What will families be like in 10 years

In the future, parents could raise either one or more clones of themselves, including clones derived from each partner. Depending on the scenario, siblings could be genetic duplicates of each other or their parent or both. Future children will interact with their surrogate AI parents any number of ways. The level of engagement is sure to be so intimate and intense that the child and even the parents will consider the AI to be part of the family.

By mid-century, we should have a colonial presence on Mars, and possibly the Moon. Eventually, humans will want to embark on long-term missions to the stars.

These interstellar arks will travel below the speed of light, and because it could take centuries or even millennia for these travelers to reach their destination, the original occupants will likely age and die advances in radical life extension notwithstanding , leaving their offspring to continue the mission. Should such a scenario transpire, the human occupants would likely continue to evolve, both biologically and culturally. We have no idea if people frozen in vats of liquid nitrogen will ever be brought back to life, but the possibility raises some interesting scenarios.

Given that some family members will have been separated by death for many years, their reunions will be particularly emotional and profound. But because Alcor will likely exercise a last-in, first-out policy LIFO when choosing who to re-animate, some family members may have to wait a while before all family members are pulled out of cold storage. Once reunited, however, these post-cryonic families will work together as they integrate into their futuristic new society.

Advances in neuroscience could irrevocably change the family unit as we know it today. Imagine a family connected via mind-to-mind communication. Mind-melded families would be greater than the sum of its parts. Of course, an assembly of interconnected minds need not be limited to just family members; friends and colleagues could join in as well, leading to highly interconnected and intimate communities that would exhibit very hive-like behavior. The more education a mother has, the more likely she is to be in the labor force.

Along with their movement into the labor force, women, even more than men, have been attaining higher and higher levels of education. In fact, among married couples today, it is more common for the wife to have more education than the husband, a reversal of previous patterns. These changes, along with the increasing share of single-parent families, mean that more than ever, mothers are playing the role of breadwinner —often the primary breadwinner—within their families.

The bulk of these breadwinner moms—8. Breadwinner moms are particularly common in black families, spurred by very high rates of single motherhood. Asian families are less likely to have a woman as the main breadwinner in their families, presumably due to their extremely low rates of single motherhood.

The flip side of the movement of mothers into the labor force has been a dramatic decline in the share of mothers who are now stay-at-home moms.

In roughly three-in-ten of stay-at-home-mom families, either the father is not working or the mother is single or cohabiting. As such, stay-at-home mothers are generally less well off than working mothers in terms of education and income. Except as noted, throughout this chapter a parent may be the biological or adoptive parent, or the spouse or partner of a biological or adoptive parent i.

Stevenson and Wolfers maintain that divorce rates have declined since that time, while Kennedy and Ruggles find that the divorce rate has continued its rise. See here for more on the challenges of counting same-sex couples in the U.

Even smaller shares were living with no parent, or with a father only. It may be the case that some families that began as stepfamilies may no longer identify as such, if the stepparent went on to adopt the children. Remarriages involving spouses who have no children from prior relationships would not create blended families. While it is still possible to have children beyond this point, about Women who reached the end of their childbearing years in the mids came of age during the height of the post-World War II baby boom, a period typified by unusually high fertility.

In times of uncertainty, good decisions demand good data. Please support our research with a financial contribution.

It organizes the public into nine distinct groups, based on an analysis of their attitudes and values. Even in a polarized era, the survey reveals deep divisions in both partisan coalitions. Use this tool to compare the groups on some key topics and their demographics. Pew Research Center now uses as the last birth year for Millennials in our work.

President Michael Dimock explains why. About Pew Research Center Pew Research Center is a nonpartisan fact tank that informs the public about the issues, attitudes and trends shaping the world. It conducts public opinion polling, demographic research, media content analysis and other empirical social science research. Pew Research Center does not take policy positions.

It is a subsidiary of The Pew Charitable Trusts. Newsletters Donate My Account. Research Topics. The shrinking American family Fertility in the U. Previous attempts have, in fact, failed. No sooner had his seminal book World Revolution and Family Patterns been published than divorce rates started increasing, and married women began moving into the labour force.

Nothing ventured, nothing gained, however. And there are some clear clues we can draw on to guess at how family life might change in Europe over the years. From the early s, marriage and childbearing began to be postponed and cohabitation and non-marital childbearing started to increase.

The trend is clear in the chart below. Demographers Dirk Van de Kaa and Ron Lesthaeghe interpreted these changes as the consequence of changing values, increased self-fulfilment and individualism. Marriage, sex and parenthood would be separated, and we would see a convergence to sustained low fertility and a new set of family forms: non-marital fertility, lone parenthood, cohabiting couple families.

There has been movement in most countries towards new family forms such as cohabitation and non-marital childbearing. Even in what are generally considered to be more religious countries in Southern Europe. Countries still differ , though, in the way in which cohabitation, marriage and childbearing are related. The extent to which governments have acted to recognise and regulate non-marital cohabiting unions and same-sex couples suggests that the acceptance of new family forms will continue to vary greatly between countries.

In other words, people today experience a greater range of ways to organise their family lives, and we expect such diversity to characterise future families. Partly in response to economic precariousness and reduced gains to marriage, less well educated people are more likely to enter partnerships at an earlier age and to have children outside marriage.

They are also more likely to see their relationships fail, or to go through pregnancy with multiple partners, compared to those with higher levels of education in the US and possibly also in the UK. You can also see the evidence of persistent diversity in large cross-national differences in the level of childbearing. As can be seen in the chart below, there is persistently low fertility around 1. Childbearing is higher in countries with higher levels of female labour force participation , economic development , generosity of paid parental leave provision for mothers and paternity leave.

There are several factors likely to affect how families are structured and organised, and which could impact on shaping the future families. These include increasing longevity which has important implications for how we plan our lives , care needs and inter-generational relations.