Opinion: America’s changing family patterns, part II

The traditional American family has been experiencing changes for all age groups, all races, and all ethnic groups that have been transforming the fabric of our society since the cataclysmic decade of the 1960s. Writing for the Hoover Institute, Herbert S. Klein points out, “Every aspect of the American family is experiencing change. These include the number of adults who marry, the number of households that are formed by married people, the number of children that are conceived, the economic role of mothers, the number of non-family households, and even the importance of marriage in accounting for total births.”

Birth rate

A crude birth rate is stated as the number of births per one thousand people already in the population. Therefore, it will almost always have a decimal point. According to Statistica, 200 years ago, the birth rate in the United States was exactly like that of a “third-world country.” In 1825, our birth rate was 54.89.

Although the expression “third-world country” is not used anymore, it was an apt description of those countries that did not benefit from the two great economic transformations that created the “modern world,” that is capitalism and communism. In the 1980s, when the term was widely used, the third-world countries were in sub-Saharan Africa, most of Asia, and scattered throughout Central and South America.