[humanser] Marriage on the Decline

[Mary Ann Robinson]

        Marriage on the Decline: Bad Economy Turns More and More People
Off of Matrimony
  Amy DePaul, Alterationet December 4, 2010
  When she was a single mom raising her son in Orange County,
Calif., Katherine Romero always found ways to get dinner on the
table despite a tight budget: ramen noodles (eight packages for
$1), store brands only and low-cost meats such as a single
chicken breast divided between the two of them.  "We ate a lot of
pasta and soup," Romero remembers.
  Now grown, Romero's 23-year-old son tends to avoid canned soups
but otherwise seems well-served by his upbringing.  He recently
earned two bachelor's degrees, is pursuing a career in federal
law enforcement and plans to marry his longtime girlfriend.
  "It's kind of a storybook ending," says Romero, who herself has
remained single since she became a mother at 22.  Back then, she
remembers feeling alone -- that no one else was in her situation.
But over the years she has connected with other never-married
mothers.  One friend had a child with her boyfriend before the
two broke up; another used in vitro fertilization to have a baby
she planned to raise alone.
  While the circumstances of the three women differ, what they
all have in common is that their situations are increasingly
common.  Four out of 10 births in the U.S.  occur outside
marriage, and while moralists have viewed this pattern as an
indicator of slipping social standards, the trend is better
understood as a barometer of economic disparity.
  Marriage in retreat Single motherhood and a decline in marriage
were trends long identified with African-Americans.  Sen.  Pat
Moynihan warned, infamously, about increasing numbers of black
children born outside wedlock in 1965, and the subject returned
to center stage some 30 years later in the lead-up to welfare
reform, with public discourse focused on demonizing black
families and fathers in particular.
  But since Moynihan's era the same trends have taken hold across
American society, with the percentage of births to unmarried
women currently at 40 percent, up from 5.3 percent in 1960.
Hispanics and Asians, along with blacks and whites, have also
seen an increase in births outside marriage from 2002-2006.
  Meanwhile, the decline in marriage, for decades a pattern in
black America, has come to include more people across all groups.
For example, some 84 percent of U.S.-born people between 30 and
44 were married in 1970; by 2007, that figure had fallen to 60
percent.
  Some obvious social forces have fueled the trend that
sociologists call "the retreat from marriage," starting with the
sexual revolution of the 1960's.  But the economy's role has been
greatly under-appreciated despite some rather obvious
connections.  Most notably, dwindling job prospects in unskilled
labor have undercut working-class men's ability to support a
family, making them less marriageable in the eyes of some
potential partners.
  So it's not surprising that the retreat from marriage is more
concentrated among economically vulnerable whites, who now
reflect some of the same family patterns detected earlier among
African-Americans.
  "Lower-income white family formation is starting to look like
black family formation of 20 years ago," said Paula England,
Stanford University professor and member of the Council on
Contemporary Families.
  Authors Naomi Cahn and June Carbone, authors of Red Families
very.  Blue Families, also note a shift.
  "Non-marital childbearing, which was once thought of as a
marker of race, has become more thoroughly identified with
class," they wrote in their book.  "The economic forces that
remade African-American communities, particularly in the rustbelt
inner cities during the '60's and '70's, now also affect
working-class whites," according to Cahn and Carbone.
  Among industrial nations, non-marital birth rates vary.
Iceland claims the highest rate of births to unmarried women, at
66 percent, while Japan has the lowest at 2 percent.  Germany,
Spain, Canada, and Italy all had lower percentages of births to
unmarried women than the U.S.
  "Bachelors" are walking down the aisle One group of Americans
is not experiencing a decline in marriage or marital births.
People with bachelor's degrees, in fact, are more likely to delay
birth until after marriage and divorce less, and they are now
more likely to marry than their less-educated counterparts.
  "The college-educated part of America is living the American
dream -- with happy, stable, two-parent families," according to a
2009 report called "State of Our Unions" by the National Marriage
Project.  But for the non college-educated, by contrast,
"Marriage rates are continuing to decline, and the percentage of
out-of-wedlock births is rising."
  According to sociologist Andrew Cherlin of Johns Hopkins, a
college degree -- and not race -- is increasingly the most
important factor connected with rate of marriage and marital
birth.
  "I think college grads are the winners in the new global
economy," said Cherlin.
  "People who can see a secure future for themselves are content
to wait to have children.  People who can't see a secure future
are less content to wait."
  Interestingly, lack of degree was not always accompanied by
marital decline, as shown in research by Betsey Stevenson of the
University of Pennsylvania and the Council on Contemporary
Families.  Her research shows that in 1950, a white female
college graduate had less chance of marrying than a high school
dropout.
  The inverse is now true.
  Why the cold feet? Coupledom offers some immediate practical
payoffs to parents who might otherwise go it alone -- one
mortgage payment rather than two, in an obvious example.  A
marital partnership offers even more rewards in terms of
inheritance, taxes (in some cases), health insurance benefits and
social status.
  Many experts, like Professor Paula England at Stanford, believe
one deterrent to matrimony, though not to procreation, is the
popular notion that marriage can't take place before economic
success has been achieved.
  "It used to be that people had the idea that a young couple
gets married, lives in an apartment, struggles to buy a house.
Now the feeling is you should have your house first," England
said.  "When people think they need to have achieved a stable
economic position before getting married, then there's an
economic constraint on getting married."
  This ethic of waiting may explain why college-educated young
adults -- anticipating a more prosperous future -- are more
likely to marry than their degree-lacking counterparts, and why
African-Americans, historically lacking access to economic
opportunities, turned away from marriage earlier on.
  Another factor in the marriage equation, at least for
African-Americans, is the perception of marriage as a white
institution, the subject of an article by Joy Jones in the
Washington Post in 2006.  In the piece, Jones discusses the
discovery she made while teaching a classroom of African-American
sixth-graders, who told her they cared about good parenting and
devoted fatherhood but not about the institution of marriage.
They told her that, "Marriage is for white people."
  The students may have hit on something.  Divorce rates are the
most unfavorable for African-Americans, with the probability of a
black woman's first marriage remaining intact for 10 years at 51
percent while 64 percent for white women and 68 percent for
Hispanic women.
  Marriage leads to money, or vice versa? A recent study by the
Pew Research Center made the point that college-educated people
who marry each other and stay together reap unquestionable
financial rewards, further distancing themselves from their
non-degreed counterparts: According to "Women, Men and the New
Economics of Marriage": "Americans who already have the largest
incomes and who have had the largest gains in earnings since 1970
-- college graduates -- have fortified their financial advantage
over less educated Americans because of their greater tendency to
be married." In other words, marriage is yet another dividing
line between the haves, who still adhere to the conventional
sequence of love-marriage-baby , and the have-nots, who find the
traditional path to family formation -- like many middle-class
aspirations -- further out of reach.
  Amy DePaul is a writer and college instructor who lives in
Irvine, Calif.  Her articles have appeared in The Washington Post
and many other newspapers.
  B plus Alterationet Mobile Edition
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: acb-hsp at acb.org.vcf
Type: text/x-vcard
Size: 142 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <http://nfbnet.org/pipermail/humanser_nfbnet.org/attachments/20101204/8b005d6d/attachment.vcf>