But the Wildes, as typical as they may seem, could never be Sonoma County's poster family. They're too traditional. Census figures released today reveal a snapshot of the North Coast for the new millennium. The new data shows only 23.3 percent of Sonoma County's 172,403 households are married parents with children under 18, compared to 24.4 percent in 1990. That mirrors the national average, where for the first time just one in four of the country's households is a nuclear family.
Experts say the decline took just two generations to set in.
When the parents of today's baby boomers walked the aisle, one in two families was married with children. The two-parent household is such a minor, minor part of the population nowadays. We are a very different type of society than we were in the past. Of the county's households with children, 19.2 percent are run by women without husbands. That could be single mothers, those married but separated or couples who are raising children but are not married.