Women under 30, most births occur outside marriage
25 Feb The New York Times
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.
“Marriage has become a luxury good,” said Frank Furstenberg, a
sociologist at the University of Pennsylvania.
The shift is affecting children’s lives. Researchers have
consistently found that children born outside marriage face elevated
risks of falling into poverty, failing in school or suffering emotional
and behavioral problems.
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.
Amber Strader, 27, was in an on-and-off relationship with a clerk at
Sears a few years ago when she found herself pregnant. A former nursing
student who now tends bar, Ms. Strader said her boyfriend was so
dependent that she had to buy his cigarettes. Marrying him never entered
her mind. “It was like living with another kid,” she said.
When a second child, with a new boyfriend, followed three years later
her birth control failed, she said her boyfriend, a part-time house
painter, was reluctant to wed.
Ms. Strader likes the idea of marriage; she keeps her parents’
wedding photo on her kitchen wall and says her boyfriend is a good
father. But for now marriage is beyond her reach.
“I’d like to do it, but I just don’t see it happening right now,” she
said. “Most of my friends say it’s just a piece of paper, and it doesn’t
work out anyway.”
The recent rise in single motherhood has set off few alarms, unlike
in past eras. When Daniel Patrick Moynihan, then a top Labor Department
official and later a United States senator from New York, reported in
1965 that a quarter of black children were born outside marriage and
warned of a “tangle of pathology” he set off a bitter debate.
|