Not in the Crowd by Konnie Enos

My daughter came into my room last night and told me she found a study that said 97% of 20 year olds have at least one living grandparent.

We discussed this at length.

The daughter talking to me is my second born and she was 19 when MY last living grandparent died. After some discussion we established that all five of my children were between the ages of 4 and 14. Yes, I said FOUR. When their last grandparent died.

So my children are in the three percent.

Being a curious sort, I did some searching for some statistics on family dynamics.

An article I found (http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2014/12/22/less-than-half-of-u-s-kids-today-live-in-a-traditional-family/) said about 46% of U.S, kids under 18 live with both their parents in a traditional heterosexual marriage and neither one of them remarried.

So my kids are a rarity.

I have five kids, two of those still under 18. My husband and I have been married for 26 years now. I can remember one time going into the food stamps office for an interview and the worker asking me if any of my children had a parent not living in the home with them.

No. My husband and I live with our children.

Then she asked if my husband or I either received or paid any child support.

I told her the only children either my husband or I had were the same five children.

She said that was highly unusual. Generally if a woman had more than two kids, there was more than two dads involved, especially when you were talking about woman receiving Food Stamps and WIC, like I was.

Then I found another article describing the sandwich generation (http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2013/01/30/the-sandwich-generation/). It said nearly half the people in my age range are raising children or supporting adult children.

Okay, I’m doing both.

It also said, about 15% of these people in this age range are “sandwiched” between their kids and at least one parent that they are caring for.

Okay, not doing that.

In fact, as noted above, can’t be doing that. My parents and in-laws are dead.

So technically I’m in the sandwich generation age range, and have children that fit the age range, but I’m not in a “sandwich” situation.

So again, unusual.

Out of this same curiosity, I looked up statistics on twins as well. (http://www.twin-pregnancy-and-beyond.com/mirror-twins.html) Fraternal twins are the most common.

Among identical twins, mirror twins account one fourth of them.

I guess my kids are in good company. I’m a rarity too.

All this got me thinking about how we try to group people into categories. If this set of circumstances applies to you, you belong in this group. But all too often people don’t fall into a set category.

Recently I saw a video that was supposed to be out of Denmark, which showed a large group of people being grouped into different “boxes”. Then someone asked all of them to form a new group if they fit the description. They’d say a description, people would step forward and they’d take a picture of this new group.

The point it was making was we all have things in common with everyone else

You can do the statistics all you want but not everyone is going to fall within those parameters exactly. In fact, most people are going to fall outside the average simply because it is an average.

Who wants to be average anyway?

 I know I’ve said it before, but I’ll say it again, no two people are exactly alike.

Personally, the world would be rather boring if we were.

Smile. Make the day a brighter day.