family

Fifteen years ago, the going wisdom on cohabitation was that marriages preceded by living together were more likely to fall apart—that news is out of date. Several pieces from CCF share more current work on cohabitation, including the key observation that cohabitation itself is no longer associated with more or less risk of divorce in any subsequent marriage. Other recent pieces cover cohabitation and housework, childrearing, and remarriage.

• Does Premarital Cohabitation Raise Your Risk of Divorce?
• First Comes Love, Then Comes… Housework?
• Remarriage in the United States
• Child-Rearing Norms and Practices in Contemporary American Families
• Cohabitating Isn’t What It Used To Be

This briefing paper was prepared as part of an online symposium Moynihan+50: Family Structure Still not the Problem for the Council on Contemporary Families and published jointly by CCF and the Institute for Women’s Policy Research (IWPR).

Executive Summary

In The Negro Family: The Case for National Action, published in 1965, Daniel Patrick Moynihan famously argued that the fundamental obstacle to racial equality was the instability of Black families, and especially the prevalence of single-mother families. That same year, he predicted that the spread of single-parent families would result not only in rising poverty and inequality but also in soaring rates of crime and violence. Half a century later, we report that the changes in family structure that concerned him have continued, becoming widespread among Whites as well, but that they do not explain recent trends in poverty and inequality. In fact, a number of the social ills Moynihan assumed would accompany these changes have actually decreased.

• Even as single-parent families have become more prevalent in all race/ethnic groups, especially among Black families, poverty rates have fallen, partly because of effective welfare programs, and partly because of increased education and job opportunities (especially for women). In 1967 more than 60 percent of single-mother families were poor. Today, according to new, adjusted poverty calculations, that poverty rate has been almost halved, falling to 35 percent.

• During the period of greatest change in family structure, educational levels rose for Black children and young adults. Today, almost 90 percent of Black young adults are high school graduates, compared with only about 50 percent in the 1960s; Black college completion rates have doubled, from less than 10 to almost 20 percent.

• Since 1994 juvenile crime rates have plummeted by more than 60 percent for Blacks and Whites alike, even though marriage rates have continued to fall and the proportion of children born out of wedlock has reached 40 percent.

• Although it is true that single-parent families are more likely to be poor than two-parent ones, we show that fluctuations in poverty rates since the 1990s cannot be explained by changes in family structure.

• Marriage is no protection against racial inequality. Black and Latino children in married-couple families are, respectively, three- and four-times more likely to be poor than White children in such families.

One of the legacies of the Moynihan Report has been to focus attention on changing family structure, rather than on other factors that are more amenable to policy intervention. While marriage promotion programs have proven ineffective, evidence suggests that increasing employment opportunities and wage levels, anti-discrimination policies, and social safety nets have considerable potential to reduce poverty, increase economic and educational opportunity, and decrease racial inequality. more...

Over at Families as They Really Are, Erin Anderson has posted about men’s lagging uptake of family leave when it is available. Over here, we have prepared a round-up on how men are doing in families by looking back at papers from the Council on Contemporary Families.

An issue related to use (or not) of family leave has to do with the underlying security of jobs: In the CCF June 2013 Symposium on the Equal Pay Act, economist Heidi Shierholz wrote about the erosion of men’s wages in the past few decades. She explains, “In the late 1970s, after a long period of holding fairly steady, the gap in wages between men and women began improving. In 1979, the median hourly wage for women was 62.7 percent of the median hourly wage for men; by 2012, it was 82.8 percent. However, a big chunk of that improvement—more than a quarter of it—happened because of men’s wage losses, rather than women’s wage gains.” Read more here. more...

One of the consistent findings of sociological research in recent decades has been that couples who had a child before getting married had substantially higher odds of divorcing than couples who married first. This held true even when researchers controlled for other factors that tend to distinguish such couples from those who marry directly—education, family background, race and ethnicity. But considering the tremendous increase in premarital cohabitation and childbearing over the past quarter century, and in light of new evidence that many other longstanding “laws” of marriage and divorce have been overturned (e.g., see “It’s Not Just Attitudes: Marriage Is Also Becoming More Egalitarian”; Are Individuals Who Marry at an Older Age Too Set in Their Ways to Make Their Marriages Work?), we set out to investigate whether this particular sociological “rule” still applies. more...

The U.S. Census Bureau’s report on income, poverty and health insurance coverage, released today, reflects the continued uncertainty for U.S. families that has persisted since the Great Recession. Year-to-year changes in most trends were modest or not statistically significant—except in the case of health insurance coverage—but the longer-term trends are important.

Specifically:

• Household income has still not recovered to its pre-recession levels. In inflation-adjusted 2014 dollars, household income is now $53,657, which is down 6.5% from the pre-recession peak of $57,357. Although there has been improvement since the lowest level in 2011-2012, this remains a substantial loss—and source of uncertainty—for the typical U.S. household, even with the steady job growth of the last six years.

• Similarly, poverty rates for families remain higher than they were before the recession. In 2014, 21.1% of children lived below the poverty line—up from 17.4% in 2007. For families overall, the poverty rate stands at 12.7%, which is 1.9% higher than it was in 2007.

• The most important good news, continuing recent trends, may be the increase in health insurance coverage. Insurance coverage (from all sources) has increased 1.8% for children, and 5.9% for the total population, since 2010—now standing at 94% for children and 89.6% for the total population. This is generally attributed to the expansion of insurance coverage provided by Obamacare.

Despite strong job growth, the recovery remains a mixed one for U.S. families, with significant uncertainty and hardship a persistent part of family life for many people. However, with household income down and poverty up, the expansion of health insurance coverage may be easing the strain for families, helping to mitigate one important source of uncertainty and potential crisis—the costs associated with a sudden, or ongoing, health condition requiring expensive care.The expansion of health insurance coverage may be easing the strain on families, helping mitigate one source of uncertainty and potential crisis.

August 26 was Women’s Equality Day. Established in 1971, the day commemorates passage of the 19^th Amendment, which gave women the right to vote. But political equality did not begin to extend to economic equality or marital equality until the 1970s, despite passage of the Civil Rights and Equal Pay Acts in the mid-1960s. As late as 1975, women earned only 60 cents for every dollar a man earned, and no state had yet repealed the laws that gave a man immunity from raping his wife.

Since then, women’s progress in upward occupational mobility and earnings has been dramatic. Dual-earner marriages are now the norm, women now outpace men in educational achievement, and growing numbers of wives out-earn their husbands.

For many years, however, women’s gains seemed to destabilize marriages and threaten family formation. As women entered the workforce, marriage rates fell and divorce rates soared. Fertility plummeted, and policy-makers worried that career-oriented women were turning their backs on motherhood entirely. Some early studies suggested that when wives got their husbands to do housework, they were more likely to get beaten up (Fuchs 1988), or at the very least, to have less happy sex lives.

Many of these developments, however, were products of a transitional period of adjustment, especially marked in the 1970s and 1980s, when women embraced gender equality more quickly than did men and experienced widespread discontent with the persistence of traditional marriage and family arrangements.

The gender revolution is nowhere complete, but there is now evidence that the further progress of the gender revolution is in many cases resulting in a certain restabilization of family life.

• In the US and many other countries, divorce rates have fallen among couples who express the greatest support for gender equality. Women’s higher education and earnings now seem to help rather than hurt their marriage chances.
• In Sweden, women with a high career orientation are now more likely to enter a union than other women (Thomson and Bernhardt 2010). And in other countries with strong work-family support systems (Finland and Norway as well as Sweden), dual-earner marriages are now less likely to divorce than male breadwinner ones (Cooke et al 2013).
• In US marriages formed in the early 1990s and since, couples who share housework report higher marital quality and better sexual relationships than those with a more traditional division of labor. And even among older men (ages 51-92) those with egalitarian gender role attitudes report much higher levels of marital happiness than otherwise comparable men with traditional attitudes (Kaufman 2006).

Men’s increasing involvement in child care and housework (Sullivan, et al. 2014) seems to be critical here.

• An analysis of 13 industrialized countries (Sevilla-Sanz 2010) found that men with more egalitarian attitudes were more likely to form a romantic union and particularly to cohabit than men with less egalitarian attitudes.
• Among cohabitors, men who were involved in the care of their children (providing care when the mother was absent, taking children to daycare and medical appointments) were more likely to make the transition to marriage than those less involved (Kotila 2014).

In fact, such men’s involvement seems to make women more willing to have children.

• Studies show that when men are more involved with their children after the birth of a first child, a couple is more likely to have a second child. This is the case both in Sweden (Goldscheider, Bernhardt and Brandén 2013) and the US. In the US, the big difference was between the most sharing couples and those who shared inconsistently (81 percent of the former had a 2^nd child compared with only 55 percent of the latter [Torr and Short 2006]).
• This may be why fertility patterns in Europe are changing: In the 1970s, the countries in Europe with the lowest levels of women’s employment (primarily in southern Europe) had the highest fertility; by the 1990s this relationship had reversed, with the countries of northern Europe, which have the highest levels of women’s employment, also having the highest fertility.

References:

Fuchs, Victor R. 1988. Women’s Quest for Economic Equality, Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press.

Kotila, Letitia. 2014. “The role of father involvement in the union transitions of cohabiting parents.” Paper presented at the annual meetings of the Population Association of America, Boston, MA.

Kaufman, Gayle. 2006. “Gender and marital happiness in later life,” Journal of Family Issues 27(6):735-757.

Torr, Berna Miller and Susan E. Short. 2004. “Second births and the second shift: A research note on gender equity and fertility,” Population and Development Review 30:109-130.

Goldscheider, Frances, Eva Bernhardt, and Maria Brandén. 2013. “Domestic gender equality and childbearing in Sweden,” Demographic Research 29 (40):1097-1126.

Cooke, Lynn, et al. 2013. “Labor and love: Wives’ employment and divorce risk in its socio-political context,” Social Politics 20(4):482-509.

Sullivan, Oriel, Francesco Billari, and Evrim Altintas. 2014. “Father’s changing contributions to child care and domestic work in very low fertility countries: The effect of education,” Journal of Family Issues 35(8):1048-1065.

Sevilla-Sanz, Almudena. 2010. “Household division of labor and cross-country differences in household formation rates,” Journal of Population Economics 23: 225-249.

Released originally on August 25, 2015.

Despite substantial increases in married mothers’ employment and the expressed desire of the majority of women and men to share employment and caregiving responsibilities, gender remains the most influential determinant of who does the housework and child care today. Many observers have attributed the seeming unwillingness of men to increase their time in housework and child care as the linchpin of gender inequality, a manifestation of men’s patriarchal power to prioritize activities that provide economic rewards, such as paid work, or enjoyment, such as leisure (Goode 1992; Jackman 1994).

One strain of feminist and academic scholarship holds that men feel no need to do more child care or housework because they reap the benefits of marriage and fatherhood (e.g. marriage and fatherhood wage premiums, living in a clean, well-run household, and children’s performance of filial duties) without having to spend time producing them — cooking, cleaning, or taking on the everyday, physical care of children. Rather, they can expect wives and mothers to shoulder the burden of feeding and caring for children and families, regardless of women’s other time demands. Such an analysis builds on the work of Jessie Bernard, an influential feminist sociologist, who argued that marriage is a gendered institution that privileges men and disadvantages women.

One key assumption of this argument has been that men do not want to become involved with children except when they can have fun with them. But this argument does not hold up when we analyze both the quantitative time diary data on mothers’ and fathers’ child care time and the qualitative literature on what fathers want. Instead, careful examination reveals a more complex story about the interplay between gender, marriage, parenthood, and class-differentiated patterns of childrearing that are more about ensuring upward mobility among children than about gender oppression. more...

Does marriage lead women to take on a larger share of housework? In the 1950s and 1960s, marriage was clearly unfair to women. The social and legal definition of marriage made it a woman’s duty, but not a man’s, to provide services in and around the home. Husbands had the final say over many family matters, such as where a couple would live and how the finances were managed. Married women were expected to take care of the meals and housework without any assistance from their husbands, whether they worked outside the home or not.

Values have changed since then, but some scholars argue that marriage still carries powerful role expectations that differ by gender and that lead women to start doing more housework and men to start doing less. Since the 1990s, several studies have compared the behavior of couples who are married and couples who live together. They find that unmarried cohabiting couples split the housework and paid work more equally than married couples, where wives tend to do a larger share of unpaid housework and husbands to do more paid work. Some have concluded from this comparison that there is something about marriage roles, and the expectations surrounding those, that causes couples to become more traditional after marriage.

But these studies were not comparing the same types of couples before and after marriage. They were comparing all cohabitors, even ones that didn’t intend to ever get married, with all married couples, even those that did not cohabit before marriage. more...

If at first they don’t succeed, do most Americans “try, try again”?

Wedding season is here again, and for many couples that is literally true. In 2013, 40 percent of all marriages — four out of every ten — were remarriages for either the bride or groom. One in five were remarriages for boththe bride and groom (Lewis and Kreider 2015; Livingston 2014).

Among men and women in their early 40s, more than half of all marriages are remarriages.

And among divorced or widowed individuals under age 45 who are not yet married, more than half (56 percent) say they expect to marry again. Remarriage is not the only way that previously-married individuals establish new relationships. As of 2013, almost half (47 percent) of cohabiting adults were previously married.

Despite this enthusiasm for repartnering, remarriage rates have been falling. In 2013, of every 1,000 previously-married man and woman in the country, 28 got married. But this is down from 50 per 1,000 in 1990, a decline of 40 percent (Payne 2015). Men are either more eager or more able to find new spouses than women. The current remarriage rate is nearly twice as high for men as for women (40 per 1,000 for men and 21 per 1,000 for women) (Payne 2015). In 1995, 54 percent of women who divorced before age 45 had remarried within five years of divorce. A decade later that had declined to 38 percent (NCHS).

People are taking more time to remarry than in the past. Half of men and women who remarry after a divorce from a first marriage do so within about four years (Kreider and Ellis 2011). A decade earlier, half remarried in about three years (Kreider and Fields 2002). more...

In a dramatic shift in attitudes from just 40 years ago, most modern couples want to share the duties and rewards of work and family equally. However, this is particularly difficult for new parents in the U.S. in light of limited governmental support and persistent traditional gender norms. The U.S. offers inadequate paid parental leave and few options for cutting hours at work, while the cost of quality infant child care is exceptionally high. Thus parenthood is especially challenging for U.S. couples—the majority of whom are dual-earners who strive to achieve a work/family balance.

We studied 182 different-sex couples who were expecting their first child. Most were professionals who were well-positioned to equally share housework, parenting, and paid work responsibilities due to their high levels of education and the fact that both partners were working full-time. During the last trimester of the woman’s pregnancy and at 9-months postpartum, we had these men and women keep time diaries, recording every activity they engaged in during a 24-hour workday and non-workday. We also surveyed them about their own attitudes and perceptions of their division of labor at the beginning of our study and again when their child was nine months old.

more...