Here is a classic problem of cause and effect. Teenagers who give birth are more likely to be from households with lower income levels. Also, teenagers who give tend to end up later in life in households with lower income levels. But does the lower income level cause teens to be more likely to give birth? Or does giving birth cause as a teen cause that woman to be more likely to end up in a lower-income household? How can one untangle cause and effect? Melissa S. Kearney and Phillip B. Levine tackle these questions in "Why is the Teen Birth Rate in the United States So High and Why Does It Matter?" which appears in the Spring 2012 issue of my own Journal of Economic Perspectives. They have lots of interesting comments to make about variation in teen birthrates across states and countries. Here, I'll focus on their analysis of the cause and effect question, which surprised me and offers a nice example of how economist try to disentangle these sorts of issues.

"Our reading of the totality of evidence leads us to conclude that being on a low economic trajectory in life leads many teenage girls to have children while they are young and unmarried and that poor outcomes seen later in life (relative to teens who do not have children) are simply the continuation of the original low economic trajectory. That is, teen childbearing is explained by the low economic trajectory but is not an additional cause of later difficulties in life. Surprisingly, teen birth itself does not appear to have much direct economic consequence."

Conceptually, how would one tell whether giving birth as a teenager is a cause of lower future economic prospects?

Labels: adolescence, class, out-of-wedlock births, poverty, teenage pregnancy

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...All propaganda invites snark and parody, and the story of Julia is ripe for it. She’s an everywoman only by the standards of the liberal upper middle class: She works as a Web designer, has her first child in her early 30s (the average first-time American mother is in her mid-20s), and spends her golden years as a “volunteer at a community garden.” (It will not surprise you to learn that the cartoon Julia looks Caucasian.)

What’s more, she seems to have no meaningful relationships apart from her bond with the Obama White House: no friends or siblings or extended family, no husband (“Julia decides to have a child,” is all the slide show says), a son who disappears once school starts and parents who only matter because Obamacare grants her the privilege of staying on their health care plan until she’s 26. This lends the whole production a curiously patriarchal quality, with Obama as a beneficent Daddy Warbucks and Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan co-starring as the wicked uncles threatening to steal Julia’s inheritance.

Labels: Barack Obama, culture, out-of-wedlock births, Ross Douthat, single parenting

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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.

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

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Fewer teenagers gave birth in 2010 than in any other year since 1946, government researchers announced last week, and there is good evidence that today’s teenagers are initiating sex later and using birth control more consistently than previous generations did.

According to a report from the National Center for Health Statistics, birth rates among young women ages 15 to 19 fell in all but three states and in all racial, ethnic and age groups. From 2009 to 2010, the rate of teenage births fell by 9 percent, to 34.9 per thousand, the lowest rate ever reported in the 65 years for which data is available.

“I think the current generation of youth are perhaps more conscientious and cautious,” said Dr. John Santelli, a professor of clinical population and family health at Columbia University who was not involved in writing the report.

Data from surveys conducted by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention back up Dr. Santelli’s assertion. Since 1991, the percentage of teenagers who have ever had sex has decreased by 15 percent, the number who have had sex with four or more partners has decreased by 26 percent, and the percentage using condoms has increased by 32 percent.

Labels: abstinence, contraception, culture, demographics, out-of-wedlock births, premarital sex, race, sex education, teenage pregnancy

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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.

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

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...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.

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

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Boys will be boys — but can they be raised to be men by single mothers?

That was the topic on everyone’s minds last Saturday afternoon at the Black Spectrum Theatre, where a debate, hosted by Councilman James Sanders Jr. (D-Laurelton) as part of a salute to Women’s History Month, at times worked the audience of more than 100 vested individuals into a near frenzy of emotions.

The time restrictions were not always observed, the panelists didn’t necessarily speak in turn, and the audience was talking back long before the public participation segment began, but the debate did what Sanders said it set out to accomplish: it educated, motivated and sent the spectators home with plenty of food for thought.

“We might as well start wrestling with this in a respectful, disciplined manner,” Sanders said prior to the discussion.

“Our job is to look at the whole thing, to explore it all. We’re going to bring thinking back,” he said.

According to Sanders, the debate was designed to “make us think about our children, our families and the structure of our society. What has happened to the positive male influence, and what happens to our sons if they don’t have one?”

Sanders asked the audience, “When was the last time our community thought? We used to play chess, a thinking game. For every move, 20 possibilities open up. Now we have strong thumbs and weak minds.

“There’s a lot going on in our community. Women are left with the burden of raising children,” he said.

The six panelists, representing a wide range of backgrounds, were divided into two even groups, based on their response to the debate’s premise, “Single mothers can’t raise boys to be men.” One side agreed, the other did not.

Cathleen Williams, whose book, “Single Mother The New Father,” raised considerable controversy because of its provocative title, opened the discussion by saying, “As a single woman, I was able to successfully raise my son,” currently a student at St. John’s University.

“As a people, we tell women you can’t do it, that you’re doomed to failure. Not only can you, but you must do it for the salvation of our race,” she said.

She indicated that there are “over 10 million single women in the United States raising their children successfully,” admitting that she “didn’t do it alone.”

Opening the discussion for the opposition, clinical social worker Rodney Pride, who serves as vice president of youth development at United Black Men of Queens, said, “Eight out of 10 boys are without a positive male role model in their families and that ain’t good. So many boys are walking around with a level of anger.” He suggested that their pent-up rage often leads to cases of teenage pregnancy, dropping out of high school, and black on black violence.

Labels: boys, children, culture, Fathers, gender, motherhood, out-of-wedlock births, parenting, single parenting

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Researchers have long tried to untangle the complicated mix of economics, culture, education and contraception (or lack thereof) that leads to teenage pregnancy.

Despite a decline in births to American teenage mothers over the past two decades, the United States stands out among developed nations in that its teenagers are much more likely to give birth than their peers in Canada, Germany, Norway, Russia (a country that is still advancing on the spectrum of development) or Switzerland.

A new study [pdf] by Melissa S. Kearney, an economist at the University of Maryland, and Phillip B. Levine, an economist at Wellesley College, builds on their previous research [pdf] looking at the link between income inequality and rates of teenage childbirth.

It turns out the connection is quite striking.

In general, teenage childbirth is more common among poor girls. But poor girls who live in places with a high level of inequality — meaning that the ratio of income at the median of the income distribution to the income at the 10th percentile of the income distribution is higher than in other places — are even more likely to bear children as teenagers. ...

Inequality, the authors suggest, makes the poorest citizens believe that they have little chance of economic mobility. They are giving birth “at a young age instead of investing in their own economic progress because they feel they have little chance of advancement,” the authors write.

In fact, the authors point out that other research has shown that poor girls who have babies when they are teenagers do not suffer much worse economic outcomes in the long term than their peers who wait to have children. Teenage childbearing is “a symptom, not a cause” of poverty and economic immobility, Mr. Levine said in an interview.

Labels: adolescence, children, class, out-of-wedlock births, parenting, poverty, teenage pregnancy

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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.

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

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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.

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

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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.

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

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Robin: The news that the majority of mothers under 30 are now unmarried — the subject of KJ’s blog post from earlier this week — didn’t really surprise my daughter Samantha and me. For the past year, we’ve been working on a book together called “Twentysomething,” steeping ourselves in social science research to write about what it’s like to be young, both in Sam’s day (she’s 27, part of the millennial generation) and in mine (I’m 58, born smack in the middle of the baby boom). So we kind of saw this one coming.

What leaps out at us about this study from Child Trends [pdf], a think tank in Washington, is what it reflects about the class divide. The proportion of births to unmarried mothers has been steadily increasing for years, but the increase has been especially rapid in one subset: young white women without a college education. The percentage of births occurring outside of marriage among white 20-something women in 2009 was 51 percent for those with no college and 34 percent for those with some college. Among those with a college degree, the percentage was just 8 percent. Having babies with or without a husband is apparently a significant point of departure between well-off millennials and their less privileged peers.

It’s not just behavior that’s splitting along class lines; it’s the very concept of how adulthood is supposed to unfold. Working-class women and middle-class women have different views about which comes when along the road to adulthood. Is it babies first, or is it everything else?

In the 1990s, Martha McMahon, a sociologist at the University of Victoria, interviewed 59 Canadian mothers of preschoolers and found that the sequence they considered ideal depended on their socioeconomic background. “Whereas middle-class women indicated they felt they had to achieve maturity before having a child,” Dr. McMahon wrote, “working-class women’s accounts suggest that many of them saw themselves as achieving maturity through having a child.”

Labels: "emerging adulthood", age at first marriage, Canada, children, class, culture, Marriage, men, out-of-wedlock births, parenting, single parenting, unmarried parents, women

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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.

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

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The number of single Jewish women opting to become mothers has increased dramatically over the past decade, according to statistics released on Tuesday by the Central Bureau of Statistics.

The data, which were published to coincide with Family Day celebrated nationwide on Thursday, shows that some 4,900 single Jewish women in Israel gave birth in 2010, nearly double the 2,600 single women who gave birth in 2000. The increase can be linked to advances in medical technology and the country’s policy of making fertility treatment widely available and free.

The number of mothers raising children without any partner has doubled from 8,000 women in 2000 to more than 16,000 women in 2010. ...

Ninety-one percent of single parent families with young children are headed by a woman: 57% are single mothers because of divorce, 16% are women who chose to give birth without a partner, 15% are separated from their spouse and the rest are widows.

The traditional family structure is still very much the norm – 96% of couples are officially married, while the remaining 4% are couples who have chosen to share their lives without traditional approval.

Labels: demographics, divorce, Israel, Judaism, Marriage, Middle East, motherhood, out-of-wedlock births, single parenting

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Matt Yglesias has an interesting intervention in the debate over Charles Murray’s “Coming Apart.” In nutshell, he suggests that the decline of marriage in the American working class doesn’t necessarily reflect a social or an economic crisis. Rather, it’s a rational — and in certain ways, laudable — response to an age of female empowerment and material abundance. In the current socioeconomic landscape, the sexes simply need each other less: Women are “newly empowered and less dependent on male economic support,” he notes, which has made them them “somewhat choosier” about their mates; men, meanwhile, are less likely to do the hard work necessary to be solid marriage material because hard work is unpleasant, and it’s easier to lead a life of leisure than ever before. “To a certain puritanical frame of mind that views toil as a virtue in and of itself,” he writes, “this may seem unfortunate,” but leisure is one of civilization’s great achievements: “George Jetson, after all, only worked nine hours a week. Why should we aspire to anything less?” Yes, the new order may be somewhat harder on children, but absent evidence of true social disintegration (soaring crime rates, collapsing educational attainment, riots in the streets), ”why not just look at progress and call it ‘progress’?”

I suppose one rejoinder would be, progress toward what end? If the argument is that per capita G.D.P. will probably keep rising even in an America where most births are out of wedlock, then I suppose that I agree (and so, I imagine, does Charles Murray). But the world Yglesias is describing is a world where the short-term rational self-interest of both sexes — the understandable female desire to have children without taking on the burden of husbands who are often basically children themselves, and the understandable male desire not to take a steady but low-paying job when they can work part-time, goof off on the XBox, and still find willing sexual partners — conspires to keep some of the crucial ingredients of long-term happiness out of reach for a larger and larger share of the population.

Labels: children, class, economics, Marriage, men, out-of-wedlock births, Ross Douthat, single parenting, unmarried parents, women

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Over the weekend The New York Times gave us two very different pieces demonstrating the different sides of the evolving marriage coin. On one side, you have the town of Lorain, Ohio, notable for its population of single mothers, ostensibly going it alone by choice. On the other, there's Kyle Spencer's piece about how New York City dads -- a few of them, at least -- have begun to embrace what was traditionally considered a "women's realm," by running their local Parent Teacher Associations.

While a growing acceptance of single momhood and PTA dads might seem to be signs of social progress, the stories are more complicated. The story of the single moms of Ohio doesn't read as a tale of empowerment, exactly. True, these women don't "need men" to support them (a good thing), but the unfortunate cost associated with raising their kids alone is that they work long hours, are often unable to spend much time with their children, and those children are more likely, statistically, to have behavioral or emotional problems and even fall into poverty. Further, the women interviewed for The Times story don't actually say they don't want to marry. They say things like, "I’d like to do it, but I just don’t see it happening right now. Most of my friends say it’s just a piece of paper, and it doesn’t work out anyway.”

Jason DeParle and Sabrina Tavernise, writing in the Times, use interviews with the women of Lorain to illustrate a broader statistical and social point: "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." This is supported with data from Child Trends, a Washington research group that analyzes government data and reports "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." Family structure has become, "a new class divide, with the economic and social rewards of marriage increasingly reserved for people with the most education," to the extent that sociologist Frank Furstenberg has called marriage a luxury good.

Which brings us back to those PTA dads, whose embrace of that "nontraditional" role "reflects a number of underlying social trends: more women with demanding jobs, more men underemployed in a lingering recession, more shared parenting responsibilities over all and the professionalization of the PTA itself," explains Spencer.

Labels: children, class, culture, economics, Fathers, gender, Marriage, men, motherhood, out-of-wedlock births, parenting, single parenting

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LORAIN, Ohio — Marriage has lost its luster in Lorain, Ohio.

Sixty-three percent of all births to women under 30 in Lorain County occur outside marriage, according to Child Trends, a research center in Washington. That figure has risen by more than two-thirds over the past two decades, and now surpasses the national figure of 53 percent.

The change has transformed life in Lorain, a ragged industrial town on Lake Erie. Churches perform fewer weddings. Applications for marriage licenses are down by a third. Just a tenth of the students at the local community college are married, but its campus has a bustling day care center.

The New York Times interviewed several dozen people in Lorain about marriage here. What follows are their stories.

Young parents spoke of an economy that was fundamentally different from in their parents’ time, and that required more than a high school education for fathers to be stable breadwinners. They talked of how little they trusted each other to be reliable mates, and of how the government safety net encourages poor parents to stay single. ...

Many women described a lifestyle of dating in which relationships sometimes resulted in children, but less often in fathers deeply involved in their families. Judge David Basinski of Lorain County Domestic Relations Court, in Elyria, said he recently had a case in which a man who had nine children by six women owed $55,000 in back child support. Child support cases have become so common among unmarried parents that the court now gives seminars on parental responsibilities.

Labels: children, class, culture, economics, Fathers, incarceration, Marriage, marriage penalty, men, motherhood, out-of-wedlock births, premarital sex, single parenting, welfare, women

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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.

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

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...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.

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

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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.

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

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