What Today's Families Actually Look Like: A Stats-Backed Guide for Brands
By the FAM | Florida Family & Kids Casting Experts
If your brand is still casting the same two-parent, two-child, single-language, same-race family as your default, there is a meaningful opportunity in front of you. The American family has changed significantly over the past several decades and the data tells a compelling story. This post lays out what that data actually shows, why it matters for casting decisions, and what brands that are getting it right are doing differently.
The Nuclear Family Is No Longer the Majority
In 1970, 67% of Americans ages 25 to 49 were living with their spouse and one or more children younger than 18. Today that share has dropped to 37%. Only 47% of US households were married-couple households in 2025, compared to 66% fifty years ago.
Roughly one in four children in the United States currently lives in a single-parent household, and about a quarter of women who had their first child between 2020 and 2024 were living with an unmarried partner at the time.
The picture that emerges is one of genuine diversity in how American families are structured today. Families that may have once been considered outside the mainstream are now, collectively, the majority of the American household landscape.
Multiracial and Interracial Families Are Growing Fast
19% of all new marriages in the US are now interracial, up from just 3% in 1967. Today roughly 1 in 4 Americans are in an interracial romantic partnership. The multiracial population is one of America's fastest-growing demographic segments, having grown by 269% since 2000 and comprising 5.5% of the total population as of 2024.
The research on how audiences respond to this representation is equally compelling. A University of Florida study found that emerging adults exhibited more favorable attitudes toward multiracial family ads compared to same-race, single-race family ads, and that featuring multiracial families directly promotes positive attitudes toward the ad and indirectly positively affects attitude toward the brand and purchase intention.
Multiracial family casting is both a representation opportunity and a measurable performance driver.
Multilingual Families Are a Significant Audience
More than 22% of people in the United States spoke a language other than English at home as of 2024. In 2024, some 45 million people spoke Spanish at home alone, making it by far the most common non-English language in American households.
In Florida specifically, the numbers are even more pronounced. The state's Latin, Caribbean, Haitian, and international communities make South Florida one of the most linguistically diverse markets in the country. Casting decisions that reflect that reality have a direct impact on how broadly and authentically a campaign connects.
Multigenerational Households Are at a Record High
More than 1 in 4 Americans currently lives in a multigenerational household, and multigenerational homes represented 17% of all housing purchases in 2024, a record high.
For brands in healthcare, financial services, home goods, food, and lifestyle, this is a meaningful casting opportunity that remains largely untapped. A grandparent and grandchild pairing. Three generations around a dinner table. These are not edge cases. They are the lived reality of tens of millions of American families.
What This Means for Your Casting
The family that many brands have historically defaulted to in advertising now represents a smaller share of the actual American family landscape than it once did. The families that have often been less represented, single parents, multilingual households, multiracial families, multigenerational units, blended families, collectively reflect how the majority of American families actually live today.
This is not about performative diversity. It is about accuracy. When a brand casts families that reflect how American families actually live, it is simply showing its audience a version of themselves, which is one of the most powerful things advertising can do. Brands that move with that shift are the ones building the kind of long-term audience relationships that outlast any single campaign.
The Florida Context
For brands shooting in South Florida specifically, the demographic reality makes diverse family casting a natural fit. Florida's multicultural population, with its deep Latin, Caribbean, Haitian, Afro-Caribbean, and international communities, gives brands access to genuine family diversity that reflects both the local market and the broader national demographic shift. A family cast in South Florida that reflects its actual community is not just authentic to that market. It is authentic to the direction the entire country is moving.
A Personal Note
This one is personal. I am Amanda, co-founder of The FAM, and I grew up in a multiracial household. My brother and I are both biracial but look completely different from one another. Growing up, people rarely assumed we were related. Kids at school would ask us outright if we had the same mom and dad. We did. Biracial families were just not something people were used to seeing.
When we were kids, my parents actually brought us to a modeling agency and asked if we could be cast together as siblings. The agency said no.
That moment says everything. It was not that multiracial families did not exist. They absolutely did, and always have. They just were not seen as castable. Not in advertising, not on television, not in the images that were supposed to reflect what a family looked like.
Things are different now, partly because representation in media has moved the needle in a real way. Multiracial families are more visible than they have ever been in advertising and that visibility shapes how society sees and accepts them. We still have a way to go, but the direction is right. It is part of why The FAM exists, and it is part of why working in the casting space feels meaningful to me personally.
Working with The FAM
At The FAM our network is built around real families across Palm Beach County and South Florida and that network reflects the full range of what families actually look like today. Multiracial families, multilingual families, multigenerational family groups, single parent families, blended families, and everything in between. When a brand comes to us with a brief, we have the real families to match it.
If your next campaign needs to reflect the family your audience actually lives in, we would love to talk.
