SINGLES, CHURCHES CAN TAKE SEPARATE PATHS: Louisville Courier-Journal

feature:

When Steven Schafer looks out over his small congregation on Sunday mornings, he sees a picture of modern American family life.

About half of the congregants come from what was once typical — families headed by married couples.

The rest include “a lot of single parents, a lot of divorced parents, a lot of grandparents raising their kids,” said Schafer, pastor of Ridgewood Baptist Church in Pleasure Ridge Park. “The traditional family is not the norm.” That presents a major challenge to churches, which are struggling to respond to the revolution in how Americans structure their families, households and romances.

Nearly half of American adults today aren’t married — whether never-married, currently divorced, separated or widowed, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.

Married couples account for just under half of all American households — down from 71 percent in 1970, according to the U.S. Census.

Yet still today, married people are more likely than singles to attend church. And churches often seem focused on the nuclear family, whether it’s in the sermon topics, the posters on the walls or the graded Sunday schools.

The Rev. Kevin Cosby, pastor of St. Stephen Church, said his congregation is trying to create a culture in which “you’re not abnormal if you’re single.”

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Labels: Christianity, cohabitation, culture, Marriage, religion, single parenting, singles, unmarried parents

posted by Eve at 11:54 AM VOTE

GOOD NEWS AND BAD NEWS IN MARRIAGE AND DIVORCE STATISTICS: Mark Regnerus

blogs:

...The action is largely on the marriage side of the equation: the marriage rate has dropped 17 percent in 10 years, while the divorce rate has dropped 10 percent. The two tend to rise and fall together, but clearly not tightly so. People are being more selective about marrying, likely, and as a result there are fewer divorces.

Third, some states exhibit dramatically different stories here. The marriage rate in Mississippi has dropped 48 percent in 20 years (from 1990 to 2010), while their divorce rate has dropped 22 percent. Their ratio of new marriages to divorce is now 1.14-to-1, meaning that if you were going to go ahead and misinterpret that statistic the old-fashioned way, you’d say something like 88 percent of all marriages in Mississippi will end in divorce. Of course we don’t know the future, and any given year’s new marriages aren’t often also reflected as divorces that year—Hollywood goofballs notwithstanding—but the ratio tells us that there are nearly as many divorces in Mississippi now as there are marriages. Not good.

So which state has the best ratio? Which means (to me at least) the most marriages relative to divorces…the blessed state of my birth: Iowa, where 2.9 new marriages were registered in 2010 for every one divorce. Sociologist Maria Kefalas wrote about Iowa as having many “marriage naturalists,” and it appears so. Even though I’ve been gone from the place since I was 13, cultural traces remain, no doubt.

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Labels: cohabitation, culture, divorce, Hawaii, Iowa, Mark Regnerus, Marriage, Mississippi, North Dakota, Vermont, West Virginia

posted by Eve at 12:20 AM VOTE

EXPERTS IN PHILLY DESCRIBE MYSTERIES OF POLYAMORY: The Philadelphia Inquirer

reports:

You think a romantic relationship between two people is hard? Try polyamory.

A panel of experts at the American Psychiatric Association meeting in Philadelphia last week said that open relationships between more than two people can work, but it requires a lot of talk about rules, boundaries, and time spent with various lovers.

William Slaughter, a psychiatrist in Cambridge, Mass., who has been treating polyamorous patients for about five years, said they need to have very good communication skills and be especially good at “mentalizing” or understanding others’ emotional reactions. He and Richard Sprott, a psychologist at California State University East Bay, and Elisabeth Sheff, a sociologist who recently left Georgia State University, talked about what to expect from polyamorous patients. Such patients often complain that they have to spend too much time educating their therapists, Slaughter said. ...

Sheff and Sprott believe polyamory is increasing. Sprott said younger generations are less insistent on monogamy than their parents. He cited research that found that 29 percent of lesbian couples, 29 percent of cohabiting straight couples, and 47 percent of gay couples are not monogamous. Among married couples, 23 percent of men and 19 percent of women cheat at some point in the marriage. He said there is no way to know how common polyamory is. ...

Sheff has studied children in polyamorous families. In her small sample, the “kids tend to be in great shape.” These families often aren’t obvious to the mono world. They look like a couple whose good friends come over a lot or people who are good friends with their exes. Most are discreet about sex, so the kids aren’t confronted by it and neither are their friends.

Sheff said the children say they like having extra adults in their lives. There’s always someone to drive them somewhere or help with homework. “A number of them expressed pity for children who only have two parents,” she said.

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Labels: adultery, children, cohabitation, gay/straight differences, lesbians, mental health, monogamy, more than two parents, parenting, polyamory, professional associations

posted by Eve at 10:37 AM VOTE

DAUGHTERS OF THE REVOLUTION: Ross Douthat

blogs:

...It’s also interesting to watch “Girls” in parallel with AMC’s 1960s-set “Mad Men,” which reached a crucial cultural hinge moment this week when Peggy Olson’s journalist boyfriend Abe invited her to dinner at a fancy restaurant and proposed that they … move in together. Abe and Peggy have already been sleeping together, but in the substitution of a cohabitation proposal for the marriage proposal she expected – and the way she was first taken aback by, then justified, and then embraced the idea of moving in together – we can see the beginning of the shift from a world where “premarital sex” tended to be actually premarital (i.e., you would sleep with someone only if you thought you might be on the way to marrying them) to the world we inhabit today, in which there’s no clear script for making one’s way from casual encounters through steady relationships to cohabitation and then (at some point, maybe, but not always, especially down the income ladder) marriage. When Peggy’s mother, a sour outer-borough Catholic widow, tells her daughter that her suitor will use her “for practice” and then discard her, she’s probably being unfair to Abe himself, who seems like a decent enough guy. But her words foreshadow a world in which Hannah Horvath’s awful pseudo-boyfriend floats indifferently from one sexual encounter to the next, secure in the knowledge that “practice” is all he’ll ever be expected to provide.

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Labels: class, cohabitation, culture, heterosexual couples, Marriage, men, premarital sex, Ross Douthat, sex, women

posted by Eve at 11:09 PM VOTE

THE END OF MARRIAGE? HUSBAND-WIFE HOUSEHOLDS AT RECORD LOWS: 2010 CENSUS: ABC News

reports:

Ozzie and Harriet step aside. The proportion of homes in America with husband-wife couples has now fallen below 50 percent, the lowest since the Census Bureau began tabulating this family data in 1940.

New census 2010 figures, released today, reveal that 48 percent of all households include a married husband and wife, compared with 52 percent in 2000. That’s down dramatically from the peak. In the 1950 census, 78 percent of all households in America mirrored the Ozzie and Harriet mold, with a husband and wife in the home.

There is wide variation from state to state. Utah has the highest proportion of husband-wife households, at 61 percent. The lowest numbers are in New York and Louisiana, with 44 percent each.

There are more interracial married couples than a decade ago. Their numbers jumped 28 percent since 2000. ...

Unmarried couples make up less than 7 percent of all households, but their numbers still jumped 40 percent from 2000. The largest increase in that group was same-sex partner homes, which skyrocketed 80 percent in the past decade. They make up less than one percent of all households, but in 2010, nearly 650,000 households identified themselves as same-sex partner homes.

Other types of living arrangements are also on the upswing. There are more people living alone. Homes with just one person made up nearly 27 percent of households in 2010. Atlanta and Washington, D.C., are the two cities with most residents living by themselves – about 44 percent in each. The Census Bureau says that probably reflects young single people looking for job opportunities.

Another growing phenomenon is the number of male homeowners living without a spouse, but with other family members. Half of these are dads with their own children. The others might include an adult son whose parent moves in, or a brother housing another brother. Think “Two and a Half Men.” This category of home increased by 19.05 percent, from 4.2 percent of households in 2000 to 5 percent in 2010.

It’s also more common to find multiple generations living together. In 2010, there were 5 million families where three or more generations lived under the same roof, about a million more than a decade before.

The new census numbers also reflects the graying of America.

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Labels: aging, cohabitation, culture, extended family, family structure, Fathers, gay couples, interracial marriage, Marriage, singles, unmarried parents

posted by Eve at 11:41 AM VOTE

Births to Cohabiting Couples Dramatically Increase: Baptist Press

reports:

The number of babies born to unmarried couples who are living together in America has increased dramatically during the past decade, according to a new report by the National Center for Health Statistics. "We were a little surprised in such a short time period to see these increases," Gladys Martinez, a demographer and the lead author of the report, said. About 23 percent of the reported births in the study -- based on face-to-face interviews of 22,000 men and women from 2006 through 2010 -- were to unmarried heterosexual couples who were cohabiting when the child was born. In 2002, the figure from a similar study was 14 percent. Researchers in the study did not attempt to explain the increase, but a sociologist from Bowling Green State University in Ohio told USA Today that it could be attributed to the economy. "Marriage is an achievement that you enter into when you're ready. But in the meantime, life happens. You form relationships. You have sex. You get pregnant. In a perfect world, they would prefer to be married, but where the economy is now, they're not going to be able to get married, and they don't want to wait to have kids," Karen Benjamin Guzzo said.

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Labels: cohabitation, culture, economics, Marriage, out-of-wedlock births, unmarried parents

posted by Imapp Staff at 11:36 PM VOTE

UK CHILD BENEFIT PROPOSALS RISK "INTRUSIVENESS," SAYS COMMONS LIBRARY: The Telegraph

reports:

The House of Commons Library says couples will have to provide detailed information about their relationship to HMRC so officials can establish whether they are entitled to the benefits.

The report also warns the proposal to remove the £20 a week benefit from higher earners or their partners will create a new “couple penalty”, encouraging people to live apart.

Meanwhile “question marks remain” over how the revised plan, set out in thee Budget, will be implemented, with an “obvious” potential for dispute.

The stark warnings come in a new briefing on the controversial Child Benefit reforms, published by Parliamentary researchers on Monday. ...

The briefing says that social security officials have long used the phrase “living together as man and wife” to calculate benefits eligibility.

“But its extension to the tax system raises a range of issues and could lead to complaints about intrusiveness.

“Furthermore, whether or not a ‘partnership’ exists will have to be determined on an ongoing basis throughout the tax year, not just at a single point in time.”

Benefits staff are told in guidance to consider “duration and stability of the relationship”, “financial arrangements”, “sexual relations (although a person should not be asked about this)”, “the degree of interdependence and devotion” and “how other people see the relationship”.

However they do not use a “score card” or a single factor to decide if two people are in a relationship akin to marriage or civil partnership.

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Labels: children, cohabitation, common-law, Marriage, United Kingdom, unmarried parents, welfare, work/family policy

posted by Eve at 5:29 PM VOTE

THE DOWNSIDE TO COHABITING BEFORE MARRIAGE: Meg Jay

in the NYT, in case you haven't seen it already:

AT 32, one of my clients (I’ll call her Jennifer) had a lavish wine-country wedding. By then, Jennifer and her boyfriend had lived together for more than four years. The event was attended by the couple’s friends, families and two dogs.

When Jennifer started therapy with me less than a year later, she was looking for a divorce lawyer. “I spent more time planning my wedding than I spent happily married,” she sobbed. Most disheartening to Jennifer was that she’d tried to do everything right. “My parents got married young so, of course, they got divorced. We lived together! How did this happen?”

Cohabitation in the United States has increased by more than 1,500 percent in the past half century. In 1960, about 450,000 unmarried couples lived together. Now the number is more than 7.5 million. The majority of young adults in their 20s will live with a romantic partner at least once, and more than half of all marriages will be preceded by cohabitation. This shift has been attributed to the sexual revolution and the availability of birth control, and in our current economy, sharing the bills makes cohabiting appealing. But when you talk to people in their 20s, you also hear about something else: cohabitation as prophylaxis.

In a nationwide survey conducted in 2001 by the National Marriage Project, then at Rutgers and now at the University of Virginia, nearly half of 20-somethings agreed with the statement, “You would only marry someone if he or she agreed to live together with you first, so that you could find out whether you really get along.” About two-thirds said they believed that moving in together before marriage was a good way to avoid divorce.

But that belief is contradicted by experience. ...

As Jennifer and I worked to answer her question, “How did this happen?” we talked about how she and her boyfriend went from dating to cohabiting. Her response was consistent with studies reporting that most couples say it “just happened.”

“We were sleeping over at each other’s places all the time,” she said. “We liked to be together, so it was cheaper and more convenient. It was a quick decision but if it didn’t work out there was a quick exit.”

She was talking about what researchers call “sliding, not deciding.” Moving from dating to sleeping over to sleeping over a lot to cohabitation can be a gradual slope, one not marked by rings or ceremonies or sometimes even a conversation. Couples bypass talking about why they want to live together and what it will mean.

WHEN researchers ask cohabitors these questions, partners often have different, unspoken — even unconscious — agendas. Women are more likely to view cohabitation as a step toward marriage, while men are more likely to see it as a way to test a relationship or postpone commitment, and this gender asymmetry is associated with negative interactions and lower levels of commitment even after the relationship progresses to marriage. One thing men and women do agree on, however, is that their standards for a live-in partner are lower than they are for a spouse.

Sliding into cohabitation wouldn’t be a problem if sliding out were as easy. But it isn’t.

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Labels: cohabitation, culture, divorce, gender, gender differences, heterosexual couples, Marriage, men, women

posted by Eve at 4:45 PM VOTE

MORE CHILDREN BORN TO UNMARRIED PARENTS: USA Today

reports:

A growing number of firstborns in the USA have unmarried parents, reflecting dramatic increases since 2002 in births to cohabiting women, according to government figures out today.

The percentage of first births to women living with a male partner jumped from 12% in 2002 to 22% in 2006-10 — an 83% increase. The percentage of cohabiting new fathers rose from 18% to 25%. The analysis, by the National Center for Health Statistics, is based on data collected from 2006 to 2010.

"We were a little surprised in such a short time period to see these increases," says demographer Gladys Martinez, lead author of the report, based on face-to-face interviews with 12,279 women and 10,403 men ages 15-44.

The percentage of first births to cohabiting women tripled from 9% in 1985 to 27% for births from 2003 to 2010.

Karen Benjamin Guzzo, a sociologist at Bowling Green State University in Bowling Green, Ohio, who studies cohabitation and fertility, says she thinks the big jump since 2002 is likely because of the recession, which was at its height from late 2007 to 2009, right in the middle of the federal data collection.

"I think it's economic shock," she says. "Marriage is an achievement that you enter into when you're ready. But in the meantime, life happens. You form relationships. You have sex. You get pregnant. In a perfect world, they would prefer to be married, but where the economy is now, they're not going to be able to get married, and they don't want to wait to have kids."

Also, middle class parents may think more about how much kids cost, but "having kids is much more than about money. It's about love," Guzzo says. "You can be a good parent if you don't have a lot of money. You can be with someone who can be a good parent."

Sociologist Kelly Musick of Cornell University in Ithaca, N.Y., who studies cohabiting couples with children, says she's noticed women with more education starting to have children outside of marriage. She says cohabiting used to be more common among women who didn't graduate from high school but it's becoming more common for those with a high school degree or some college.

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Labels: class, cohabitation, culture, demographics, economics, Marriage, out-of-wedlock births, race, unmarried parents

posted by Eve at 11:12 AM VOTE

ARE WE OVERESTIMATING THE BENEFITS OF MARRIAGE TO CHILD DEVELOPMENT? Washington Post blogger

interviews a researcher:

...In your view, will the trend of young parents forgoing marriage affect parental involvement?

Children born to unwed parents spend less time with their fathers on average than those born to married parents, and that difference gets larger as children age (unwed fathers are most involved in children’s lives at the very beginning). So, the rise in nonmarital childbirth is related, on average, to lower levels of fathers’ involvement. Overall, however, resident fathers are spending more time with children than ever before. So, it’s not fair to argue that unwed parenthood is associated with an overall decline in father involvement.

Also, unwed parenthood is not necessarily associated with lower levels of mothers’ involvement. Once you account for differences in education and income level between married and single mothers, there are no large differences in maternal involvement with children between these groups. So, the trend seems to impact fathers’ involvement but not mothers’, on average. It’s important to remember, though, that in some families, stepfathers (and stepmothers) are very involved in children’s lives.

Has your research shown a correlation between a marriage certificate and parental involvement? How about a father’s involvement?

I haven’t examined father involvement in married and unwed parent families, but others have. It’s important to distinguish between unwed parents who live together — called cohabiting families — and unwed parents who do not. Many unwed parents live together when their children are born, although the proportion decreases substantially as children age. Cohabiting fathers do spend less time interacting with their children than married fathers, but the largest differences are between married fathers and unwed dads who don’t live with their children, which is not surprising.

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[My take btw is that the causal arrow runs both ways, and while economic and personal circumstances obviously affect who gets married, marriage has a positive effect on child outcomes, in part by promoting greater stability and a stronger bond with the child's father. Both of which this researcher explicitly acknowledges even as she suggests that we overemphasize marriage. Also, the repetition of the phrase "a marriage certificate" where I think most people would just say "marriage" rings really oddly to me. --Eve]

Labels: childhood, children, class, cohabitation, culture, Fathers, Marriage, men, motherhood, out-of-wedlock births, single parenting, unmarried parents

posted by Eve at 11:00 AM VOTE

MARRIAGE SPLITS SOAR IN REPUBLIC OF IRELAND: Belfast Telegraph

reports:

More than 200,000 people are divorced or separated in Ireland, it has emerged.

Census figures showed 87,770 people were divorced last April, a 150% rise since 2002, the first count after divorce was legalised in 1997.

Elsewhere, the amount of people separated stood at 116,194.

However, more Irish couples have also married in recent years, with 143,588 more people wed in 2011 than five years earlier.

Of the 1.18 million families, 143,600 were comprised of cohabiting couples. There were also 215,300 families headed by lone parents and 4,042 same-sex couples living together - 2,321 men and 1,721 women.

more

Labels: cohabitation, demographics, divorce, gay couples, immigration, Ireland, Marriage, single parenting

posted by Eve at 12:21 AM VOTE

MARRIAGE, FAMILY PRESSURE AND JEWISH GEOGRAPHY: Jewish Journal

feature:
...Demographers have long noted that non-marital unions are more likely to be interracial than are marital unions (i.e., married couples). And according to Stanford demographer Michael J. Rosenfeld, interracial couples and same-sex couples are more likely to live away from the community in which their parents reside.

Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion demographer Bruce Phillips has found that this also applies to Jews when he looked at non-marital unions in the 2000-2001 National Jewish Population Survey. Respondents under 30 were the most likely to be cohabiting. Phillips found that persons of mixed Jewish/non-Jewish ancestry (i.e. one or no Jewish parents) are far more likely to intermarry than those of single Jewish ancestry (i.e., two Jewish parents). Almost all of the mixed Jewish ancestry respondents under 30 had a non-Jewish partner, regardless of marital status. Among single Jewish ancestry respondents, however, those who were cohabiting were almost two and half times as likely to have a non-Jewish partner as those who were married (73 percent versus 30 percent).

Phillips pointed out that Jewish cohabitation resembles interracial cohabitation.

For both Jews and African-Americans, non-marital unions are more likely to be interfaith/interracial than are marriages. Young Jews in cohabiting interfaith unions apparently have reservations about their parents’ reaction and/or the complications that arise from an interfaith marriage.
more

Labels: cohabitation, culture, intermarriage, Judaism, Marriage, race, religion

posted by Eve at 9:13 PM VOTE

WHAT MARRIAGE MEANS IN TODAY'S "NEW NORMAL": Amber and David Lapp

at The Public Discourse:

The New York Times’ recent story that more than half of births to American women under age 30 now occur outside of marriage, and the conversation spurred by Charles Murray’s new book, Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960 – 2010, have shifted public gaze to a population largely ignored in the scholarly literature of the past few decades: the 58 percent of Americans with a high school diploma but no college degree—what some might call “working class.”

Nonmarital births have been common among Americans without a high school diploma for at least thirty years: as the 2010 State of Our Unions reports, in 1982 33 percent of births to women without a high school diploma occurred outside of marriage, compared to 13 percent of births to high-school educated women. But in the past thirty years, nonmarital births to high-school educated women surged: in the late 2000s’, 44 percent of births to high-school educated women occurred outside of marriage. (By comparison, only 6 percent of births to college-educated women were outside of marriage.) It is the behavioral changes of this “moderately educated middle”—the 58 percent of high-school educated Americans—that put the “normal” into “the new normal” that the Times describes.

Furthermore, the “new normal” is not driven primarily by an increase in single mothers, but in the number of cohabiting couples: in 1988, 39 percent of high-school educated Americans had cohabited; in the late 2000’s, 68 percent. According to Child Trends, 52 percent of all nonmarital births took place within a cohabiting relationship. Almost two-thirds (61 percent) of nonmarital births to white women took place in cohabiting unions.

These trends raise important questions. How do working-class young adults think about marriage today? Do they still revere it even while they choose to delay it, or are they jettisoning marriage altogether? If they do revere it, why the increase in cohabiting unions with children?

These are among the questions we have been exploring in more than one hundred interviews with mostly white working-class young adults in southwestern Ohio. Our findings are both sobering and hopeful to friends of marriage.

Hopeful, because in spite of the “new normal,” most of the young adults who spoke to us do aspire to marriage, or at least to what marriage stands for in their minds—mainly love, fidelity, permanence, and happiness. This is consistent with national statistics that find that 76 percent of high-school educated young adults say that marriage is “very important” or “one of the most important things” to them.

But sobering, because even as working class young adults dream of love, commitment, permanence, and family, they inherit a cultural story about love and marriage that frustrates those longings. And while there are other factors—both economic and social—this inadequate philosophy of love and marriage helps to account for the “new normal.”

Let us explain.

First, let’s take a look at how working-class young Americans think about marriage.

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Labels: children, class, cohabitation, culture, Marriage, out-of-wedlock births, parenting, single parenting, unmarried parents

posted by Eve at 1:20 PM VOTE

MY "DIVORCE DILEMMA" ARTICLE

is now available online:

If America has endured a “divorce revolution” since California passed no-fault divorce in 1969, we’ve now entered the counterrevolutionary phase. Divorce rates have fallen from their peak in the early ’80s, the deep pain often felt by children of divorce is openly acknowledged, and young Americans typically express both fear and a moral horror at divorce. They are determined not to repeat the mistakes of previous generations; avoiding divorce is a constant anxiety, even obsession.

But as with most purely reactionary cultural movements, the revolt against divorce has been much better at targeting what it rejects than figuring out what it’s for. In a strange, sad twist, the divorce counterrevolution has only weakened our marriage culture more.

Here are three things we’ve ignored as we make divorce (and divorced people) the scapegoat for broader problems of family breakdown.

more

Labels: "emerging adulthood", age at first marriage, children, cohabitation, culture, divorce, Eve Tushnet, Marriage, out-of-wedlock births, single parenting, unmarried parents

posted by Eve at 2:26 PM VOTE

DOWNSIDE OF RISING SINGLE MOTHERHOOD: Cathy Young

in Newsday:

The trend toward unwed parenthood has reached a new milestone: More than half of births to American women younger than 30 now occur outside of marriage.

Predictably, some lament this as another sign of the fall of civilization. Others see it as something to celebrate. On the feminist blog Jezebel.com, a headline unabashedly proclaimed: "The Increase in Single Moms Is Actually a Good Thing." The article argued that women are now empowered enough to be choosy about the men they marry. On Slate.com, writer Katie Roiphe urges us to recognize that "the facts of American family life no longer match its prevailing fantasies" and that marriage is only one way of raising children.

The doomsayers may exaggerate, but the cheerleaders are misguided. It's great news that more women are economically self-sufficient. But there are at least two major reasons the rise of single motherhood should not be hailed as a victory for female autonomy. One is children. The other is men. ...

Many feminists have lamented the fact that, while women have moved into traditionally male roles in the workforce and made great strides in career achievement, they continue to do most of the traditionally female work of housekeeping and child care. Gloria Steinem is fond of saying that we have learned that women can do everything men can do, but not the other way around. This, many agree, is the unfinished business of the last half-century's revolution in gender roles.

In fact, married fathers, especially in households where both parents work, have become involved in hands-on child-rearing to an extent that would have seemed unthinkable 50 years ago. It is no longer unusual to see fathers changing diapers, bottle-feeding infants, or shopping with toddlers. Stay-at-home dads are a small but growing population.

Yet the trend toward more engaged fatherhood is being canceled out by the growing number of children with no father in the home. This redefinition of families as women and their children is a modern-day version of the old-fashioned, very non-feminist notion of family and child-rearing as a female domain in which men are only visitors. Sending men the signal that they are disposable is hardly a way to encourage them to be better fathers.

more

Labels: children, cohabitation, culture, Fathers, feminism, gender, Marriage, men, motherhood, out-of-wedlock births, parenting, single parenting, women

posted by Eve at 2:24 PM VOTE

I HAVE AN ARTICLE IN THE CURRENT "AMERICAN CONSERVATIVE"

on the culture of fear of divorce. It's subscribers-only for now, but here's the opening:

If America has endured a “divorce revolution” since California passed no-fault divorce in 1969, we've now entered the counterrevolutionary phase. Divorce rates have fallen from their peak in the early '80s, the deep pain often felt by children of divorce is openly acknowledged and respected, and young Americans typically express both fear and a kind of moral horror at the thought of divorce. They are determined not to repeat the mistakes of previous generations; avoiding divorce is a constant anxiety and even obsession.

But as with most purely reactionary cultural movements, the revolt against divorce has been much better at targeting what it rejects than figuring out what it's for. In a strange, sad twist, the divorce counterrevolution has only weakened our marriage culture more.

Here are three things we've ignored as we make divorce (and divorced people) the scapegoat for broader problems of family breakdown.

pdf for subscribers

Labels: age at first marriage, children, cohabitation, culture, divorce, economics, Eve Tushnet, Marriage, out-of-wedlock births, premarital sex, relationship dissolution, weddings vs. marriage

posted by Eve at 8:02 PM VOTE

FOR WOMEN UNDER 30, MOST BIRTHS OCCUR OUTSIDE MARRIAGE: NYTimes

reports:

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. ...

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. ...

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, 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 than 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.

more

Labels: children, class, cohabitation, culture, divorce, economics, Marriage, marriage penalty, men, out-of-wedlock births, premarital sex, race, unmarried parents, women

posted by Eve at 4:02 PM VOTE

Family Ties, Without Tying the Knot: A New York Times

symposium:

This week, New Jersey becomes the latest state to take up a same-sex marriage bill. But the Pew Research Center tells us that fewer Americans are marrying, suggesting that younger people are looking for other ways to define “family.”

Why are lawmakers so hung up on marriage? If fewer Americans are choosing to marry, what are the legal implications for relationships that are based on something other than marriage or parenting?

Syracuse University’s Kevin Noble Maillard helped organize this discussion.

more--participants are Kevin Noble Maillard, Robin Fretwell Wilson, Laura Rosenbury, Lesh Ward Sears, Melynda Price, and Katherine Franke.

Labels: beyond marriage, children, civil unions, cohabitation, committed relationships, culture, family policy, family structure, law, unmarried parents

posted by Imapp Staff at 10:59 PM VOTE

TIME TO ADMIT IT: THE CHURCH HAS ALWAYS BEEN RIGHT ON BIRTH CONTROL: Michael Brendan Dougherty and Pascal-Emmanuel Dobry

in Business Insider:

...Many people, (including our editor) are wondering why the Catholic Church doesn't just ditch this requirement. They note that most Catholics ignore it, and that most everyone else finds it divisive, or "out-dated." C'mon! It's the 21st century, they say! Don't they SEE that it's STUPID, they scream.

Here's the thing, though: the Catholic Church is the world's biggest and oldest organization. It has buried all of the greatest empires known to man, from the Romans to the Soviets. It has establishments literally all over the world, touching every area of human endeavor. It's given us some of the world's greatest thinkers, from Saint Augustine on down to René Girard. When it does things, it usually has a good reason. Everyone has a right to disagree, but it's not that they're a bunch of crazy old white dudes who are stuck in the Middle Ages.

So, what's going on?

The Church teaches that love, marriage, sex, and procreation are all things that belong together. That's it. But it's pretty important. And though the Church has been teaching this for 2,000 years, it's probably never been as salient as today.

Today's injunctions against birth control were re-affirmed in a 1968 document by Pope Paul VI called Humanae Vitae. He warned of four results if the widespread use of contraceptives was accepted:

General lowering of moral standards
A rise in infidelity, and illegitimacy
The reduction of women to objects used to satisfy men.
Government coercion in reproductive matters.

Does that sound familiar?

Because it sure sounds like what's been happening for the past 40 years.

As George Akerloff wrote in Slate over a decade ago,

By making the birth of the child the physical choice of the mother, the sexual revolution has made marriage and child support a social choice of the father.

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Labels: Catholic Church, cohabitation, contraception, demographics, Fathers, Marriage, out-of-wedlock births, population control, premarital sex

posted by Eve at 12:35 AM VOTE

THE COSTS OF DELAYING MARRIAGE: Sarah Torre

at the Heritage Foundation:

Starting a career, paying off student loans, and buying a house are all momentous occasions on the journey to American adulthood. While many young men and women still achieve these milestones, tying the knot and settling down are events increasingly avoided on young Americans’ path toward maturity.

The increase in the average age at first marriage and the steep drop in the national marriage rate over the past four decades demonstrate the declining view of matrimony among 21st-century young people.

Americans are increasingly choosing the loose bonds of cohabitation to “test drive” a relationship, placing marriage as a tentative aspiration. Nearly 12 percent of U.S. couples are currently in a cohabiting relationship. Unfortunately, the increasingly favored lifestyle of living together outside of marriage is not necessarily a recipe for happily ever after.

Cohabiting couples are much more prone to separation and less likely to reconcile than married couples—even after the third year of living together. The relationship of cohabiting couples isn’t always enjoyable. According to studies on cohabitation, men and women who live together tend to report higher levels of depression, twice the rate of infidelity, and worse relationship quality than married couples.

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Labels: "emerging adulthood", age at first marriage, cohabitation, culture, economics, Marriage, out-of-wedlock births, relationship dissolution, unmarried parents

posted by Eve at 7:22 PM VOTE