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.”

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

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Labels: class, culture, economics, Marriage, motherhood, race, single parenting, women

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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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...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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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.

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

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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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I grew up with one parent. My mother raised me with help from her mother. It was not her choice to be alone, but she did make a conscious decision not to remarry while I was still a kid. I am grateful for that and glad that she and my father were not together while I grew up. I believe it was because she made the decision not to commit to anyone else that I had such a well-supported and peaceful childhood.

We lived in a medium-size town in northern Wisconsin, in a small lime-green house with a yard. My grandma, a college professor (herself twice divorced), lived no more than a few miles away throughout my childhood and for a while even lived on the same block as we did. My mom worked as a public-school teacher. During summer vacation I played outside while she tended to a vegetable garden. In winter we baked cookies and made snow sculptures we’d paint with food coloring. We always ate well. We took vacations. It was hardly a conventional childhood in the traditional sense, but in its own way it was quite idyllic.

I’ve realized recently that when I picture myself with my own child, there’s no father in the frame. I imagine it being just the two of us—a team, like my mom and me. Perhaps because of how I was raised and how happy my childhood was, I often wonder whether I wouldn't rather just have a kid alone. ...

Rather than being a force of stability, the times my own father did show up served only to temporarily disrupt the pleasant routines my mother and I had established. He arrived unannounced at our back door one day when I was 8, and I thought he was an escaped convict who’d come to bludgeon us to death. I’d screamed, and my mom came running, pausing for a moment to laugh, “No, honey, that’s just your dad.” My father came to see us several times over the course of my growing up. I remember these visits as short and uncomfortable. (His large beard embarrassed me to no end.) ...

Perhaps all of this sounds selfish to some people, but there is no conclusive evidence that I would be giving a child any less possibility for success than a kid with two parents, as long as I am mature and have the financial means. Much of the research that supports having children within marriage is about opportunity, not the physical presence of two parents.

Labels: childhood, children, culture, divorce, Fathers, motherhood, single parenting

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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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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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Do mothers matter? Having no mother was -- at least until recently -- widely agreed to be a tragedy. Psychiatric case studies, Disney movies, and well-known spirituals such as "Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child" have testified to the importance of mothers and the pain of mother loss. But such views have not meant that every child has lived in a society that affirms the importance of the child's bond with his or her mother. Children have been denied their mothers because of class biases (see, poor); racial and ethnic biases (Indian, Aborigine); as part of severe civil conflict (Argentina, Dirty War); amid widespread, institutionalized human rights abuses (slavery); or because their mothers were rightly or wrongly perceived to be unfit (see: history of adoption, good, bad, and ugly).

Yet even as the broad history of helping ourselves to other people's children continues to be probed and largely condemned (except in the case of adoption, where most reasonable people agree that such an institution must exist in order to find loving homes for children in need of them), a newer and notably deliberate form of mother loss has sprung up, one that receives relatively little debate and is often presented as benign or even good, without question. I am referring, of course, to the practices of surrogacy and egg donation.

When surrogacy and egg donation first gained national attention in the 1980s the children in question usually had a social mother, a woman, herself infertile, married to a man and seeking to achieve pregnancy with the use of another woman's body. Today we are witnessing an equal opportunity run on deliberately conceiving motherless children. Men, alone or in pairs, can buy eggs and rent wombs, too. A child can be denied knowledge of and a relationship with his or her generally fit mother simply because other adults -- the child's prospective legal parents -- wish it to be so, and are willing to pay to make it so. These transactions occur with the aid of doctors, lawyers, and clinics licensed by the state, and thus with tacit approval from the state.

I wrote about some of these new single fathers by choice in my recent report, "One Parent or Five: A Global Look at Today's New Intentional Families." There is Ian Mucklejohn, father of three. In 2001, at the age of 54, the British citizen became the father of triplets conceived with an egg donor and a gestational surrogate mother, both living in the U.S. Mucklejohn soon became a hero for other single fathers-to-be when he won British citizenship and birth certificates with a blank in the space for "mother" for all three children.

Labels: children, culture, donor conception, Elizabeth Marquardt, Fathers, gay parenting, motherhood, My Daddy's Name Is Donor, parenting, single parenting, surrogate motherhood

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...My touchstone is my beloved hometown of Yamhill, Ore., population about 925 on a good day. We Americans think of our rural American heartland as a lovely pastoral backdrop, but these days some marginally employed white families in places like Yamhill seem to be replicating the pathologies that have devastated many African-American families over the last generation or two.

One scourge has been drug abuse. In rural America, it’s not heroin but methamphetamine; it has shattered lives in Yamhill and left many with criminal records that make it harder to find good jobs. With parents in jail, kids are raised on the fly.

Then there’s the eclipse of traditional family patterns. Among white American women with only a high school education, 44 percent of births are out of wedlock, up from 6 percent in 1970, according to Murray.

Liberals sometimes feel that it is narrow-minded to favor traditional marriage. Over time, my reporting on poverty has led me to disagree: Solid marriages have a huge beneficial impact on the lives of the poor (more so than in the lives of the middle class, who have more cushion when things go wrong). ...

There aren’t ideal solutions, but some evidence suggests that we need more social policy, not less. Early childhood education can support kids being raised by struggling single parents. Treating drug offenders is far cheaper than incarcerating them.

A new study finds that a jobs program for newly released prison inmates left them 22 percent less likely to be convicted of another crime. This initiative, by the Center for Employment Opportunities, more than paid for itself: each $1 brought up to $3.85 in benefits.

So let’s get real. A crisis is developing in the white working class, a byproduct of growing income inequality in America. The pathologies are achingly real. But the solution isn’t finger-wagging, or averting our eyes — but opportunity.

Labels: children, class, culture, economics, ex-offenders, incarceration, Marriage, men, out-of-wedlock births, poverty, single parenting, women

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A state lawmaker has introduced a bill aimed at preventing an unmarried woman from coming to Utah to give birth and pursue adoption without informing the biological father of her plan, a problem highlighted in a Friday Utah Supreme Court ruling involving an unmarried Colorado father.

House Bill 308, sponsored by Rep. Christine Watkins, D-Price, would require pregnant women to give notice by mail or publication to out-of-state unmarried fathers if they plan to give birth and place infants for adoption in Utah. ...

"I am very sympathetic to fathers loving their children," said Watkins, who has two brothers and four sons. "A lot of fathers don’t want to give up on their children. I thought, ‘You know, let’s give these guys a chance.’"

Utah’s current law says that once a birth mother consents to an adoption or relinquishes her child, that decision may not be revoked. Watkins’ proposed bill changes that, too. If a biological father successfully asserts his parental rights, a birth mother would have 30 days to then revoke her consent to the adoption.

Labels: adoption, children, Fathers, single parenting, unmarried parents, Utah

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America is coming apart. For most of our nation's history, whatever the inequality in wealth between the richest and poorest citizens, we maintained a cultural equality known nowhere else in the world—for whites, anyway. "The more opulent citizens take great care not to stand aloof from the people," wrote Alexis de Tocqueville, the great chronicler of American democracy, in the 1830s. "On the contrary, they constantly keep on easy terms with the lower classes: They listen to them, they speak to them every day."

Americans love to see themselves this way. But there's a problem: It's not true anymore, and it has been progressively less true since the 1960s. ...

Over the past 50 years, that common civic culture has unraveled. We have developed a new upper class with advanced educations, often obtained at elite schools, sharing tastes and preferences that set them apart from mainstream America. At the same time, we have developed a new lower class, characterized not by poverty but by withdrawal from America's core cultural institutions.

To illustrate just how wide the gap has grown between the new upper class and the new lower class, let me start with the broader upper-middle and working classes from which they are drawn, using two fictional neighborhoods that I hereby label Belmont (after an archetypal upper-middle-class suburb near Boston) and Fishtown (after a neighborhood in Philadelphia that has been home to the white working class since the Revolution).

To be assigned to Belmont, the people in the statistical nationwide databases on which I am drawing must have at least a bachelor's degree and work as a manager, physician, attorney, engineer, architect, scientist, college professor or content producer in the media. To be assigned to Fishtown, they must have no academic degree higher than a high-school diploma. If they work, it must be in a blue-collar job, a low-skill service job such as cashier, or a low-skill white-collar job such as mail clerk or receptionist.

People who qualify for my Belmont constitute about 20% of the white population of the U.S., ages 30 to 49. People who qualify for my Fishtown constitute about 30% of the white population of the U.S., ages 30 to 49.

I specify white, meaning non-Latino white, as a way of clarifying how broad and deep the cultural divisions in the U.S. have become. Cultural inequality is not grounded in race or ethnicity. I specify ages 30 to 49—what I call prime-age adults—to make it clear that these trends are not explained by changes in the ages of marriage or retirement.

In Belmont and Fishtown, here's what happened to America's common culture between 1960 and 2010.

Marriage: In 1960, extremely high proportions of whites in both Belmont and Fishtown were married—94% in Belmont and 84% in Fishtown. In the 1970s, those percentages declined about equally in both places. Then came the great divergence. In Belmont, marriage stabilized during the mid-1980s, standing at 83% in 2010. In Fishtown, however, marriage continued to slide; as of 2010, a minority (just 48%) were married. The gap in marriage between Belmont and Fishtown grew to 35 percentage points, from just 10.

Single parenthood: Another aspect of marriage—the percentage of children born to unmarried women—showed just as great a divergence. Though politicians and media eminences are too frightened to say so, nonmarital births are problematic. On just about any measure of development you can think of, children who are born to unmarried women fare worse than the children of divorce and far worse than children raised in intact families. This unwelcome reality persists even after controlling for the income and education of the parents.

In 1960, just 2% of all white births were nonmarital. When we first started recording the education level of mothers in 1970, 6% of births to white women with no more than a high-school education—women, that is, with a Fishtown education—were out of wedlock. By 2008, 44% were nonmarital. Among the college-educated women of Belmont, less than 6% of all births were out of wedlock as of 2008, up from 1% in 1970. ...

Religiosity: Whatever your personal religious views, you need to realize that about half of American philanthropy, volunteering and associational memberships is directly church-related, and that religious Americans also account for much more nonreligious social capital than their secular neighbors. In that context, it is worrisome for the culture that the U.S. as a whole has become markedly more secular since 1960, and especially worrisome that Fishtown has become much more secular than Belmont. It runs against the prevailing narrative of secular elites versus a working class still clinging to religion, but the evidence from the General Social Survey, the most widely used database on American attitudes and values, does not leave much room for argument.

Labels: class, culture, economics, Marriage, out-of-wedlock births, religion, single parenting

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ELYRIA, Ohio — Dinner (chicken and mashed potatoes) was long over, teeth were brushed, and a rousing game of Monopoly had come to a close. It was 9 p.m., and the children nestled into bed under blankets emblazoned with superheroes.

The tranquil domestic scene plays out nightly here, not in a family home, but behind a brightly lighted storefront next to Tuffy’s auto repair, the site of a new child care center that is open 24 hours a day.

Day care is slowly becoming night care in today’s economy, as parents work ever longer days, take on second jobs and accept odd shifts to make ends meet.

“No one works Monday through Friday, 9 to 6 anymore,” said Tiffany Bickley, a cook whose 6-year-old daughter, Airalyn, recently started going to the center, ABC & Me Childcare. “No one.”

About 40 percent of the American labor force now works some form of nonstandard hours, including evenings, nights, weekends and early mornings, according to Harriet B. Presser, a professor of sociology at the University of Maryland. That share is expected to grow with the projected expansion of jobs in industries like nursing, retail and food service, which tend to require after-hours work.

At the same time, working hours are less predictable than they once were. ...

“You don’t want to put your 2-year-old at a child care center at 2 a.m.” said Gina Adams, a senior fellow at the Urban Institute. “It just doesn’t feel right.”

There are some indications now that this might be changing. The National Association of Child Care Resource and Referral Agencies said it was hearing from members that providers were offering more nontraditional hours, though it added that it did not formally track the data.

While overnight care is still relatively rare, evening hours are no longer so unusual, providers say. Donna McClintock, chief operating officer for Children’s Choice Learning Centers Inc., which runs 46 employer-sponsored child care centers across the country, said that demand for nontraditional hours had grown and that centers providing care after-hours care made up a large part of the company’s recent growth. About a fifth of the company’s centers have added nontraditional hours in the past few years, she said.

Labels: child care, children, culture, day care, economics, parenting, single parenting

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