No Longer Married With Kids

A new survey finds only about a quarter of U.S. households contain married couples with children -- a trend that may mean more than half of the nation's children won't be living with both parents after the turn of the century.

The General Social Survey, conducted periodically by the University of Chicago's National Opinion Research Center, found only 26 percent of households have married couples and kids, compared with 45 percent in the early 1970s.

The survey, released today, paints an even starker picture of marriage in the 1990s than U.S. Census officials, who found that married couples with children younger than 18 fell from 50 percent in 1970 to an estimated 36 percent of all families in 1997.

Tom W. Smith, director of the survey, said if current trends continue, most households won't even contain children -- largely a testament to the increasing number of people waiting to have children and the ever-growing number of baby boomers becoming "empty nesters.''

Surveyors found that Americans seem to be accepting of what Smith called the "modern family.''

For example, 67 percent of Americans surveyed last year disagreed that parents ought to stay together just because they have children. That question was not asked in previous surveys, Smith said.

Americans are becoming more accepting of divorce, due in part to the fact that many people who are starting families may be products of divorce themselves, said Stephen Kraus, a Connecticut-based market researcher.

"It's very much a sense of tolerance. People can do what they want,'' says Kraus of Yankelovich Partners, a market research and consulting firm that tracks attitudes about family, among other things.

Bahira Sherif, a professor of individual and family studies at the University of Delaware, told CBS Radio News she expects the number of married couples with children to continue going down.

"What makes me sad," says Sherif, "is I hear my students say because they are the children of divorce, they don't want to wish that on their children."

She suggests offering young people classes in personal relationships as early as possible. "I would start with junior high school and high school," she says.

In conducting the survey, researchers interviewed 2,832 Americans age 18 and older between February and May of last year.

The survey also found that:

• Fifty-six percent of adults were married, compared with nearly three-quarters in 1972, when the survey was first taken.
  
• Fifty-one percent of children lived in a household with their two original parents, compared with 73 percent in 1972.
  
• The percentage of households made up of unmarried people with no children more than doubled to 32 percent last year, compared with figures from 1972.
  
• And the percentage of children living with single parents rose to 18.2 percent, compared with 4.7 percent in 1972.