Working Suburban Moms On the Decline
A household with children and a working mom is not the norm anymore. Mark Penn wrote in The Wall Street Journal that married, middle-class, working suburban moms are declining in numbers and influence as a key swing vote.
Mr. Penn is the CEO of the PR firm and President of a polling firm. His clients have included political and business leaders. He served as chief strategist and pollster to Hillary Clinton in her 2008 presidential campaign.
New early 2008 census figures show that the percentage of households with children under 18 has hit a low of 30.7%. This is in contrast to the situation in 1960 when 48.9% of households had such children.
Women are marrying later, developing their careers more, and having fewer children. More moms are opting to become full-time moms. In 1994,19.8% of married-couple families with children younger than 15 had a stay-at-home mom. In 2008 that figure was almost 24%.
Two-thirds of all households have no children in them at all. Suburban and exurban growth itself has slowed to a crawl and instead the new areas of growth are in our cities.
More people are looking to walk to work and shopping, giving up the idea of the house and the lawn and instead opting for the maintenance-free lifestyle of condos.
Cities with over a million people have been growing now at a rate of twice their previous growth rate. Minivans hit their high watermark in 2000, selling 1.3 million while sales have dropped down to 441,156 as of October 1, 2009.
Mr. Penn says that these changes are about lifestyle choices. We are going from everything being based around our kids to everything being based around education, work, and the emerging new adult lifestyles.
Life expectancy has also played a major role in the shift. If birth rates boomed again, households with kids would still shrink as a function of the total population.
New Latino and other communities are taking root and creating far greater diversity than ever before. Seniors are living second lives of renewed consumerism.
Mr. Penn says that on the rise are single, urban workaholics, Internet-junkie empty nesters, and new immigrants taking root.
