[acb-hsp] 5 Reasons Why Americans Are Delaying Marriage

[peter altschul]

5 Reasons Americans Are Delaying Marriage
  June Carbone and Lauren Cahn, New Deal 2.0 May 23, 2011
  New research shows that women are getting married at later ages 
-- and that the divorce rate is going down.  The results reflect 
some good news -- later marriages are more likely to last.  Most 
importantly, however, these figures correlate with widespread 
changes in the American family.
  First, the decrease in the divorce rate does at least in part 
reflect later marriages.  Teen marriages have always been risky 
and most studies suggest that the increase in maturity from the 
teen years to the early twenties bodes well for the stability of 
relationships.  Delay from the early twenties to the late 
twenties and thirties, however, is more controversial.  While 
these later marriages are also more likely to last, economist 
Stephane Mechoulan found that the increase in the age of marriage 
in itself accounts for only a small part of the falling divorce 
rates.  Instead, they reflect the increasing tendency of the 
well-off to marry similarly well-off partners and those marriages 
are more likely to last at any age.
  Second, the overall statistics hide the class-based dynamics at 
the core of the shift.  Historically, college educated women were 
less likely to marry than high school graduates.  Today, male and 
female college graduates have become substantially more likely to 
marry (and stay married).  At the same time, marriage has 
effectively disappeared from the poorest communities.  In the 
middle, pregnant teens like Bristol Palin have become much less 
likely to marry the fathers of their children.  It is hardly 
surprising therefore that overall divorce rates have fallen as 
the highest divorce risks (pregnant teens among them) have become 
much less likely to marry.
  Third, the later age of marriage for college graduates does 
suggest a new middle class strategy: invest in women's education 
and earning capacity as well as menbs, push back the age of 
marriage and childbearing from the low ages of the anomalous 
fifties, and reap the benefits of two incomes.  This strategy, of 
course, began in the sixties and seventies and produced much more 
independent women.  Today, it also reflects a new marriage 
strategy.  The only portion of the American population 
substantially better off than a generation ago are high income 
men, and it's easier to tell who will be successful (think of 
those Wall St.  bonuses) and who will not at thirty than at 
twenty.  At the same time, for less spectacularly successful men, 
two substantial incomes are essential for middle class life.  
Today, becoming established means not only college graduation and 
graduate school, but the right internships, entry level jobs, and 
often repeated moves between positions, cities and sometimes 
career paths.  These investments pay off in terms of a stable 
investment for family life, but they are rarely in place before 
the thirties and earlier marriage and childbearing often makes 
them harder to establish.  As the economy becomes more perilous, 
the risks of early marriage increase.
  Fourth, with the disappearance of relatively stable and high 
paying manufacturing jobs, working class women may have greater 
opportunities than working class men and they have also become 
pickier about marriage as a result.
  Women have become more likely to graduate from high school and 
college and the jobs they choose -- teaching, health care, retail 
sales, administration -- tend to be more stable than those 
available to men.  Construction workers, for example, often earn 
more than Walmart employees, but they are also more likely to be 
laid off.  Studies further show that while unemployed women spend 
more time on the home and the children, unemployed men spend more 
time moping, drinking, watching TV, and lashing out at those 
around them.  The new data confirms that the Great Recession has 
slowed marriage rates and earlier studies show that financial 
stress greatly increases the divorce rates of young and working 
class couples with the most traditional attitudes toward gender 
roles.  In today's economy, these couples have become less likely 
to marry.
  Fifth, a delay in marriage and a decrease in divorce might be a 
good thing, but only if it also produces a drop in non-marital 
births.  For the middle class, later marriage continues to mean 
later childbearing, and later childrearing tends to lower overall 
fertility.  Women's workforce participation increases the 
opportunity cost (and the family tensions) of having more 
children.  The combination of the suburbs, with their dependence 
on the automobile, and the disappearance of stay-at-home moms 
dismantled the community networks that had supervised children, 
placing more emphasis on the role of individual parents.
  Modern studies of family time indicate that while mothers today 
spend substantially less time on housework than they did a half 
century ago, they spend as much time with their children and 
their husband spend more.  Today's "helicopter" parents invest 
enormous amounts of time overseeing homework, coaching sports 
teams, escorting their children to after school activities, and 
addressing their emotional needs.
  Working class women, however, have become more likely to have 
children without marrying.  If the father is chronically 
unemployed, uncommitted to the relationship, immature or simply 
unreliable, young mothers may decide that they are better off on 
their own.  It is hard to assess the impact of falling marriage 
rates therefor without examining the nature of childbearing.  The 
changes of the last quarter century indicate that marriage is 
increasingly becoming a marker of class -- the delayed marriages 
of the middle class produce steadily lower divorce rates, very 
few non-marital births, and substantial resources to invest in a 
falling number of children.  For the rest of the country, the 
statistics may simply confirm a greater move away from marriage 
altogether.
  June Carbone is the Edward A.  SmithstMissouri Chair of Law, 
the Constitution and Society at the University of Missouri-Kansas 
City.
  Naomi Cahn is the John Theodore Fey Research Professor of Law 
at George Washington University Law School.  She is the author of 
numerous books and law review articles on gender and family law.
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