March 2008

 

In This Version:

  • Americans: How They Live, Work, and Play
  • In Sickness and in Wealth
  • USA to Grow to 438 million people by 2050
  • Assimilation of Immigrants
  • Children? Living Arrangements and Child Care

Americans: How They Live, Work, and Play

Time Magazine opted to take an in-depth look at Americans and how they spend their time and money. Some of the statistics identified for this feature speaks volumes about who we are and what’s important to us. Check out…

  • There are 303 million Americans and 242 million of them live in a city or suburb; 141 million work outside the home; 107 million drive to work alone; and 70 million of them leave for work between 6:30 and 8:30 a.m.
  • The morning rush involves more than 4 in 10 Americans on the move each weekday morning between this two hour time window with the average American sitting in traffic for 38 hours burning an additional 26 gallons of gas per person.
    LA is #1 for traffic sitting with its residents averaging 72 hours a year followed by San Francisco-Oakland at 60 hours.
  • Families aren’t what they used to be. Only 10% of American households have 5 or more people living in them compared with 21% in 1970 and one-third of American households consist of only two people.
  • TV – after sleep and work, TV is the #1 consumer of our free time; the average U.S. households has more TVs than people; 2.73 televisions as compared to. 2.6 people per household.
  • Spending on DVD rentals has climbed to $24.4 billion but we still manage to go out to movie theaters with Americans averaging between 5 and 8 movies a year
  • This spending on movies at the movie theater is $9.4 billion which represents 10 times more than spending at all major professional sports
  • The range of TV time varies based upon household status; women with young children come in on the low side at 1 hour and 28 minutes a day of TV watching while the high end is represented by child-free men at 4 hours and 38 minutes
  • The gender divide with men averaging one hour more free time than women with women spending 42 minutes on housework and 28 minutes on cooking
  • The amount of time Americans spend sleeping is another area of concern as diminished functioning from lack of sleep accounts for additional auto accidents and deaths. Children sleep one hour less a night than they did 30 years ago. In addition, there is an 80% increase in obesity among adolescents for each hour of sleep they lose.
  • The United States has more fast-food cooks than they do full-time farmers; 612,020 vs. 392,850 and Americans spend more in restaurants than they do in grocery stores; $390 vs. $364 billion.
  • Exercising a dream is really true. While Americans spend $4.9 billion on fitness equipment and $17.4 billion on fitness clubs, the American Time Use Survey found that on any given day, 83% of Americans don’t exercise at all.

(Source: One Day in America. Time Magazine. November 2007)
more…http://www.time.com/time/specials/2007/article/0,28804,1674995_1683300,00.html

 

In Sickness and in Wealth

A PBS special that airs four Thursdays in a row starting 3/27/08 explores the relationship and reality of inequality and health in the United States. The documentary explores why your zip code, bank balance, and race are more powerful predictors of your health and life expectancy than your medical coverage, your good and bad habits, and your genetic makeup. A few of the statistics to be featured in this series include:

  • The United States possesses the highest gross national product in the world and spends $2 trillion annually on health care and yet Americans live shorter, often less healthy lives than almost any other industrialized nation. Please Note: the $2 trillion expended annually on health care in the United States is more than half the total expenditures world wide.
  • People who are in the highest income groups can anticipate living on average 6 ½ years longer than those Americans living in the lowest income group. Middle income families, families of four making $41,300 to $82,600 annually, will die on average 2 years sooner than those in the top income bracket.
  • Taking into consideration income level or social status, African Americans die earlier than their white peer group members.

(Source: USA Today, 3/3/08) more…http://www.unnaturalcauses.org/

 

USA to Grow Between Now and 2050

The ranks of the 303 million Americans are projected to increase to 438 million by 2050 and that increase will be driven primarily by immigration with the number of Hispanics estimated to triple. Other projections from this report from the Pew Research Center include:

  • If current trends continue, 82% of the increase will be immigrants arriving from 2005 to 2050 and their U.S.-born descendants
  • The 117 million people added during this time period will consist of 67 million immigrants and 50 million of their U.S. born children
  • Nearly one in five Americans (19%) will be an immigrant in 2050, compared with one in eight (12%) in 2005.
  • By 2025, the immigrant, or foreign-born share of the population will surpass the peak during the last great wave of immigration a century ago.
  • The impact of immigration has been compounded as the number of births for U.S. women dropped sharply and then leveled off.
  • Hispanics will make up 29% of the U.S. population in 2050, compared with 14% in 2005.
  • The non-Hispanic white population will increase more slowly than other racial and ethnic groups; whites will become a minority (47%) by 2050.
  • The nation's elderly population will more than double in size from 2005 through 2050, as the baby boom generation enters the traditional retirement years.
  • The number of working-age Americans and children will grow more slowly than the elderly population, and will shrink as a share of the total population.

Please Note: The Center's projections are based on detailed assumptions about births, deaths and immigration levels--the three key components of population change. All these assumptions are built on recent trends. Trends can and do change making for some uncertainties.

 

Dependency Ratio

The Pew Center Report referenced above also included an analysis of what they refer to as the "dependency ratio". This dependency ratio refers to the number of children and elderly compared with the number of working-age Americans.

  • As of 2005, that ratio was 59 children and elderly people per 100 adults of working age in 2005.
  • By 2050, it is anticipated that the ratio will increase to 72 dependents per 100 adults of working age

(Source: Pew Research Center. U.S. Population Projections: 2005-2050, February 2008)
more…http://pewresearch.org/pubs/729/united-states-population-projections

 

Assimilation of Immigrants

One source of disagreement and consternation among some Americans relates to the assimilation of immigrants into the American way of life. The traditional immigration path where new immigrants settle in urban areas with many other immigrants who share their language and culture is not necessarily the path being followed by today’s
immigrants.

Today’s immigrant population is approximately 12.5% of the population
compared with just under 15% during the high levels of immigration
to the United States during the 1890s and early 1900s.

There are a number of factors and changes related to this assimilation including the following:

  • Many of today’s immigrants to the United States are “pre-assimilated” due to exposure to American ways and the English language before they even come to the country
  • Homeownership is widely recognized standard of the American way of life. Of the immigrants who came to this country in the 1970s, the rate of homeownership is approximately 68%; equal to the rate of Americans born in this country.
  • Homeownership among Hispanics is double that of low-income immigrants from the past immigration periods
  • Immigrants are increasingly moving to the suburbs as soon as possible rather than waiting until children are grown as was the past pattern.

(Source: USA Today, 3/4/08)

 

Where Are Today’s Children?

Who Do They Live With?

The majority of children in the United Sates live with two biological parents. An overall picture found that

  • 94% of children lived with at least one biological parent
  • a higher percentage of the mothers (94%) lived with their biological children than the fathers (85%).
  • most children lived with at least one sibling (79 %). The majority (64 %) lived with one or two siblings, while 5 % lived with four or more siblings.

More specific data related to how children live include the following:

  • Approximately 61% of children in the United States younger than 18 lived with their biological mother and father in 2004 regardless of their marital status
  • 42.7 million lived with both parents who were married to each other.
  • 4.1 million lived with a biological mother and stepfather
  • 19.3 million children lived with one parent, with the majority of those (88 %) residing with their mother.
  • 17% (12.2 million) children who lived with a stepparent, stepsibling and/or half-sibling
  • 71% of children living in blended families lived with a half sibling; 46% with stepparent; and 10% with stepsibling
  • 13.4 million children lived in extended families containing someone other than their parent or sibling; approximately 6.5 million lived with at least one grandparent, with 1.6 million of these children having no parent present.

http://www.census.gov/Press-Release/www/releases/archives/children/011507.html

Who’s Minding the Children?

Data gathered by the Pew Research Center related to child care arrangements provided insight into the child care patterns of pre-school aged children and cited the following:

  • Relatives regularly provided child care to almost half of the more than 19 million preschoolers, fathers and grandparents served as the primary relative child care providers.
  • 11.3 million (30%) children younger than 5 whose mothers worked were cared for on a regular basis by a grandparent during their mother’s working hours.
  • slightly more than 30% were cared for in an organized care facility such as day care, nursery or preschool
  • 25%received care from their fathers
  • 3 % from siblings and 8 % from other relatives when mothers went to work.
    The report highlights differences among child care patterns for preschoolers and all children that reflect a variety of different factors and included:
  • Preschoolers with black and Hispanic mothers working were more likely to be cared for by their grandparents than their fathers.
  • For preschoolers of working non-Hispanic white mothers, about the same percentage (29%) were cared for by their fathers and their grandparents
  • Preschoolers whose mothers worked a night or evening shift were more likely to have their father as a child care provider than those whose mothers worked day shifts (39 % and 18 %, respectively).
  • 89% of children younger than 5 with working mothers were in a regular child care arrangement, compared with 63% of grade school-age children
  • Families with an employed mother and children younger than 15 paid an average of $107 per week for child care in 2005, up from $73 in 1985.
  • Families with an employed mother and a child younger than 5 paid more, on average, per week for child care than those whose children were each 5 and older ($129 compared with $97).
  • Families in poverty who paid for child care in 2005 spent a greater proportion of their monthly income on child care than did families at or above the poverty level (29 % compared with 6 %).
  • Among all children, self-care was much more prevalent among middle school-age children than among those in elementary schools: 6 % of ages 5 to 11 and 33 % of ages 12 to 14 regularly cared for themselves

 

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  © California Park & Recreation Society, 2007. trendSCAN is created for CPRS by Leisure Lifestyle Consulting of Sarasota, FL. Comments and questions can be directed to Dr. Ellen O’Sullivan at leisurlife@aol.com. Please feel free to share interesting trend information with her as well.