American Jews have married non-Jews of those who got married during the 15 years ending in 2023. In the early twentieth century, Jewish-Christian intermarriage was almost unknown. In this century, more and more Jews and Christians have met each other at work in school and in recreational associations. There was a time when Jews were not invited to Christian homes, when both religions frowned on intermarriages, and when anticipation of eventual children raised the question as to in which religion the children would be raised. In this century, many of these obstacles have ceased to be considered, as a vast number of Americans have abandoned religion and accepted agnostic views instead (agnostic is Greek. It means no knowledge and is derived from gnosis, meaning knowledge). Americans of any religious background are not living in an intermarriage if both ar e agnostics who do not know whether God exists. Some years ago a movie called Guess Who's Coming to Dinner explored the intermarriage of a Caucasoid girl to a Negroid man. Despite the unlikely ending of the movie, which seeks to portray the families of both the woman and the man as satisfied with this arrangement, the real effect of this movie is to portray the immense difficulties which a racial intermarriage presents. Even those who truly love each other will find that their children will have great difficulties in finding a marriage partner, as a vast majority of black and white Americans reject racial intermarriage. 

Sociologists have discovered that a majority of Americans marry someone living within five miles of each other, are most likely to have a similar educational history, have similar political opinions, and agree on child raising issues. This essay is only a limited summary of American family life. There are many books concerning the American family in your library. Try to skip the TV and read an important book. Books ae far more entertaining than TV.

Shalom u'vracha.

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