The question of “what is happening to the American family” has been asked by demographers for quite some time. The vision of the perfect family that most critics have in mind is very removed from reality. This vision comes from the 1950s idea of a ‘nuclear family’ with mom, dad, two kids, and a dog, where the father is the breadwinner and the mother stays home to take care of the house and kids. Yet over the last fifty years demographic trends have significantly transformed the “television sit-com style of family”, portraying the more complex society that we live in today. One of the key reasons why families are so different today is because people are more in favor of individualism at the expense of moral obligation than they were fifty years ago. Over the past fifty years we have seen major changes in the rate of divorce, cohabitation, childbearing and parenting, status of children, and marital relationships and through thorough analysis we will understand why these changes have occurred.
Marital Disruption
As needs and interests conflict more and more in our society, the question of how much weight must the individual give to the interests of others compared to his or her own is raised. As Bumpass points out, more people are choosing to divert from the interests of the large community toward the interests of the individual alone and this can be seen no better than in the increased rate of marital disruption. Even though annual divorce rates have risen and fallen around the trend line, the primary rate of increase in the level of lifetime divorce has been nearly constant for more than 100 years. Between 1960 and 1979, the divorce rate more than doubled. It was also estimated that if divorce rates continue to hold nearly two-thirds of recent marriages would likely end in divorce. (Bumpass 1990)
What is interesting to note is that even though there are important differentials-mainly in race, education, and at age in marriage, no social structure is immune from divorce. For example, information from the 1980s indicates that more than half of first marriages are likely to end in divorce among whites, women who attended college, and those who married after the age of 23. Individuals with a lower level of education tend to have a higher rate of divorce than those that are better educated. Yet there may be a somewhat U-shaped relationship here because studies show that women with graduate level education are more likely to divorce than those with college educations. Also, African-Americans experience the highest rate of marital disruption and they have experienced a constant increase in divorce since 1970. Disruption rates are fairly similar for whites and Hispanics, yet Hispanics have seen a much more rapid increase over the past twenty years and they now exceed the rate of whites. Racial and ethnic divorce rates tend to persist even when other risk factors, such as education and age at marriage, are taken under consideration. (DaVanzo Rahman 1993)
Despite this negative information regarding marital disruption, many families are certainly stable. Over a third of marriages are expected to last a lifetime, and over 50% of the children that come from two-person families will have “intact families” for life. Yet the insecurity that is stemmed from these high levels of divorce rates may lead to reduced investments in some marriages, lowering the possibility that the marriages will last. One area where this idea can be seen is the increased rate of women in the labor force, a topic that will be covered much more extensively further in this paper. Because of the fact that marriages are looked at as being unstable lifetime guarantees, teenage girls may find it necessary to be able to support themselves. As a result increases in women’s “economic independence” may reduce the probability that couples will stay in bad and unhappy marriages (Bumpass 1990).
Even though marital disruption has had the most dramatic affects on the family over the past fifty years, increased levels of cohabitation preceding marriages has had a significant impact on family status. The percentage of marriages that are preceded by cohabitation have increased from 8% in the late 1960s to nearly 50% in the late 1980s and this number is expected to have increased over the past 15 years. It is estimated that nearly half of the people that are in their early forties have lived in a cohabited relationship, and more that half of the people that have recently been married have lived in cohabited relationships. (Bumpass 1990)
The question that arises from this information is how is cohabitation looked at as being the norm in today’s society when forty years ago it was looked at as morally wrong? It appears as though there are two main factors that need to be considered when answering this. The first is that the “revolution in the sexual experience of unmarried persons” over the past forty years has made people more accepting to the idea of cohabitation. Today, less than a fifth of young adults disapprove of premarital sex, even for eighteen-year-olds. (Bumpass 1990)
The other substantial factor in the increase of cohabitation is that more people are skeptical about marital stability because of the increase in divorce rates. Therefore couples have felt the need to experiment with marriage by living together before making a long-term commitment. When couples are asked why they chose cohabitation, most say so that they “can make sure they are compatible before getting married” (Bumpass 1990).
Therefore, the increase of cohabitation with couples helps to explain the rapid decline of marriages by offsetting it. It would also seem reasonable to assume that cohabitation has helped to keep the divorce rate from being higher than it already is. The reason for this is because the “premarital divorces” that take place for the couples living together, which would most likely have resulted in actual divorces had these people married, do not occur because these couples chose not to marry. Also, even though most adults are still getting married they are doing so later in life. One of the main reasons for this is due to cohabitation. In 1950 the median age for women getting married was 20.3 yet in 1992 that number rose to 24.4. Increases in age at marriage have also been attributed to the greater education and work opportunities available to young women. Lastly, cohabitation and the increase in divorce rates help in adding to the idea that marriage is not a necessity for some people. Only a third of young adults under the age of 25 believe that “it is better to be married than to go through life single” (DaVanzo Rahman 1993).
It is known that the total fertility rate in the United States has been stable for over twenty years, despite the fact that marriage behavior has been changing so radically. This stability is misconceiving because it hides a lot of the change that has been occurring with childbearing. From 1970 to 1987 the proportion of children born to an unmarried mom doubled to more than a quarter. One reason for this is because nonmarital childbearing has become apart of the life experience of a substantial amount of women. If trends continue, 17% of white females and 70% of black females will have a child while they are not married. A main reason for this increase is due to the idea that nonmarital childbearing is no longer considered a form of “illegitimacy” or “bastardy”. This growing acceptance of nonmarital childbearing helps to explain why one-third of unmarried people that were questioned said; “it would be alright for me to have a child while unmarried if I planned on marrying”. Another reason that helps to explain the increase of child-bearing out of wedlock goes back to the notion that if women no longer see marriage as a life-time economic security than the importance of having a “legitimate” birth is less appealing (Bumpass 1990).
Over one million teenage girls become pregnant each year in the United States, and out of these one million half of them give birth and half of them have an abortion. The “rates of pregnancy and abortion among all teenagers and among white teenagers in the United States” is higher than in almost every other developed country. Of the teenagers that chose to carry their pregnancies out, the majority of them keep their babies. In 1982, of unmarried teenage mothers, 7.4% of whites and 0.7% of blacks placed their child up for adoption. The white unmarried teenage mothers that placed their child up for adoption were more likely to have finished high school and have fathers that were highly educated than those who gave up their babies. Therefore it can be assumed that the main reason why the highly educated white teenage mothers gave up their child is because they would be hurting their chances to succeed early in life if they raised their child. (DaVanzo Rahman 1993)
The significant rise in the rate of divorce, the decline in marital fertility, and an increase in childbearing out of wedlock has led to a substantial increase in the proportion of children growing up in single parent families. From the 1960s to the 1990s the percentage of children living in month-only families nearly tripled, from 8% to 23%. These percentages have gone up for whites, blacks, and Hispanics. It has been estimated that nearly half of all children will spend at least some time in a single-parent family before they reach age 16. The percentage is much higher for blacks, 80%, than for whites or Mexicans, 40% (DaVanzo Rahman 1993).
This increase in the proportion of children living in single-parent families has raised a lot of concern over the financial well being of the children in the absence of one of the parents, usually the father. In 1991, the median income of female-headed households with related children under the age of eighteen was less than one-third that of married couples. Also, 475 of all female-headed households were below the poverty line, as opposed to the 8% of all two-parent families. (DaVanzo Rahman 1993)
These children who grow up in mother-only families tend to be absent from school more often and have more behavioral problems in school. They are also more likely to drop out of school and have lower educational attainment. They are more likely to have lower earnings as young adults and are more likely to marry early and have children early, both in and out of wedlock. Furthermore these children that grew up in mother-only families are more likely to commit violent crimes, and use drugs and alcohol than those who grew up in intact families. (DaVanzo Rahman 1993)
Over the past forty years the amount of women in the labor force has grown a substantial amount. In 1960, the percentage of currently married women with children under 18 years old was 28%, yet by the mid 1990s this percentage has risen to 68%. Some of the many reasons why more and more married women are entering the workforce are because of increases in women’s education and wages, expansion of the service sector of the economy, and changes in attitudes about the acceptability of women working outside of the home.
The fact that more and more women are entering the workforce has had a substantial affect in marital relationships. The reason for this is because it has caused both men and women to have “divergent” views on what they want out of a marriage, resulting in a decrease in the rate of marriages. Studies performed in the late 1980s found that one-third of husbands in resent marriages preferred to not have their wife employed. Men are not the only one’s who would like to see their wives work less because it was found that one-sixth of wives would prefer not to work, and the majority of women would rather work less. These “divergent views” often stem from whether or not the husband and wife agree on if the wife should be employed. For example, when there is a conflict in spouse preferences, if the wife works “in violation of the traditional power relationship”, husbands see it as disruptive of the marriage; yet if the wife does not work, “in deference to the traditional power relationship”, she sees it as being disruptive. However this is not a huge problem in most marriages because nearly 75% are in agreement over the wife’s employment. (Bumpass 1990)
Most of the trouble that is reported from marriages with employed wives occurs in families where the wife is working over 45 hours a week. The reason for this is because of the extra task load that workingwomen carry because of traditional expectations. However, it has been found that in relationships where the mother is working, the actual hours that husbands contribute to children is 30% higher compared to the hours contributed by husbands with non-working wives. Some evidence suggests that the newer generation of fathers that were brought up in single-parent homes with a “more gender-neutral sharing” of household duties are more in favor of forming “new families” with a equitable distribution of domestic labor (DaVanzo Rahman 1993).
It has also been found that husbands and wives both agree in that the “household task allocation is unfair to the wife”. What is also interesting about this information is that most of the men that perceive the time spent on the child activities is unfair don’t believe that the marriage is in trouble, while most of the women who believe that the time allocation is unfair say that their marriage is in trouble. (Bumpass 1990)
As one examines all of the information above it is reasonable to ask why does anyone get married and have children in the first placed? In attempting to answer this question it seems necessary to mention that the relational aspects of a family cannot be thoroughly described on paper. As explained by Bumpass the “intimacy with a partner in the context of commitment provides unique aspects of meaning and social support.” It has been explained in this paper that childbearing and parenting come with many headaches, yet the time spent raising one’s own child provides so much joy to parents that these headaches seem meaningless.
Despite all of this family relationships remain an important but diminishing space in our lives. It is a fact that that many of today’s young adults set financial success as a major goal with an equivalent fall in the proportion of people that are concerned with finding meaning in life. The trends discussed in marital distribution, cohabitation, marriage, and fertility are expected to continue. Thus, this demographic transition that has occurred in America over the past 40 years will most likely continue and the family lifestyle will continue to diverge from our 1950s “nuclear family”.
1. Larry L. Bumpass, "What's Happening to the Family" in Demography, Vol. 27, No. 4, November 1990, pp. 483-498.
2. Julie Da Vanzo and M. Omar Rahman, "American Families: Trends and Correlates", Population Index, Vol. 59, Fall 1993, No. 3, pp. 350-386.