[humanser] Five reasons Americans are delaying marriage

[Mary Ann Robinson]

5 Reasons Americans Are Delaying Marriage
  

June Carbone and Lauren Cahn, New Deal 2.0 May 23, 2011
  New research shows that women are getting married at later ages
-- and that the divorce rate is going down.  The results reflect
some good news -- later marriages are more likely to last.  Most
importantly, however, these figures correlate with widespread
changes in the American family.
  First, the decrease in the divorce rate does at least in part
reflect later marriages.  Teen marriages have always been risky
and most studies suggest that the increase in maturity from the
teen years to the early twenties bodes well for the stability of
relationships.  Delay from the early twenties to the late
twenties and thirties, however, is more controversial.  While
these later marriages are also more likely to last, economist
Stephane Mechoulan found that the increase in the age of marriage
in itself accounts for only a small part of the falling divorce
rates.  Instead, they reflect the increasing tendency of the
well-off to marry similarly well-off partners and those marriages
are more likely to last at any age.
  Second, the overall statistics hide the class-based dynamics at
the core of the shift.  Historically, college educated women were
less likely to marry than high school graduates.  Today, male and
female college graduates have become substantially more likely to
marry (and stay married).  At the same time, marriage has
effectively disappeared from the poorest communities.  In the
middle, pregnant teens like Bristol Palin have become much less
likely to marry the fathers of their children.  It is hardly
surprising therefore that overall divorce rates have fallen as
the highest divorce risks (pregnant teens among them) have become
much less likely to marry.
  Third, the later age of marriage for college graduates does
suggest a new middle class strategy: invest in women's education
and earning capacity as well as menbs, push back the age of
marriage and childbearing from the low ages of the anomalous
fifties, and reap the benefits of two incomes.  This strategy, of
course, began in the sixties and seventies and produced much more
independent women.  Today, it also reflects a new marriage
strategy.  The only portion of the American population
substantially better off than a generation ago are high income
men, and it's easier to tell who will be successful (think of
those Wall St.  bonuses) and who will not at thirty than at
twenty.  At the same time, for less spectacularly successful men,
two substantial incomes are essential for middle class life.
Today, becoming established means not only college graduation and
graduate school, but the right internships, entry level jobs, and
often repeated moves between positions, cities and sometimes
career paths.  These investments pay off in terms of a stable
investment for family life, but they are rarely in place before
the thirties and earlier marriage and childbearing often makes
them harder to establish.  As the economy becomes more perilous,
the risks of early marriage increase.
  Fourth, with the disappearance of relatively stable and high
paying manufacturing jobs, working class women may have greater
opportunities than working class men and they have also become
pickier about marriage as a result.
  Women have become more likely to graduate from high school and
college and the jobs they choose -- teaching, health care, retail
sales, administration -- tend to be more stable than those
available to men.  Construction workers, for example, often earn
more than Walmart employees, but they are also more likely to be
laid off.  Studies further show that while unemployed women spend
more time on the home and the children, unemployed men spend more
time moping, drinking, watching TV, and lashing out at those
around them.  The new data confirms that the Great Recession has
slowed marriage rates and earlier studies show that financial
stress greatly increases the divorce rates of young and working
class couples with the most traditional attitudes toward gender
roles.  In today's economy, these couples have become less likely
to marry.
  Fifth, a delay in marriage and a decrease in divorce might be a
good thing, but only if it also produces a drop in non-marital
births.  For the middle class, later marriage continues to mean
later childbearing, and later childrearing tends to lower overall
fertility.  Women's workforce participation increases the
opportunity cost (and the family tensions) of having more
children.  The combination of the suburbs, with their dependence
on the automobile, and the disappearance of stay-at-home moms
dismantled the community networks that had supervised children,
placing more emphasis on the role of individual parents.
  Modern studies of family time indicate that while mothers today
spend substantially less time on housework than they did a half
century ago, they spend as much time with their children and
their husband spend more.  Today's "helicopter" parents invest
enormous amounts of time overseeing homework, coaching sports
teams, escorting their children to after school activities, and
addressing their emotional needs.
  Working class women, however, have become more likely to have
children without marrying.  If the father is chronically
unemployed, uncommitted to the relationship, immature or simply
unreliable, young mothers may decide that they are better off on
their own.  It is hard to assess the impact of falling marriage
rates therefor without examining the nature of childbearing.  The
changes of the last quarter century indicate that marriage is
increasingly becoming a marker of class -- the delayed marriages
of the middle class produce steadily lower divorce rates, very
few non-marital births, and substantial resources to invest in a
falling number of children.  For the rest of the country, the
statistics may simply confirm a greater move away from marriage
altogether.
  June Carbone is the Edward A.  SmithstMissouri Chair of Law,
the Constitution and Society at the University of Missouri-Kansas
City.
  Naomi Cahn is the John Theodore Fey Research Professor of Law
at George Washington University Law School.  She is the author of
numerous books and law review articles on gender and family law.
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