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Updated
04-21-2015
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This article outlines how American marriage and family structure has changed
significantly from 1970 to 2010, and summarizes implications for typical
kids.
For perspective, this brief YouTube video summarizes ideas about effective parenting:
See my comments after the article. The hilights below are mine. -
Peter Gerlach, MSW
+ + +
It is usually assumed that marriage and family are the bedrock on
which societies are built. Parents provide the necessities of life for their
offspring; parents are children’s
first teachers; parents provide an important part of the discipline children
need to learn and thrive; parents teach values and appropriate behavior to
their children; the extended family is a source of traditions and
values that provide a sense of belonging to something big. But after four
decades of fundamental changes in the structure of American families, it is
wise to consider the impacts of these changes on subsequent generations and
the traditional way of American life.
First,
the changes. Here is a succinct summary: between 1970 and 2010, marriage
rates declined by nearly 75 percent for 20 to 24 year old women and more
than 30 percent for 30 to 34 year old women; nonmarital births have
increased by over 280 percent; the percentage of women age 35 who are single
with children has increased by over 120 percent; about 60 percent of men and
women who marry cohabited prior to their first marriage. These are momentous
changes in the American way of love, romance, and family formation. The fact
that these trends have been going on for four decades and more, mostly at a
fairly steady clip, leads to the conclusion that they are permanent.
Policymakers
have responded by enacting a number of policies designed to increase the
incentives for marriage or to actively encourage marriage. Many of these
policies follow the principle that if a behavior is good for individuals and
society, policymakers and administrators should make it as easy as possible
to engage in the behavior and to reward it.
Thus,
policymakers have made changes in the tax code, changes in welfare programs,
and enacted new marriage encouragement programs designed to help people
develop the social skills that facilitate forming permanent relationships.
Many of
these programs have been evaluated by gold standard research which shows
that they have unfortunately produced modest or no impacts.
None has led to
increased marriage rates, demonstrating how difficult they are to change.
More broadly, as the trend data recited above demonstrate, whatever else
might be said about these policies, they have not reversed any of the trends
in family composition.
As the
marriage researcher and popular writer Stephanie Coontz has pointed out,
many Americans are adapting to the new rules for marriage, nonmarital
births, single parenting, and cohabitation. One of the fundamental changes
underlying declines in marriage rates is that women now have paid jobs at a
far higher rate and they earn higher wages than in the past.
A
fascinating statistic in this regard is that while the median earnings of
prime-age men (25 to 55), including those who did not work, declined by over
30 percent between 1970 and 2010, prime age women’s median earnings rose by
nearly 850 percent.
These
amazing changes in women’s income reflect, in addition to changes in average
wages, the fact that there has been a decline in the share of men who work
and an historic increase in the percentage of women who work.
Granted it
may be difficult to know whether the increased earnings of women led to less
marriage or vice versa, but polls show that young women are determined to
have careers and more than a few work so that they and their children won’t
be dependent on the income of men. Even mothers with little education and
low job skills are much more likely to work than in the past. Never-married
mothers - those with the least education and job skills - are more likely now
to work than to be on welfare.
Men have had
to adapt too. Another of the fundamental changes underlying not just changes
in marriage but in American society in general has been a decades-long
movement toward gender equity. Not only have women elbowed their way up in
the job market, but their husbands and cohabiting boyfriends have had to
pick up part of the burden of housework and child rearing. A Pew report
published in 2013 found that fathers living with their children spend more
than twice as much time doing housework today as in 1965 and almost three
times as much time with their children.
The nation’s
welfare policy, reformed by accretion over the years beginning roughly in
the mid-1980s, with a big explosion in 1996 that encouraged, cajoled, or
even forced mothers to leave welfare for work, has greatly expanded benefits
for poor working parents, usually mothers.
There has
been at least a ten-fold increase in payments and benefits for poor working
parents through the Earned Income Tax Credit, the Child Tax Credit,
nutrition programs, child care, and other benefits since the 1980s. A mother
and children living on welfare cannot escape poverty; low-income working
mothers with below-poverty wages can escape poverty by combining her
earnings with government’s work support benefits.
Thus, men
and women as well as government policy have adapted at least somewhat to the
modern status of marriage and child bearing. But an area of great concern
remains. Children do worse when
living with single parents than living with their married parents.
There is now widespread agreement that children living with single mothers
are more likely to do poorly in school, to be arrested, to have a teen
birth, to have mental health problems, and to go on welfare as adults.
They are also four or five times
more likely than children living with their married parents to be in poverty.
It is one thing for adults to make choices that jumble tradition, but
children do not get choices about the composition of their family.
If the trends reviewed here continue,
many more children will
live in poverty and the
development of a substantial fraction of the nation’s children
will be disrupted, with consequences for individual
children, their parents, the economy, and society. The nation
should continue exploring ways to increase marriage rates and
reduce nonmarital birth rates. But it seems likely that we will
continue to pay a steep price for sacrificing the interests of
children to maximize the freedom of adults.
Haskins is a senior fellow and
co-director of the Center on Children and Families at the Brookings
Institution
Comments
This sobering article concludes with a superficial recommendation:
"The nation
should continue exploring ways to increase marriage rates and reduce nonmarital
birth rates." It suggests that
programs to motivate American couples to marry have been ineffective.
An
underlying implication is that typical U.S. couples currently value adult
freedom more than their kids' developmental progress and
wholistic health. It suggests that typical parents aren't very aware of - or minimize - their
kids' developmental need for a stable two-parent home.
I suggest
that this is evidence of the societal impact of
inherited psychological
wounds and
unawareness: a growing number of parents were raised in
low-nurturance homes and families, and are at risk of unintentionally
repeating that lethal dynamic with their own kids.
Opinion: What our
nation really needs is education
on the profound
importance of
parenting effectiveness, and
of family cohesion and nurturance on
our kids and our society. - Peter Gerlach, MSW
Lesson 6 in this
ad-free Web site offers a practical framework for effective
parenting.
The Web address of this article is
https://sfhelp.org/parent/news/trends.htm
Comments
