Summary of article; for the first time in US history “nonfamily households” account for more households than do marraiges. Nonfamily households include both homosexual and heterosexual couples living out of wedlock. Nonfamily households made up 50.2% (55.8 million households) vs. 49.8% for marraiges (55.2 million households). These figures do not include single men and women.
I think this will ultimately result in 1000 debates, but the one which I would like to start here is also mentioned in the article. What does this mean for future politics?
Personally, I hope this is a presursor to the start of the beginning of the end for “family values/traditional values/Christian values” politics. The butterfly flapping its wings if you will.
But, alas, I don’t have much hope that the chage will be fast. The article also mentions that most of the “nonfamily households” are clustered in larger cities such as New York and LA. I fear that this will limit the “nonfamily” voting power in national elections b/c of the electoral college (is there a more appropriate term for that?).
Does this include also households where people are simply roommies?
The GLBT movement here in Spain calculates their numbers of “gay people living in relationships” by looking at census figures of “households with two and only two same-gender adults”. After the last census they’d started touting numbers as high as 20% unless someone asked whether they’d taken out parent/child cases :smack: Mind you, the people counting “unmarried anysexual couples” hadn’t either.
If a company has a set of related products, they often refer to them as a family, “Check out our family of toilet cleaning products.”
In workplaces, it’s not uncommon for close co-workers to say, “we’re not just co-workers, we’re family.”
Why is the term “nonfamily” in any way appropriate to describe any domestic arrangement that is not a man and a woman with a legal contract, and their 2.5 kids? I’ll buy “non-traditional family” but (searches self) yes I am offended that Mrs. Call and I, who are not married but whom I proudly call my wife and have been together for orders of magnitude longer than any Brittany Spears’ marriage, along with the NatureKids, is anything BUT a family.
I’ve never heard the term “nonfamily” before, so I hope it’s not popular, nor especially the sentiment behind it. But if it is, I hope the political change you’re hoping for at the very least deletes that term.
I would be interested in seeing those numbers as a function of age. I imagine that for people 30 and under, the number of “nonfamily households” is much higher.
I live with my brother. It doesn’t mean that either he or myself are gay. It doesn’t mean that we’re not family either for that matter.
This data seems pretty useless. It can be taken to mean many things. Some of which include:
OMG More gay people!
Jebus, Housing prices skyrocking means more people unrelated live together!
OMG its those immigrants again!
These numbers by themselves don’t mean a damn thing other than that there’s a smaller percentage of married folks living together. Speculating as to why without further data is just pulling explainations out our collective butt.
Certainly raises the question of who gets to define “non-family,” especially when marriage isn’t legal (e.g., same-sex couples) or relevant (e.g., friends or non-breeding family members).
The OP’s link says that they don’t include “unmarried men and women living alone”, but AFAICT they take into account other kinds of household structures involving the unmarried.
Frinstance, I am an unmarried heterosexual woman currently sharing a house with a divorced heterosexual woman to whom I am not related. Best I can figure, that makes us a “nonfamily household”. Okay, fine.
I can certainly see, though, why people like Nature’s Call would be offended at having their households called “nonfamily”. If two parents and their biological children don’t qualify as a “family”, who does, for heaven’s sake?
Same goes for single parents living with their children, who according to the linked article are also categorized as “nonfamily”. :eek: :mad: I dare the sociologists who coined that usage to repeat it to the faces of people living in such households. I think they’d wind up on the receiving end of some remarkably sudden and pronounced demonstrations of family solidarity.
I certainly hope that “nonfamily” wasn’t meant to be so inflammatory, because it is to me as well (raised by single parent). On the other hand, I can’t think of many other terms that would make sense for classification purposes. Alternative family? Non-traditional family?
Those are okay terms, I guess, but I don’t see why we should have to define “family” as based exclusively on marriage in the first place.
Here’s my suggestion for a (fairly conservative) definition of a “family household”:
A group of two or more people living together, each of whom is connected (directly or indirectly) to each of the others by marriage/committed partnership, or biological/adoptive relationship.
Thus a married couple living with their biological children is a “family household”. And so is an unmarried couple with or without children of both or either partner. And so is a group of siblings being raised by a mother, grandmother, father, uncle, etc. And so is a poly marriage with whatever children any of the partners have. And so is an uber-traditional Indian-style “joint family” household headed by the senior married couple and including their married children, grandchildren, and other relatives.
And here’s my suggestion for a less conservative definition of a “family household”:
Any group of people living together who consider themselves a family and describe themselves as such, and what their marital status or blood relationship happens to be is none of anybody else’s damn business.