‘Traditional’ families no longer the norm
By Rebecca Adams, Huffington Post
When picturing the typical American family, you can forget about a “Leave It To Beaver”-type image. Currently, 54 percent of kids in this country don’t live in a home with two heterosexual parents in their first marriage, according to a recent Pew Research Center report.
“It’s important to keep in mind that what many define as ‘traditional’ is based on a 1950s-style family,” Gretchen Livingston, Senior Researcher at Pew and author of the study, told HuffPost in an email. “But in many ways, the 1950s and early 1960s were an anomaly, especially in terms of the fact that people were marrying quite young and also having relatively large families.”
Nowadays, only 46 percent of kids live in that aforementioned “traditional” family. Instead, 15 percent of today’s kids are living with two parents in a remarriage, 34 percent live with an unmarried parent, 4 percent live with cohabiting parents and 5 percent don’t live with either parent.