The US Census Bureau thread

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Census reveals plummeting U.S. birthrates


June 3rd, 2011

By Haya El Nasser and Paul Overberg



Read More: http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/census/2011-06-03-fewer-children-census-suburbs_n.htm

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Children, the mainstay of suburbia and residential neighborhoods across the nation for more than a half-century, are fewer and increasingly sparse in many places. The share of the population under age 18 dropped in 95% of U.S. counties since 2000, according to a USA TODAY analysis of the 2010 Census. The number of households that have children under age 18 has stayed at 38 million since 2000, despite a 9.7% growth in the U.S. population. As a result, the share of households with children dropped from 36% in 2000 to 33.5%.Helen Cini has lived in four different sections of Levittown, Pa., and has resided in her current Levittown home for 35 years. There are now more households with dogs (43 million) than children.

- Americans are getting older, and women are having children later. And when they do, they're not having as many. Births among Hispanics — they make up 23.1% of those under 18, up from 17.1% in 2000 — have not been enough to stem the overall decline. Because families with children tend to live near each other, the result is an increasingly patchy landscape of communities teeming with kids, and others with very few. "All of a sudden, there may technically be no children in the neighborhood," says James Hughes, dean of the Edward J. Bloustein School of Planning and Public Policy, Rutgers University. The number of non-Hispanic white women of child-bearing age has dropped 6% since 2000, and they're not having having enough children to keep that population from dropping eventually. Fertility has declined among blacks, too, resulting in a 2.3% drop in black children during the same period.

- A recent Census survey shows that white women are more likely to be childless than other groups and that black women are more likely to be childless than Hispanics.The drop in fertility is "a big contributor," says Kenneth Johnson, demographer at the University of New Hampshire's Carsey Institute. "Although there is a substantial number of women in urban cores, there's not a lot of children produced by them."

The USA TODAY analysis shows:

• Children make up 24% of the nation's population, down from 25.7% in 2000. The kid population declined more precipitously in 58.6% of the country' 3,143 counties.

• The number of counties that had a greater share of kids than the national average fell from 1,378 to 1,247.

• Even in counties where the percentage of children grew, only 49 gained more than 1 percentage point — many of them suburbs on the outer edge of metropolitan areas such as Forsyth, Whitfield and Newton outside Atlanta and Cabarrus and Union outside Charlotte.

A University of Southern California analysis of the state's shrinking child population found that Los Angeles County is at the center of the decline because of difficult living conditions for families facing high housing costs during economic hard times. "The image of the white family living in the suburb is becoming extinct,'' says William Frey, demographer at the Brookings Institution. "It's an endangered species."

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USA TODAY's Live Stream Census: http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/census/default.htm