Ohio saw a decline in families with children younger than 18 of almost 117,000, or 8.3 percent, the data shows. Those families made up 28.1 percent of all Ohio households in April 2010, down from 31.7 percent in 2000.
Ohio’s decline in families with minor children stands in stark contrast to a slight increase nationwide (0.4 percent.). In addition, the state decline follows an increase of close to 27,000 families with children (1.9 percent) the previous decade.
Family demographers say the decline is caused by a number of trends:
• Delayed marriage and parenthood.
• Divorce.
• Outmigration of young families and people.
• A population aging in place.
Young families are prized by states because they’re the people who are going to support communities, services and the older generation, said Wendy Manning, a family demographer and sociology professor at Bowling Green State University’s Center for Family and Demographic Research.
“Those are exactly the kind of people you want to see stay put,” Manning said. “They are the economic engine.”
Although they form a desirable demographic, younger people are also more likely to move, she said, particularly in a down economy.
“These people in their early to mid 20s might see the writing on the wall, and say let’s establish ourselves where there are more economic opportunities,” Manning said.
Most of the eight-county Dayton region lost a greater share of families with children than the state, with only Warren County showing a gain, the Daily News analysis found. All told, the region lost more than 15,000 families with kids in the last decade, a decline of 8.8 percent.
Largest proportional drop in Bellbrook
The city of Bellbrook saw the biggest proportional drop during the decade among 51 cities and villages with more than 2,500 people, according to an analysis of data from Montgomery, Greene, Warren, Miami, Butler, Preble, Darke and Clark counties. The city’s share of families with minor children fell from 39.8 percent in 2000 to 31.4 percent last year, a decrease of 8.4 percentage points.
Keith St. Pierre, superintendent of Bellbrook-Sugarcreek City Schools, said the school district began seeing a decline about three years ago.
“We were going through immense growth until about 2006, when it started to slow,” St. Pierre said. “Now with the economy, which is what we attributed it to, the housing starts have just stopped.”
Bellbrook City Manager Mark Schlagheck agreed that the economy has had an impact.
“The growth certainly did stop here, just like it did in a lot of places two or three years ago,” Schlagheck said.
The city of about 7,000 still added about 225 housing units during the decade, he said. At the same time, the average household size decreased from 2.7 to 2.5 people.
“For whatever reasons,” Schlagheck said, “the number of people within those houses went down.”
Empty nesters — people whose children have moved on — appear to be part of the reason.
“People who have lived here awhile, and obviously had kids when they moved here, because with the school system and everything, this was the place to be. And they’ve continued to live here because they like the area, but now those kids have moved out of the house and moved on,” Schlagheck said.
Bellbrook resident Sherri Helling said it’s a trend she’s seen in her own family and throughout their circle of friends. Helling never really thought of herself as an empty nester, but since her daughter Kristin graduated from Bellbrook High School in 2007 and began attending Miami University, the label has fit. With her undergraduate work behind her, Kristin will continue on to graduate school.
A full-time return to the nest may never happen.
“She’s really not here very much and the vast majority of her friends have gone away to college,” Helling said. “The thing we’re seeing is that kids are moving out more than anything else.”
Bill Beeman, a resident of Bellbrook since 1966, said the number of families with children living in the city runs in generational spurts. Folks who moved into Bellbrook’s new housing stock in the 1950s aren’t around anymore, he said. Beeman’s own parents were part of the next wave who chose to raise their children in the Greene County community and the cycle has continued. In between, as kids grow up and go off to college, the number of children in the community can wane.
“My neighborhood has seen the number of kids drop. It all goes in cycles,” he said.
Kim Narther, also a long-time Bellbrook resident, wasn’t surprised to hear fewer families with children live in Bellbrook, because of the economy.
“We’ve seen a number of foreclosures and ‘For Sale,’ signs,” she said.
More people are living alone
Another influence on the steady decline in the share of families with children, experts say, is the steady increase in people living alone. Both trends have been going on for at least five decades, historical census data show.
Nationwide, families with children have dropped from almost 49 percent of all households in 1960 to just over 30 percent last year. Single-person households meanwhile, have increased over the same period from 13.1 percent to 26.7 percent.
In Ohio, the number of people living alone reached 28.9 percent last year, up from 27.3 percent in 2000. The Dayton region had almost 172,000 one-person households or 27.1 percent, up from 25.6 percent in 2000.
Of the eight counties in the Dayton region, Montgomery County ranked highest, with nearly a third of the county’s 223,943 households being people living alone the 2010 Census found.
A lot of those people living alone are elderly, said Anastasia Snyder, a sociology professor and family demographer at Ohio State University’s Institute for Population Research. “They are people whose spouses passed on, so the aging population is driving that to a certain degree.”
Another driver is that young people waiting until they are more economically set before getting married and having children, demographers say.
A Census Bureau study released this month on marriage and divorce found that the age of first marriage is the highest it has been since 1890, when the bureau began keeping track. For men, the median age of first marriage was 28 in 2009, up five years from 1950. For women it was to 26, up from 20.
“So more people are living alone early in the life course,” Snyder said. “More people are living alone later in the life course. And also, because we have this high but stable divorce rate, you have these periods after a marriage and even between marriages where people are living alone as well.
“So basically what we have is that people are spending less years of their life married.”
That could be playing out in defeats of school levies, said LeFleur F. Small, a professor of sociology and anthropology at Wright State University and of geriatrics at the Boonshoft School of Medicine.
People with no children aren’t going to be as likely to vote for school levies, Small said.
Ohio’s sluggish economy has to be playing a large role in the decrease of families with children, she said. Throughout history, Small said, family size has grown in the good times and shrunk in the bad.
“When the economy is not doing well, people tend to kind of tighten the purse strings and do a cost analysis on how many children they should have, and if they should have children at all,” Small said.
In fact, birth rates in the U.S. fell in 2007 through 2009, the worst of the recession years, according to a new report from the National Center for Health Statistics.
The number of births in the U.S. reached an all-time high of 4.3 million in 2007, but fell by 4 percent in the next two recession-racked years. That drop was the fastest two-year decline in more than 30 years, the report found.
In addition, birth rates fell for women of all age groups, except those 40 and older.
Small said young people, and women in particular, are having to consider both the direct costs and the “opportunity costs” of having and supporting a child.
“They have to weigh the pros and cons of career and financial incentives and loss that they experience as a result of having children,” said Small. “In general, you find that people are having less children.”
Contact this reporter at (937) 225-2393 or kmccall@Dayton DailyNews.com.
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