It is quite likely that the economic crisis both caused some divorces and prevented some divorces. However, the balance of the evidence suggests it prevented more than it caused. I would not read this as good news for marriage and families, however, because there may be negative consequences for people who want to part but cannot divorce because of economic constraints. The enforced wait could simply prolong or exacerbate marital stress and family conflict, rather than saving or restoring a happy marriage.
–Stephanie Coontz
In the wake of several news reports claiming that a falling divorce rate was the “silver lining” around the clouds of the Great Recession, I analyzed divorce patterns using the American Community Survey (ACS) from 2008 to 2011 to look for evidence of whether the economic crisis had increased or decreased the divorce rate. On the one hand, economic stress, job loss, and home foreclosure tend to be associated with marital tension and thus might be expected to increase the number of divorces. On the other hand, divorce is expensive, especially the cost of establishing a new household, and people who can’t sell their homes, or who have suffered a job loss, might not be able to manage a divorce and thus end up postponing or foregoing it. more...
Arielle Kuperberg, Assistant Professor of Sociology, The University of North Carolina at Greensboro, is author of this week’s briefing report at CCF@TSP. Here she answers the questions that keep coming up when people talk about cohabitation these days.
Lots of people keep asking, Does living together before marriage increase your chance of getting a divorce? In my recently published study, I finally answer this question with a definitive “no!”
For decades, researchers have found a connection between premarital cohabitation and divorce that no one could fully explain. Despite these studies and warnings from well-meaning relatives about the dangers of “living in sin,” rates of living together before marriage have skyrocketed over the past 50 years, increasing by almost 900% since the 1960s. I found in my study that almost two-thirds of women who married between 2000 and 2009 lived with their husband before they tied the knot.
With the majority of couples now living together before marriage, if cohabitation somehow caused couples to divorce, you would think that divorce would be more common in recent generations of young adults, who were much more likely to live together before marriage compared to earlier generations. But recent research has found that for young adults born in 1980 or later, divorce rates have been steady or even declining compared to earlier generations.
What explains the connection between cohabitation and divorce?
We already knew that some of the connection between cohabitation and divorce is a result of the type of people who live together before marriage. In my study I find that compared to those who married without living together first, premarital cohabitors have lower levels of education, are more likely to have a previous birth, and are more likely to be black and have divorced parents, all factors that numerous studies (including mine) have found are related to higher divorce rates.
My study found that the rest of the connection between divorce and cohabitation can be explained by one thing that previous researchers never took into account: the age at which couples moved in together. Cohabitors moved in together at earlier ages (on average) than couples that didn’t live together before marriage, and since living together at younger ages is associated with higher divorce rates, cohabitors are more likely to divorce.
Why does moving in when you are younger increase your divorce rate?
Younger couples are (on average) less prepared to run a joint household together, and may be less prepared to pick a suitable partner than couples that settle down when they are older (on average- remember this doesn’t apply to every couple!). People change a lot in their early 20s, and those changes sometimes cause incompatibilities with a partner who was selected at a younger age. These incompatibilities lead to higher average divorce rates among those who moved in with their eventual spouse at a young age, even if they waited to marry until they were older.
My research shows that waiting until you are 23-24 or older to settle down with a partner is associated with around a 30% risk of divorce if you marry that partner. Moving in earlier leads to a much higher divorce risk- for instance couples that move in at age 18-19 face almost a 60% risk of divorce if they eventually marry, and couples aged 21-22 when settling down have a 40% risk of divorce after marriage.
Are cohabitation and marriage different types of relationships? Why get married at all?
A frequent question I’ve been asked is: does this mean cohabitation and marriage are basically the same? One reporter asked me about a recent study in which couples were threatened with a mild electrical shock while holding the hand of their married or cohabiting partner, where married couples were shown to be calmer than cohabiting couples. Doesn’t this show that cohabitation is a different type of relationship than marriage is?
Absolutely! My ownresearch has shown that although cohabitation and marriage aren’t drastically different types of relationships for couples that lived together before marriages, some differences in behavior are pronounced, and the longer a couple has been married, the greater these differences grow. The public commitment, legal binds, and social expectations that come with marriage affect behavior in numerous ways which can’t be discounted.
So should you live together before marriage? Should you get married at all? That’s up to you! But living together won’t increase your chances of getting a divorce if you choose to go that route.
In the last 50 years, the percentage of men and women who cohabit before marriage – “living in sin” as it was still called in the 1960s – has increased by almost 900 percent. Today 70 percent of women aged 30 to 34 have cohabited with a male partner, and two-thirds of new marriages take place between couples who have already lived together for an average of 31 months.
These trends are troubling to some because nearly a dozen studies from the 1970s into the early 2000s showed that men and women who lived together before marriage were far more likely to divorce than couples who moved directly from dating to marriage. In fact, on average, researchers found that couples who cohabited before marriage had a 33 percent higher chance of divorcing than couples who moved in together after the wedding ceremony. In light of those findings, some commentators have argued that reducing the stigma attached to living together outside marriage has been a mistake, leading many young couples to make decisions that put their future marriage at risk. more...
Thomas A. DiPrete and Claudia Buchmann on September 22, 2014
The way education used to be
Back in 1960, more than twice as many men as women between the ages of 26-28 were college graduates. As late as 1970, only 14 percent of young women between the ages of 26 and 28 had finished college, compared to 20 percent of men. But then a dramatic change occurred. While men’s college completion rates slowed, women’s skyrocketed.
Between 1970 and 2010, men’s rate of B.A. completion grew by just 7 percent, rising from 20 to 27 percent in those 40 years. In contrast, women’s rates almost tripled, rising from 14 percent to 36 percent. Today women also earn 60 percent of all master’s degrees and more than half of all doctoral and professional degrees. The only significant area of education in which women still lag behind men is in their representation in science and engineering programs. But even in some science fields they have made progress; only 25 percent of advanced engineering degrees go to women, but they earn 52 percent of master’s and doctoral degrees in the life sciences. more...
People often think of social change in the lives of American children since the 1950s as a movement in one direction – from children being raised in married, male-breadwinner families to a new norm of children being raised by working mothers, many of them unmarried. Instead, we can better understand this transformation as an explosion of diversity, a fanning out from a compact center along many different pathways.
The dramatic rearrangement of children’s living situations since the 1950s
At the end of the 1950s, if you chose 100 children under age 15 to represent all children, 65 would have been living in a family with married parents, with the father employed and the mother out of the labor force. Only 18 would have had married parents who were both employed. As for other types of family arrangements, you would find only one child in every 350 living with a never-married mother!
Today, among 100 representative children, just 22 live in a married male-breadwinner family, compared to 23 living with a single mother (only half of whom have ever been married). Seven out of every 100 live with a parent who cohabits with an unmarried partner (a category too rare for the Census Bureau to consider counting in 1960) and six with either a single father (3) or with grandparents but no parents (3).The single largest group of children – 34 – live with dual-earner married parents, but that largest group is only a third of the total, so that it is really impossible to point to a “typical” family.
With two-thirds of children being raised in male-breadwinner, married-couple families, it is understandable that people from the early 1960s considered such families to be the norm.* Today, by contrast, there is no single family arrangement that encompasses the majority of children. more...
Last year I posted a list of blog pieces by subject, to help people teaching family courses generate ideas and discussion. Now my book is done and some of that material is in there. If you use the book for your class, we’ll give you all kinds of awesome teaching materials. But if you’re not using it (yet), here’s another list of blog posts to supplement your course. I hope this is useful whether you’re assigning the book or not, and even if you’re teaching something besides a family course.
This is organized according to my table of contents. Please let me know what works and what doesn’t, and offer your additional suggestions in the comments.
1. Introduction
What current demographic facts do you need to know? These 22 demographic data points are a good place to start. What else is necessary knowledge just to get through the day without being grossly misled or misinformed?
High marks for Census: Describes the cultural shift at the Census Bureau that followed from Obama’s election and the decision to start counting gay and lesbian married couples. Also, a nice video they made explaining how a small error in a large population (mis-marking the sex box) can dramatically distort the number of a small population within it (same-sex couples).
Millennial, save thyself: Are millennials in trouble because their ties to marriage, work, and religion are weak? It’s “kids these days” all over again. With some simple data analysis and trends.
2. History
Marriage, since when? (New Pew report): Marriage trends look different depending on the date you choose to represent “then” versus now. The 1950s were a unique (although very important) period, so careful with those comparisons.
‘Parenting’ through the (only very recent) ages: The term wasn’t used to mean child rearing until 1952, and wasn’t used popularly until the 1970s. Is this related to rising parenting standards – which beget new expressions of inequality?
3. Race, ethnicity, and immigration
Black is not a color: Black and White are social, not biological, classifications. So why do we treat the words as if they were just colors?
Immigrant health paradox update: What can we learn from the surprisingly low infant morality rates of immigrants? Maybe healthier people migrate, but after a generation (or less) in the U.S., their advantage appears to erode.
The world that Sabta made: My grandmother lived from 1913 to 2009, and came to the U.S. from Poland in 1921, the youngest passenger on the S.S. Ryndam. Hers is one of the great stories of the century, leaving a mark that goes well beyond her 50+ great-grandchildren.
Movie dimorphism udpate: How to Train Your Dragon 2 edition: Why do animated movies so often feature extreme size differences between the hands of male and female romantic characters? The latest post in a series (with links to actual hand-size data).
Gender devaluation, in one comparison: Light truck drivers (almost all men) earn more than nursing assistants (almost all women). This post examines reasons, and comes up with gender itself.
Sexual minority counts: Can the big federal bureaucracies accurately measure sexual orientation and identity? They can do pretty well if they try. And the good news is they’re trying.
Why I don’t defend the sex-versus-gender distinction: In the book I teach this distinction, but I don’t generally fight for it. This post has some history and links on the distinction, and some potential pitfalls. (Make sure you check the excellent debate in the comments.)
7. Love and romantic relationships
Is dating still dead? The death of dating is now 50 years old, and its been eulogized so many times that its feelings are starting to get hurt.
Online dating: efficiency, inequality, and anxiety: I’m skeptical about efficiency, and concerned about inequality, as more dating moves online. Some of the numbers I use in this post are already dated, but this could be good for a debate about dating rules and preferences.
Is the price of sex too damn low? To hear some researchers tell it in a recent YouTube video, women in general — and feminism in particular — have ruined not only sex, but society itself. The theory is wrong. Also, they’re insanely sexist.
Does gay marriage make straight men hate children? In the steadily losing battle against marriage equality, one of the more pernicious claims is that gay marriage threatens to turn all men against children.
9. Families and children
Play, supervision and pressured parenting: On the historical change in how parents view their children’s play and safety concerns, with photos of historical and contemporary playgrounds.
Silver linings divorce trend: Divorce rates were falling before the recession, but they fell a little faster when the crisis hit. Did the recession save some marriages?
What drives the rise of stay at home fathers? How you interpret the trend depends on how you define stay at home fathers. With the “hardcore” definition, stay at home mothers still outnumber stay at home fathers 24-to-1.
Tripping on tipping points: Minority births are now the majority. Is this a tipping point, a milestone, or a watershed? On the importance of accurately representing trends.
Dependency futures: An NPR story (linked here) on retirement prompts a look at how US demographic trends may be moving toward a future with more old-age dependency.
Susan J. Matt is author of Homesickness: An American History (Oxford University Press, 2011). She is Presidential Distinguished Professor and Chair of the History Department at Weber State University, in Ogden, Utah. She tweets at @alongingforhome.
Not long ago, The Onion ran an article with the headline “Unambitious Loser with Happy, Fulfilling Life Still Lives in Hometown.” The piece quoted a friend of the “loser,” who said, “I’ve known Mike my whole life and he’s a good guy, but it’s pretty pathetic that he’s still living on the same street he grew up on and experiencing a deep sense of personal satisfaction . . . .[H]e’s nearly 30 years old, living in the exact same town he was born in, working at the same small-time job, and is extremely contented in all aspects of his home and professional lives. It’s really sad.”
While the article was fiction, the attitudes it encapsulated were not. Americans disparage those overly attached to home. The homesick, boomerang kids, and tightly bonded families seem antithetical to American individualism. We are supposed to be a nation of restless movers who break ties to home with ease. When individuals stay in place, it contradicts our mythology. What is wrong with these people?
That’s a question being asked with increasing frequency about the rising generation, for nearly 22 percent of all adults in their 20s and 30s are living with their parents, the highest rate since the 1950s. And the media have not been kind to them: CBS News observed “… for many boomerang kids, living in a parent’s home becomes a crutch, enabling them to put off making grown-up decisions . . . .” Others have termed them the “Go-Nowhere Generation.”
The message is that staying home shows immaturity and a fatal lack of ambition. It is a sign of emotional neediness and dependence, traits widely stigmatized in American society. However, the expectation that individuals should leave home in their early 20s, and do so easily, is of recent vintage. Only in the last century did Americans come to see young adults who were emotionally close to kin and geographically rooted as psychologically immature and destined for economic failure.
In the nineteenth century, Americans believed that love for home was an ennobling emotion, evidence of a tender heart and a strong family life. Writers and preachers lavished praise on those who loved home, while physicians suggested that wandering too far from it could be fatal, for they believed people could die of acute homesickness.
In contrast, during the 20th century, as corporations and the military began to deploy people across the nation and the globe, strong attachments to family and place became a problem, obstacles to the smooth flow of capital and personnel. The love of home became an archaic emotion in a modern society dependent on a fungible, mobile workforce.
By mid-century, experts were arguing that tightly bonded families were out of place in America. Sociologist W. Lloyd Warner explained that because the economy required individuals to move frequently, “families cannot be too closely attached to their kindred. . . or they will be held to one location, socially and economically maladapted.” Those who tried to maintain strong kin ties were criticized. In 1951, psychiatrist Edward Strecker, preoccupied with the Cold War and the need for a mobile fighting force, accused American mothers of keeping their “children enwombed psychologically,” failing to “untie the emotional apron string . . . which binds her children to her.” He dubbed these women the nation’s “gravest menace.”
Today, we continue to believe young adults should leave home. When they don’t, their living choices are chalked up to poor employment prospects. While economic realities surely play a part in their residential choices, the media give short shrift to other motives. The idea that families might be drawn together by feelings of affection is left out of the equation, as is the possibility that this generation wants to become something other than mobile individualists. Yet there’s considerable evidence that millennials hold values that center more on family and less on high powered careers. A recent poll found them far less concerned with financial success than the population at large. They also are closer to their parents, whom they fight with less, and talk with more than earlier generations.
For decades we’ve assumed that leaving home in one’s early twenties is natural, a sign of healthy psychological adjustment; but we should remember such expectations are historically contingent. Today’s millennials remind us there are other ways of organizing family life than the model we’ve grown accustomed to, and prompt us to recognize that values other than individualistic, market-driven ones frequently motivate human behavior. We can learn from them that staying close to home does not make one an “unambitious loser.”
As colleges across the country begin the new school year, we hear a chorus of warnings about a generation of young adults unable or unwilling to “leave the nest.” Phrases are bandied about: “Failure to launch”; “the Peter Pan syndrome”; “boomerang kids” who can’t seem to leave home and establish an independent life. Undergirding these warnings is a fear that the younger generation is growing soft, losing the pioneer independence and rugged individualism that once built this nation.
But a glance at the past suggests it may not be the behavior of youths that has changed so much as the response by adults. Only over the past 90 years did American culture come to define young adults’ continued reliance on parental guidance and their longing to return home as a sign of psychological maladjustment. more...
My world of parenting involves sifting through countless listicles of advice, online images of children in trauma who are forced to grow up too fast, apps to manage kids’ crazy schedules, Vine videos of tiny tots singing “Let it Go” off key in the back of a minivan, and clever kidroom decorating tips on Pinterest. This is overwhelming, even for parents like me who have plenty of resources and time and education and other things that likely will enhance the life chances of my son. Parenting is hard for everyone, especially those who struggle to find work, make meals, or know where to look if they have questions about kids. Navigating the words and images and sheer volume of information on parenting out there makes it hard even for the people who have work, food, and people to turn to for help.
Many of us American parents who have the luxury of a laptop or a bookshelf may have catchy titles such as the following in our libraries and social media feeds:
More or Less: How to Raise Overscheduled Kids and Then Feel Guilty About It and Then Schedule Them in Fewer Activities but Then Add to Their Schedule to Keep Up with Other Parents Whose Kids Will Get Into a Good College
Quality Assurance: How to Use Your Professional Career Skills in Parenting, but Never Show Too Much of Your Family Self at Work for Fear of Being Labeled “Not a Committed Team Player”
Independence Days: How Not to Get Arrested for Letting Kids Do Things by Themselves That You Did When You Were a Kid
Americans are the Worst: How to Raise Your Kids Like French/Italian/Chinese/Swedish Parents Do, and Also How to Eat Like Them with Your Kids in Restaurants and Not Gain Weight
Sometimes I think parents, despite our valiant efforts to be the grown-ups in situations with our children, are more like toddlers with flailing appendages trying to learn what we should and should not fear. Trying to control a world that seems filled with tall and vocal experts and parenting peers whom we’re not sure we should trust. And tripping and hitting our heads on coffee tables every so often. While parents since the dawn of time have probably felt insecure about their abilities, we now swim in an especially large and public typhoon of confusing messages.
Does this typhoon of information make us better parents? Does it make is more assured that we are, in fact, the parents, and our children are, in fact, in need of parenting? More is not better, after all, and not just with regard to chocolate cake. Does the overload actually make us less sure of ourselves, more in need of comforting, less mature, and therefore more similar to the little creatures we are trying our hardest to raise? While our tendency to read a list of the latest habits of highly effective parents would place us squarely in the demographic category of “parent” (because who else would read that stuff?), could it also be that reading all of this actually makes us feel less parental?
Many smart people, from folks at the CDC to a long list of wonderful experts, have talked about this topic already in a myriad of other online and paper-type sources, and have even said that there are too many pieces of advice out there so we should be careful not to get overwhelmed (whoa, that’s very meta), but sometimes when it hits home it bears pondering again. My husband and I, when our son was a baby a decade ago, found ourselves amidst a circle of people who had the time and resources to read and recommend all sorts of books on babies. We, being people with time and resources and commitment to the use of big words whenever possible, read excerpts from the fluffy baby whisperer book and from the technical medical book, threw both out the window and improvised, and then returned to them three months later to realize we had done it pretty much the way the fluffy and medical experts had told us to do it in a perfect combination of both. Sometimes I think experts are just good at telling us what our guts would tell us to do anyway, but far more eloquently and for $12.95. Evidently my husband and I would rather buy advice than trust ourselves not to hit our heads on coffee tables.
I recently asked my mom, now in her 70s and an expert on parenting who has read every book out there since Dr. Spock, whether she thought the difference between the parent and child roles seemed wider between her and me than they are between me and my son. I asked her because she always seemed far more grown-up to me than I am currently acting with my kid. She never laughed when I farted at the dinner table, for example.
In this discussion, Mom and I figured that the answer to that question lies not in my penchant for scatological humor, nor in the amount of information available for parents today, but squarely in the fact that kids are often better than their parents at navigating the latest technology. Kids have long figured they knew more than their parents, and parents have long figured they need to ask for advice on what to do with these tiny creatures who appear in our lives, but now we parents have a hard time knowing which screen corners to swipe and in-app purchases to avoid to retrieve the good information. Ten years after my husband and I threw actual books out an actual window, the typhoon of advice can be read in every social media feed, app, and link on Buzzfeed. Not to mention in the 2nd editions of the fluffy and medical books, now available electronically if you can remember your Kindle password.
Kids are teaching us more than ever, at least about the means to get to the messages. I never taught my mom the steps on how to open a calendar without ripping the pages to mark down when I had piano lessons. She never needed to rely on my brothers to find out how to unfold the medical brochure on tetanus shots. There was no swiping involved in parenting then, at least not on a screen. She was the grown-up. I was the kid. But when our tiny tech expert offspring know more than we do about technology, we feel like the kids.
But despite our agreement that today’s generation gap seems narrower because of our technology-induced role reversals, I felt that my mom gave me more independence than I am giving my son. And isn’t independence part of being a grown-up? Wouldn’t that criterion be evidence of a narrower generation gap then versus now? What does it mean that my son has more skills on a smartphone than I do, but I could ride farther away on my purple banana-seat bike when I was his age? Who is more grown-up – the one who can navigate Map My Ride without accidentally buying porn or the one who can ride her bike alone to the swimming pool two miles away?
As for myself, I am considering two options for my next step as a parent. I could read all of the titles I mentioned earlier, once I find them online with my son’s help. Maybe the most apropos book we could find would be titled
Parenting in an Age of Irony: How My Kid Helped Me Responsibly Purchase Online Resources about How I Should Protect His Innocent and Developing Brain.
Or, rather than actually reading the myriad parenting columns, books, and online diatribes, I will ask my son to digitally catalog them in order from “Most Useful for How to Raise Me” to “Meh, You Can Delete This from Your Cache,” and then make the catalog into a smartphone app that will not accidentally make me buy porn.
Surely his technological prowess will prepare him well for deciphering what is and is not useful information.
But only if he does his deciphering within a one-block radius of our house, so I can keep an eye on him.
Ever since winning third place in a rural Minnesota district high school speech contest with her rendering of an excerpt from Scandinavian Humor and Other Myths, Michelle Janning has attempted to add humor to all academic pursuits, including the sociological discovery of everyday life patterns. She is a sociology professor at Whitman College, and a Senior Scholar with the Council on Contemporary Families. Her website and blog, with a humorous focus on the “between-ness” of social life, is at michellejanning.com.
This post draws from a longer CCF Brief originally published December 10, 2013. Rachel A. Gordon is a professor of sociology at the University of Illinois at Chicago.
It is “back to school” time – we can see this all around us, in stores, online, and in the media. As students shop for school supplies and clothing, many are thinking about the image they will portray when they first walk the halls of school. A recent google ad encapsulated these concerns as it opened with a youth searching “How to not look like a freshman.” Technology amplifes – or at least makes more visible – teens’ concern with social image. A recent survey by the We Heart It social networking site, and published exclusively by TIME, documents the ways in which youth thirst for attaching “likes,” “hearts,” and comments to shared photos – the latest incarnation of the original of Facebook hot or not ratings of student photos that make many people cringe, but live on.
The We Heart It study reinforced a finding in my own recent work about the impact of not just comments that are openly hurtful or admiring, but of being lost in the shuffle. One teen in the We Heart It survey reported “Sometimes I just feel like I don’t exist, like I’m invisible to everyone, I pretend it’s okay, but it hurts.” In our study, we considered how others’ ratings of adolescents’ looks associated with their achievement — in grades as well as the social scene. Our most consistent finding was that being above average in looks – what we call standing out from the crowd – was correlated with nearly every social and academic domain that we examined in high school. These advantages continued into young adulthood, including through higher college completion and, as a consequence, higher earnings for the attractive than the average in looks. more...
About Council on Contemporary Families
The Council on Contemporary Families is a non-profit, non-partisan organization dedicated to providing the press and public with the latest research and best-practice findings about American families. CCF seeks to enhance the national understanding of how and why families are changing, what needs and challenges they face, and how these needs can best be met.