Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: FRIDAY, February 19, 1993 TAG: 9302190119
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Cox News Service
DATELINE: ATLANTA LENGTH: Medium
HOME IS THE PLACE MANY JUST CAN'T LEAVE
America's baby busters, the nation's 20-ish young adults, continue to set records for delaying marriage and parenthood.But if you ask these trendsetters why they're putting family values on hold, they won't offer an explanation of individual freedom and experimentation - they left that to their baby-boomer parents.
This generation of Americans has a hard-luck story to tell.
Gaining an economic foothold has become so difficult that the majority of young, single adults - ages 20 to 24 - still lived with their parents in 1992.
Even by the time they reach their early 30s, one in four single adults still lives in their childhood bedroom, according to a U.S. Census Bureau report released Thursday.
The new statistics also show the median age for first marriages climbed to older than 26 for men - about the same as a century ago - and older than 24 for women. Now, as then, men take longer to reach the financial stability most want before they get married.
"We just continue to see slow, gradual trends in the same direction - delaying marriage, kids living with one parent and young adults living at home," said Arlene F. Saluter, author of the Census Bureau report.
The latest statistics do not indicate that any major trends are reversing, she said.
Stefanie Harris, a 23-year-old Georgia State University graduate, is among the baby busters still struggling to leave the nest.
A business major living in Atlanta with her mother, Harris had to settle for a $5-an-hour, no-benefits job. Now planning to go to law school, she can't picture being economically stable enough to start a family until she reaches 30.
"It takes longer to get established, so you don't even think about being committed [to a relationship]," she said. "You try to keep yourself open to any opportunity that becomes available."
The changes in American family life - from the increase in divorce and single parenthood to the delays in marriage and child-bearing - are the result of a combination of economic and social trends, according to the experts.
In the mid-1950s, when America's economy was in the midst of an unprecedented era of growth, the typical man got married at 22.6 years of age - four years younger than the typical marriage age for men now.
"People's idea of what's normal is what they saw when they grew up," said Martha Farnsworth Riche, director of policy studies at the Population Reference Bureau in Washington.
But as the statistics on the age of marriage show, that period actually was an unusual blip in history. The economy was so strong then that it would be virtually impossible for the baby-busters to do better than their parents.
"Their parents' generation made a killing," Riche said. "We're now back on a long-term track."
The changes - whether economic or social - mean that fewer adults and children live in traditional families than 20 years ago:
Only three in five adults in 1992 were married, down from nearly three in four in 1970.