In 1960, the year Helen Cini gave birth to one of her five children, 15 other kids were born on her block here in this quintessential postwar American suburb.
The local obstetrician was so busy he often slept in his car.
Kathy Bachman felt like an oddity when her family moved to Cherry Lane in the Crabtree section of Levittown when she was 5. She was an only child, and "everybody had five or six kids in every house."
Fast-forward to 2011.
Bachman, now 64, still lives in her childhood home. She brought up her kids there, but they're grown and gone. The house next door is vacant. Few driveways are cluttered with scooters and tricycles.
"Out of 75 houses on the street, I'd say maybe 15 might have kids," Bachman says.
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%.
There are now more households with dogs (43 million) than children.
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1 comment:
Here in Northern Ireland most young people (especially Protestant children) move to either Belfast city or indeed to another part of the United Kingdom for work, education and health factors. Over time the rural areas in N.I. (the majority of the province) has become increasingly sustained by older generations which as time progresses continue to dwindle. In 50 years time there will be hardly any unionists in the west at all.
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