Insight of the Day: Marriage is Becoming Extinct

Read this and it blew my mind: Marriage with children has become the exception rather than the rule.  Given that I work on a few clients that target to the nuclear family of: mom, dad, 1.5 kids and dog it was shocking and expected.


Shocking because I've tried many times, in many different ways to tell clients the world isn't what it was back in the 50's.  Leave It To Beaver or Father Knows Best isn't a reality any longer.  Side note: I actually think these two shows were never the American reality but people at least tried hard to aspire and admire this ideal.


Expected because my always observant nature has seen everything but this happening in my personal life and in the news, in entertainment, in statistics.  I know a lot of married couples who know kids are not for them, I grew up with many single mothers, I know plenty of divorced singles co-parenting, and now that I re-look at it my single (non-married, but maybe in a relationship) outnumber my married friends.  So what does that mean for these Fortune 500 companies?  Well, a lot.


If they haven't seen behaviors changing or new insights coming out of their multi-million research reports, I'd start re analyzing.  The mere fact that "married couples with one or more children now constitute less than one quarter of all HH’s in the US" is very telling that times are a changing...


More facts:

• The greatest demographic change over the past 50 yrs is the surge of people living alone 
• The marriage rate among young Americans continues a decades-long downward spiral
• Nearly four out of every 10 births are now to unmarried women.

What might change, well to start off there will be more people living alone & working.  That means many convenience services will be needed, cleaning, cooking, laundry, etc. Things will need to be condensed to single servings. Costco sized items will be left to multi-generational-family-households. A rise in single parents while moms are natural at nurturing they will need male role models for their children and vice versa dads will need to be more nurturing and help in parenting.  Of course they'll probably a rise in dating services that are even more specific, hello Millionaire Matchmaker.  Children will be growing up in 2 different households, parenting as we've known it will have to change in how to give children a good upbringing as it used to be based on two role models in the household.  People in the outer circle of children will play a much more important role: teachers, coaches, other parents in helping out.