The changing family in international perspective; families are becoming smaller and less traditional as fertility rates fall and more persons live alone; Scandinavian countries are the pacesetters in developing nontraditional forms of family living, but the United States has the highest incidence of divorce and of single-parent households - The American Family During the 20th Century

Monthly Labor Review, March, 1990 by Constance Sorrentino

Aging of the population. It is important to consider the age structure of the population because different arrays of persons by age result in different household structures across countries. Mortality, as well as fertility, has declined in the 20th century. The decline in mortality has been more or less continuous, and the average age at death has risen considerably in all developed countries. The decrease in fertility has resulted in a decline in the proportion of children in the population. However, because it affected all age groups, the drop in mortality did not have a major effect on the age structure of populations. In fact, mortality decreased more at younger than at older ages, thereby offsetting rather than exacerbating the effect of the fertility decline. Thus, the progressive aging of the population in the developed countries is attributable primarily to the declining fertility rates.(1)

Table 2 shows the distribution of the population by age in 10 countries from 1950 to 1990. The proportion of the population in the youngest age group (0-14 years) is declining everywhere, while the proportion of the elderly (age 65 and over) is increasing. Compared with most European countries and Japan, the U.S. and Canadian populations are more youthful, reflecting higher comparative fertility rates. However, in both North American countries, the declining fertility rates have produced a sharp drop since 1960 in the share of the population held by the under-age-15 group. With the exception of France, all the European countries and Japan now have less than one-fifth of their total population under 15, with Germany having the lowest proportion.

At the other end of the spectrum, European countries tend to have larger

proportions of elderly persons than do the two North American nations. Sweden, Germany, and Denmark all have about the same proportion of elderly as they have children under 15. In contrast, the proportion of children in the United States and Canada is nearly twice as great as the proportion of elderly.

Life expectancy at birth is higher for women than for men in all the countries studied. Women outlive men by 6 to 7 years, on average, and this influences household structures, as many more women than men live alone at older ages. In most developed countries, women must anticipate a period of living alone at some point during their later years.

Aging of the population is common to all the industrialized countries, although there are considerable differences in the extent and timing of the phenomenon. These differences are reflected in the comparisons presented later on household type. For example, countries with high proportions of elderly people tend to have higher proportions of single-person households, because the elderly are increasingly living alone.

Marriage and divorce. Almost everyone in the United States gets married at some time in his or her life. The United States has long had one of the highest marriage rates in the world, and even in recent years it has maintained a relatively high rate. For the cohort born in 1945, for example, 95 percent of the men have married, compared with 75 percent in Sweden.(2) The other countries studied ranked somewhere between these two extremes.