[Vision2020] For Women Under 30, Most Births Occur Outside Marriage

[Art Deco]

  [image: The New York Times] <http://www.nytimes.com/>


------------------------------
February 17, 2012
For Women Under 30, Most Births Occur Outside Marriage By JASON
DePARLE and SABRINA
TAVERNISE<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/t/sabrina_tavernise/index.html?inline=nyt-per>

LORAIN, Ohio — It used to be called illegitimacy. Now it is the new normal.
After steadily rising for five decades, the share of children born to
unmarried women has crossed a threshold: more than half of births to
American women under 30 occur outside marriage.

Once largely limited to poor women and minorities, motherhood without
marriage has settled deeply into middle America. The fastest growth in the
last two decades has occurred among white women in their 20s who have some
college education but no four-year degree, according to Child Trends, a
Washington research group that analyzed government data.

Among mothers of all ages, a majority — 59 percent in 2009 — are married
when they have children. But the surge of births outside marriage among
younger women — nearly two-thirds of children in the United States are born
to mothers under 30 — is both a symbol of the transforming family and a
hint of coming generational change.

One group still largely resists the trend: college graduates, who
overwhelmingly marry before having children. That is turning family
structure into a new class divide, with the economic and social rewards of
marriage increasingly reserved for people with the most education.

“Marriage has become a luxury good,” said Frank Furstenberg, a sociologist
at the University of Pennsylvania.

The shift is affecting children’s lives. Researchers have consistently
found that children born outside marriage face elevated risks of falling
into poverty <http://www.urban.org/publications/410541.html>, failing in
school or suffering emotional and behavioral
problems<http://futureofchildren.org/futureofchildren/publications/docs/15_02_05.pdf>.


The forces rearranging the family are as diverse as globalization and the
pill. Liberal analysts argue that shrinking paychecks have thinned the
ranks of marriageable men, while conservatives often say that the sexual
revolution reduced the incentive to wed and that safety net programs
discourage marriage.

Here in Lorain, a blue-collar town west of Cleveland where the decline of
the married two-parent family has been especially steep, dozens of
interviews with young parents suggest that both sides have a point.

Over the past generation, Lorain lost most of two steel mills, a shipyard
and a Ford factory, diminishing the supply of jobs that let blue-collar
workers raise middle-class families. More women went to work, making
marriage less of a financial necessity for them. Living together became
routine, and single motherhood lost the stigma that once sent couples
rushing to the altar. Women here often describe marriage as a sign of
having arrived rather than a way to get there.

Meanwhile, children happen.

Amber Strader, 27, was in an on-and-off relationship with a clerk at Sears
a few years ago when she found herself pregnant. A former nursing student
who now tends bar, Ms. Strader said her boyfriend was so dependent that she
had to buy his cigarettes. Marrying him never entered her mind. “It was
like living with another kid,” she said.

When a second child, with a new boyfriend, followed three years later — her
birth control failed, she said — her boyfriend, a part-time house painter,
was reluctant to wed.

Ms. Strader likes the idea of marriage; she keeps her parents’ wedding
photo on her kitchen wall and says her boyfriend is a good father. But for
now marriage is beyond her reach.

“I’d like to do it, but I just don’t see it happening right now,” she said.
“Most of my friends say it’s just a piece of paper, and it doesn’t work out
anyway.”

The recent rise in single motherhood has set off few alarms, unlike in past
eras. When Daniel Patrick Moynihan, then a top Labor Department official
and later a United States senator from New York, reported in 1965 that a
quarter of black children were born outside marriage — and warned of a
“tangle of pathology”— he set off a bitter debate.

By the mid-1990s, such figures looked quaint: a third of Americans were
born outside marriage. Congress, largely blaming welfare, imposed tough
restrictions. Now the figure is 41 percent — and 53 percent for children
born to women under 30, according to Child Trends, which analyzed 2009 data
from the National Center for Health Statistics.

Still, the issue received little attention until the publication last month
of “Coming Apart,” a book by Charles Murray, a longtime critic of
non-marital births.

Large racial differences
remain:<http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nvsr/nvsr48/nvs48_16.pdf>73
percent of black children are born outside marriage, compared with 53
percent of Latinos and 29 percent of whites. And educational differences
are growing. About 92 percent of college-educated women are married when
they give birth, compared with 62 percent of women with some post-secondary
schooling and 43 percent of women with a high school diploma or less, according
to Child Trends.<http://archive.constantcontact.com/fs008/1101701160827/archive/1108965696926.html>

Almost all of the rise in nonmarital births has occurred among couples
living together. While in some countries such relationships endure at rates
that resemble marriages, in the United States they are more than twice as
likely to dissolve than marriages. In a summary of research, Pamela Smock
and Fiona Rose Greenland <http://www.psc.isr.umich.edu/pubs/abs/6414>, both
of the University of Michigan, reported that two-thirds of couples living
together split up by the time their child turned 10.

In Lorain as elsewhere, explanations for marital decline start with home
economics: men are worth less they used to be. Among men with some college
but no degrees, earnings have fallen 8 percent in the past 30 years,
according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, while the earnings of their
female counterparts have risen by 8 percent.

“Women used to rely on men, but we don’t need to anymore,” said Teresa
Fragoso, 25, a single mother in Lorain. “We support ourselves. We support
our kids.”

Fifty years ago, researchers have found, as many as a third of American
marriages were precipitated by a pregnancy, with couples marrying to
maintain respectability. Ms. Strader’s mother was among them.

Today, neither of Ms. Strader’s pregnancies left her thinking she should
marry to avoid stigma. Like other women interviewed here, she described her
children as largely unplanned, a byproduct of uncommitted relationships.

Some unwed mothers cite the failures of their parents’ marriages as reasons
to wait. Brittany Kidd was 13 when her father ran off with one of her
mother’s friends, plunging her mother into depression and leaving the
family financially unstable.

“Our family life was pretty perfect: a nice house, two cars, a dog and a
cat,” she said. “That stability just got knocked out like a window; it
shattered.”

Ms. Kidd, 21, said she could not imagine marrying her son’s father, even
though she loves him. “I don’t want to wind up like my mom,” she said.

Others noted that if they married, their official household income would
rise, which could cost them government benefits like food stamps and child
care. W. Bradford Wilcox, a sociologist at the University of Virginia, said
other government policies, like no-fault
divorce<http://nationalaffairs.com/publications/detail/the-evolution-of-divorce>,
signaled that “marriage is not as fundamental to society” as it once was.

Even as many Americans withdraw from marriage, researchers say, they expect
more from it: emotional fulfillment as opposed merely to practical support.
“Family life is no longer about playing the social role of father or
husband or wife, it’s more about individual satisfaction and
self-development,” said Andrew
Cherlin<http://www.amazon.com/Andrew-J.-Cherlin/e/B001H6N5XA>,
a sociologist at Johns Hopkins University.

Money helps explain why well-educated Americans still marry at high rates:
they can offer each other more financial support, and hire others to do
chores that prompt conflict. But some researchers argue that educated men
have also been quicker than their blue-collar peers to give women equal
authority. “They are more willing to play the partner role,” said Sara
McLanahan, a Princeton sociologist.

Reviewing the academic literature, Susan L. Brown of Bowling Green State
University recently found that children born to married couples, on
average, “experience better education, social, cognitive and behavioral
outcomes.”

Lisa Mercado, an unmarried mother in Lorain, would not be surprised by
that. Between nursing classes and an all-night job at a gas station, she
rarely sees her 6-year-old daughter, who is left with a rotating cast of
relatives. The girl’s father has other children and rarely lends a hand.

“I want to do things with her, but I end up falling asleep,” Ms. Mercado
said.


-- 
Art Deco (Wayne A. Fox)
art.deco.studios at gmail.com
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://mailman.fsr.com/pipermail/vision2020/attachments/20120218/0250bd5b/attachment.html>