In case you haven't already seen this terribly depressing census report from last week, here are a few excerpts (emphasis added):
Opting to stay put, roughly 5.9 million Americans 25-34 last year lived with their parents, an increase of 25 percent from before the recession. Driven by a record 1 in 5 young men who doubled up in households, men are now nearly twice as likely as women to live with their parents.Six percent.
Marriages fell to a record low last year of just 51.4 percent among adults 18 and over, compared with 57 percent in 2000. Among young adults 25-34, marriage was at 44.2 percent, also a new low.
Broken down by race and ethnicity, 31 percent of young black men lived in their parents' homes, compared with 21 percent of young Latino men and 15 percent of young white men. At the state level, New York had the highest share of young men living with their parents at 21 percent, followed by New Jersey and Hawaii, all states with higher costs of living. Most of the cities with low percentages of young adults living at home were in the Midwest.
Younger women across all race and ethnic groups had fewer children compared with 2008. Births declined 6 percent among 20-34 year-olds over the two-year period even though the number of women in this group increased by more than 1 million, according to an analysis of census data by Kenneth Johnson, sociology professor and senior demographer at the University of New Hampshire. Never before has such a drop in births occurred when the population of young adults increased in at least 15 years.
Call it perpetual adolescence, or the death (or is it only dormancy?) of the survival instinct, or whatever.The whole point of parenting is to produce an independent individual. A healthy society would support that goal. When young men and young women aren't interested in or able to take their turns as grown-ups in the circle of life, we've all got a problem.
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Amen to infinity and beyond. Very, very sad to see. And terrifying.
ReplyDeleteMy son has recently decided to sit out a semester in favor of working. I am dying because I am afraid he will never finish, and it's his last semester. HOWEVER, I am very proud that he made the hard choice to prioritize the bird in the hand, so to speak. As you probably know, I have been torn between wanting an education for my children and failing to see what good it would ever do them, being the ages they are.
I hear and understand. Before hitting "publish" I edited out the part about fearing for my young adult children. I now have 5 kids in their twenties (and two teens) and I don't like to think about the world they'll raise their own kids in, God willing. This generation needs our constant prayers.
ReplyDeleteI'm proud of my kids, too. One of them got married last summer. I saw that as an act of not only faith, hope, and love, but of courage. What a world.
"We've got a problem."
ReplyDeleteNo, Jill we've got Europe. Perpetual welfare state, generational families living within the same walls. This is what happens when opportunity gets stolen by government. I had a friend visit Germany years ago. She said she saw examples where the new couple would build an addition onto their parents (and often grandparents) house. The grandparents got the new part, the parents the next newest and the newlyweds the oldest.
Why we are surprised, after sixty years of socialism, that our "wagon" is grinding to a halt and all the hopes and opportunities are squeezed to the point of imploding like they were a sinking ship plunging to the bottom of the ocean is beyond me. We've had example after example come before us.
God help us, because we obviously have bred out our ability to help ourselves. See any one of your excellent earlier posts on our horrible public education (or indoctrination) system.