Category Archives: marriage and relationships

His and hers: Six tips for a happy marriage

Posted on December 26, 2011 | Leave a comment

This holiday was a big one for Rex and I. We celebrated our 25th wedding anniversary on Christmas Eve. Twenty-five years ago, we took the El down to City Hall here in Chicago and tied the knot in front of a judge. It was a lovely ceremony–just the three of us. I think the judge said a few kind words of luck and we took the escalator up from the basement and out into the empty Loop for a breakfast at Petros diner and later a flight to a beach house in the Outer Banks of North Carolina, where my family was waiting, unsuspecting. We sprung it on them at happy hour and had a fabulous impromptu wedding dinner of fresh fish and a “wedding pie” for dessert.

Twenty five years later, Rex and I took the El down to City Hall to retrace our steps, but alas, Christmas Eve was on Saturday this year and City Hall was closed. Petros was closed as well. But it didn’t matter. We were still together in the empty Loop.

And now we’re off to Buenos Aires to celebrate, so the blog will be on hiatus until Jan 10 or so.

But before we go, and without sounding too sanctimonious I hope but with 25 years of it under my belt, here’s my 6 tips for a successful marriage, followed by Rex’s 6 tips:

My list, in no particular order:

  1. Marry a decent person with a sense of humor.
  2. Learn to change. Marriage is about two people. That means your way of doing things butts up against someone else’s equally good way of doing things. And life will throw curve balls. Adapt.
  3. Learn to let it go. In the heat of the moment, take a breath, hold your tongute, and force yourself to laugh (at yourself usually). Do. not. dwell.
  4. Do things together, even things you personally don’t like.
  5. Don’t think the grass is greener on the other side. It ain’t.
  6. Don’t overanalyze things. It’s really not that complicated. Ever.

And here’s Rex’s list–and seriously, we did not compare before we made this list!

  1. Don’t just settle for someone because you think no one who is right for you will come along.
  2. Recognize that relationships start from a sexual attraction but its the emotional attachment that lasts for the long haul. But don’t let the physical die altogether.
  3. Marry someone you like. (see #2–it’s surprising how many people miss this one)
  4. Don’t carry a grudge. Everybody has differences.
  5. Be willing to compromise.
  6. Don’t obsess about things because there are no hard and fast rules.

There’s no secret to a good marriage, if you ask me. It’s just learning to be happy with life however it comes at you. And it’s nice when it comes at you with someone whom you’ve grown to love so deeply.

So what are your tips to good marriage or partnerships?

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Young parents are losing ground

Posted on September 20, 2011 | Leave a comment

In a week of bad news for young adults, there’s more of it today. The share of young parents living in poverty shot up, and is at its highest peak in decades. That means that the children of those parents are also in poverty.  Today, more than one in three young parents (under age 30) lives in poverty. Thirty-seven percent! Not only is that a disgrace, but it is a threat to our futures.

We talked with many of these young people in Not Quite Adults, people like Sheila, a mother of three in her late 20s who babysits three kids in addition to caring for her own so she can balance work and family more easily. The pay is paltry–at the time less than $360 a month. She and her husband Tony had only a high school degree and were trying to patch together a living in the service sector. She’s worked in fast food, waitressing, data entry, she was a clerk at a dental clinic, and a nursing home aide. She cleaned houses for awhile, and tried to start her own business. The family lives hand to mouth, and her barely constrained desperation was evident in her interview.

Or there was Franco, a 27-year-old married father of two, who worked long days as a deliveryman for small grocery stores. Working 57 hours a week for about $12.50 an hour at the time, he was never home. Working those hours was the only way to raise his family’s income above the poverty line, but it was taking its toll.

There are countless other stories like these. We tend to imagine the latest generation as the kids we see on television or in the movies–elite brainiacs inventing the next social media tool or a slouching gamer hunkered down on the couch. But the vast majority are more like Sheila and Franco: working hard with little to show for it.

And these interviews were before the recession. It’s only worse now. I suspect that Franco and Sheila are struggling to hang on to their standard of living, and I would bet that they’ve been pushed out of their jobs as the competition for workers tightens. When estimates are that 17 million college grads are doing jobs that don’t require a BA, Franco and Sheila don’t stand a chance.

On top of the desperate job market, since 1996, the program that had supported single mothers and children (AFDC, now called TANF) has been radically altered. To receive cash assistance today, mothers must be working, and to prevent long-term dependency according to reformers, women can only receive TANF for a total of five years over their lifetime–cumulative. Every month receiving TANF counts against the clock, in other words.

After the reforms were passed, caseloads plummeted–which reformers pointed to as a sign that too many had been abusing the system. In 2010, there were 1.9 million families receiving TANF cash assistance, down from 4.8 million in 1995. However, as ample research shows, the caseloads plummeted mainly because the economy was hot. The late 1990s saw one of the most robust economies in recent memory. Jobs were plentiful, and young mothers were easily getting a foothold on the job escalator. States focused on job preparation on the belief that once in the door, they’d pick up the necessary skills to advance. But while many entered the workforce, many also embarked on a string of low-paying jobs, rarely moving up, like Sheila. As Ron Haskins, one of the main voices of welfare reform on the then-moderate Right, put it recently:

“There are a lot of moms who can’t make it under this kind of demanding regime. Most of them can get a job, but they cannot hold it. So they get a job; they lose their job; then they try to find another one; they lose that one. So they are in and out. Some of them just try it once and they are out. Research shows that these are usually moms who have two or more problems – problems such as depression (which is a big issue among welfare mothers); three or more kids (which raises issues about child care); problems with transportation; problems with housing. Most mothers can deal with one of those things and can keep going, but once they hit two or three (especially) there really is a drop-off.

Those strains were extended to other young mothers when the first serious economic downturn hit and many young mothers were let go. After a tough decade of the 2000s, according to LaDonna Pavetti, a leading researcher of welfare reform, the employment rate  among poorly educated single mothers on TANF is the same it was as reform took hold: 54%.  In the meantime, many young mothers have exhausted their benefits. You can see why unemployment insurance becomes so important today–keeping 3.2 million families out of poverty, according to the Urban Institute.

When we talk about the poverty rate of young families, we’re not only talking about single mothers of course. In fact, “working poverty” is a way of life for far too many.

There was a time when we were more committed to keeping people out of poverty.  During the 1960s and President Johnson’s “Great Society” programs (extending Bobby Kennedy’s War on Poverty),  the country agreed that the families should not have to go hungry in a land of plenty. Medicare and expanded Social Security are a direct result of that effort, and lifted millions of elderly out of poverty. Today, young families are now six times more likely to be poor than elderly families. The poverty rate for those over age 65 is 5.7%.

The programs of the Great Society also included the Peace Corps, VISTA, Head Start, the Higher Education Act, Jobs Corps, and other supports for young adults. They helped millions of young adults connect to work or find purpose in volunteering and giving back. Yes, some of those programs still exist today, and there are others that have been modeled on them, but gone is the commitment to taking care of each other as a society, for the betterment of the whole.

We are a fractured and poisonous politics today, a miserly and vindictive group (“I made it, why should I help anyone else?”). We are also short-sighted. No one can build a secure future without a strong foundation, and when so many young families are poor and struggling, we risk short-changing our future and the future of the next generation. Poverty has a long arm.

 

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Posted in marriage and relationships, parents, politics, poverty

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Has the rise of women turned men into boy?

Posted on March 14, 2011 | Leave a comment

I’ve been reading Kay Hymowitz’s new book, “Manning Up,” alongside Gay Talese’s, “Thy Neighbor’s Wife,” and as is usually the case in reading across the spectrum, the themes in each book bump up against each other in very illuminating ways. Playboy meets the Manhattan Institute.

I’m warming up for a creative nonfiction class by reading Talese’s classic on the swinging 60s and the sexual revolution, including the launch of Playboy and an in-depth look at Hugh Hefner’s life.  I was reading Hymowitz’s book (she works at the Manhattan Institute and is a contributing editor of City Journal) because it’s directly related to some of the themes in Not Quite Adults, and she was kind enough to send me an advance copy.

“Manning Up” documents the collision of two trends–the strides of young women in college and the workforce, and the slide of men into what Hymowitz calls the perennial “child-man” state. She is particularly worried about the ramifications of these trends on the state of marriage and family. She readily admits that hers is not a scientific study and instead a book from the vantage point of a cultural critic. She interviewed a few young adults–mainly college-educated East Coasters it appears–and did a thorough vetting of the media landscape to get a bead on how this generation, and men in particular, views the responsibilities of adulthood.

The story is not an uplifting one. Manhood as we know it–strong, stable head of the family whose kids are just a little afraid of him–has disappeared, she believes. Rather than taking on the adult responsibilities of mortgage, tuition, and taxes, this latest generation of men refuses to shave, watches Jimmy Kimmel and Adult Swim cartoons, and plays World of WarCraft when not inventing the iFart app.

And killjoy women? They’re striding ahead in school and work and are quickly embracing Gloria Steinem’s famous quote, “A woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle.” They’re opting for sperm banks over the slim pickings among the man-children, whose lack of ambition and refusal to commit are not, in their eyes, very good husband material.

The end result for men, she says, is a retreat. Why grow up? Why take on the drudgery of adulthood if I no longer have to? And anyway, what does that role even look like anymore? The script for how men and women are supposed to navigate and behave, the roles they’re supposed to assume, are gone. The covenant among men, among women, and between men and women that once made all the rules clear has evaporated fully. As Hymowitz puts it:

“The child-man, then, is the lost son of a host of economic and cultural changes: the demographic shift I call preadulthood, the Playboy philosophy, feminism, the wild west of our new media, and a shrugging iffiness on the subject of husbands and fathers. He has no life script, no special reason to grow up. …After passing through boyhood and adolescence, he arrives at preadulthood with the distinct sense that he is dispensable…[and as such] he might as well play with the many toys (and babes–he hopes) his culture has generously provided him. After all, he is free as men have never been free before.

Cut to Gay Talese and Hugh Hefner. The thing that struck me in reading about Hefner’s life and his quest to start Playboy was the evident beginnings of the very thing Hymowitz sees in its full-blown glory today.

Hefner instinctively understood that men were feeling stifled in their gray flannel suits and their suburban homes, that they were disappointed in marriage, and that the thrill of the hunt had passed and now they were stuck in the suburbs. To spark their fantasy, he gave them the idealized woman of their dreams, airbrushed but approachable who behaved in ways real women did not. As Talese reports:

They were unfilled married men of moderate means and aspirations who were bored with their lives, uninspired by their jobs, and sought temporary escape through sexual adventure with more women than they had the ability to get, or the time to get, or the money to get, or the power to get, or the genuine desire to get.

To show just how right Hefner’s hunch was: Playboy’s circulation shot up from 40,000 per month to 400,000 per month in a mere two years in 1955.

But the difference between then and now–besides 55 years of cultural revolution–is this: men back then stashed their Playboy’s under their bed, but it was the bed they shared with their wife. Today, Hymowitz worries, men are reading “Maxim” and other “lad” magazines in their bachelor pad and getting their porn online. No wife, no kids are in the picture.

In the 1950s and into the 1960s, there were still social rules that tamped down the desire of men to abandon marriage and just play the field and be a bachelor. Namely, women agreed in an unspoken pact to not give sex away so easily, thus making it more valuable and coveted. It was the hook to getting a good man.

But that all changed with the sexual revolution–and once again, women lose out. Whereas women once called the shots in relationships because they held the cards (namely: sex), now the tables have turned. A recent book by Mark Regnerus and Jeremy Uecker, “Premarital Sex in America: How Young Americans Meet, Mate and Think About Marrying,” says, in fact, that when it comes to relationships, men are now calling all the shots — which means less commitment and more sex.

Regnerus and  Uecker of the University of Texas at Austin drew on data from four national surveys, as well as additional interviews with men and women between the ages of 18 and 23.

Men are calling the shots not because of their great advances. Just the opposite. They’re calling the shots because the pool of marriageable men has gotten so shallow. Judd Apatow abounds. As he explained in a Q&A in Salon:

More than ever women feel like they’re competing for men. In American colleges, 57% of students are women and 43% are men. That’s a radical reversal of where we were 30 or 40 years ago. Presuming that people are attracted to people who are like them educationally, it means looking for secure relationships becomes challenging because the sex ratio is so imbalanced. That’s a terrible environment to try to get men to commit.”

Women, he says, compete with other women to attract the few eligible men, and they do that with the one thing men respond to: sex. But doing so a dangerous trade-off, he says. When sex is cheap, it lowers women’s bargaining power:

It’s the opposite of a cartel effect where women would say, “All right, we need to band together and artificially restrict the price of sex and get it high, even if we don’t want to, in order to extract things from men.” It used to be women would shame each other for selling low.

…Individual women can still have it all, and plenty do, but if you take a step back and look at the whole scene, women are not as successful in relationships as perhaps they once were.

So where does that leave things? Men calling the shots, and the shots apparently are: what’s the rush to grow up?

It’s a provocative pitch and certainly a provocative book.  I have a few problems with the finer points of the argument, but you can’t ignore the sense among women that they’re getting a raw deal in the dating world. I’ve seen it among my friends and you don’t have to look far online or at the movie theaters to get the message. And when another 25-year-old guy makes a killing on yet another juvenile social networking site (4chan anyone? ), it does make you wonder where the grown-ups are.

But I’m not one to wring my hands over this slice of the worried well. I think we have bigger worries to keep us up at night. Hymowitz and so many others focus on such a thin slice of the young adult population–that special group of elite kids who have a BA or an MA– that I don’t think we can get too tied up in knots that the world is about to end. Marriage and parenthood among this college-grad set, after all, are the surest and most successful. They may be delaying, but they’re not abandoning marriage and kids, yet.

Those who are side-lining marriage (but not kids) are more often those from the working class and below, who too often feel they cannot afford to marry. They’re not sitting at home watching cartoons and ordering pizza. They’re working two part-time jobs with no benefits in a desperate scramble to stay afloat. They often cherish the idea of marriage, but just can’t get there. As more and more Americans tumble off their safe perch and into the ranks of the struggling middle and lower-middle class, the marriage rates are likely to fall with them. These are the families we should be shining our spotlight on, not the privileged few who can afford to delay adulthood.

But as our publisher told us, it’s the elite parents who buy books.

 

 

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For the first time the economic gain from marriage are greater for men than women

Posted on November 19, 2010 | Leave a comment

Here’s an astounding fact: Today the economic gains associated with marriage are greater for men than for women. Let that sink in a moment because it’s a momentous change.

According to a Pew Research study, economics and education have upended this long-standing dynamic. In the past, when relatively few wives worked, marriage was a bonus economically. But today, with the growing earnings gains of women, the stagnating wages for men with the least education, and with women outstripping men in higher education, the story has changed. Today, men benefit from marriage economically more than women. According to Pew:

Among U.S.-born 30- to 44-year-olds, women now are the majority both of college graduates and those who have some college education but not a degree. Women’s earnings grew 44% from 1970 to 2007, compared with 6% growth for men. More men today marry women with more education than they have, while more women marry men with less education than they have. The combination of these factors means that marriage is a better deal, economically at least, for men–and particularly those with less education overall.

Whether this cause for celebration or worry I’ll leave to you. It is certainly heartening to see women making so many gains professionally. However, I personally worry that so many young men with the least education are struggling in today’s economy (and increasingly even those with  a college degree are included). Indeed, married women today are somewhat less likely than their 1970 counterparts to have a husband who works. I just wrote a brief with the nonprofit group, The Young Invincibles, on young men’s precarious standing. The trends are pretty sobering.

But we can talk data all day. Here’s a story that gets right to the heart of it.  A young man wrote it to our Generation-R website to tell us about his dilemma–a dilemma facing many in this most recent generation of college grads. (we welcome these stories and conversation, so add your own to the site).

Having a sense of economic security–which this recent college grad clearly lacks–is a precursor to popping the question for most couples. It is particularly true of those couples at the lower rungs of the economic ladder. Survey after survey shows that this group values marriage as much as anyone, but they want their financial ducks in a row first. And of course, for them, getting those ducks in a row can take a long, long time. It’s not surprising then that the marriage rates for those with the least education and income are by far the lowest.

Yet it seems that this worry might be creeping up the ladder of late.  In our early interviews with recent college grads, we’re hearing that same concern. “My life is on hold,” we hear, until I can get a good job and some money in the bank. Given the dire economy, when college grads are working as bartenders, receptionists, and cashiers at the local Shop Rite, it’s not clear when that moment is going to be.

It’s clear that marriage is no longer a marker of adulthood as it once was. Maybe it never will be again. It’s certainly not the necessity it once was. Couples can live together, they can live on their own, they can create his and her apartments, they can create new family forms. No harm, no foul.

But, the declining marriage rates are a symptom of something larger, of the acceleration of a chronic cough into full-blown tuberculosis.  We find ourselves in a winner-take-all society, where those at the very tippy-top reap all the rewards of luck and “hard work,” while those in the expanding bottom become increasingly frustrated. Working hard and playing by the rules does not seem to open the same doors it once did.

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Marriage today: overwhelmed by choices and unburdened by social expectations

Posted on October 11, 2010 | 1 Comment

I’ve been thinking about marriage lately and how it’s changed. What struck me in reading over the many transcripts of interviews for “Not Quite Adults” was how few young people followed the path of Steve and Julie below–and what that means, in the end, for the meaning of marriage in today’s world.

Julie and Steve had their first date as juniors in high school in St. Paul, Minnesota. For Julie, Steve was a nice escape from her home life. Julie’s parents were drinkers and they struggled financially for most of Julie’s younger years. Yet despite this difficult home life, Julie was a good student in high school, a cheerleader, with many friends who excelled as well. When it came time to graduate, her friends all went off to elite four-year colleges, but Julie was cowed by the tuition.

“I guess I always thought there was some magic college money that was waiting for me,” she said. When the money failed to materialize, she abandoned her plans for college and took a job in retail. “It wasn’t like I was going to Harvard or anything,” she said, “so it wasn’t a big deal.”

Steve was also at loose ends. He was living at home after high school without a job or any direction when his mother, worried he was drifting without direction and thinking he needed a little tough love, gave him an ultimatum: start paying $100 in rent or move out. Instead, he joined the Navy. Three months later, he and Julie were engaged.

“We just kind of missed each other,” said Julie. “So we decided to get married because then we could be together.” They were both 20.

The two moved to a Navy base in Georgia, Julie took a part-time job, and they bought a house together.

“I don’t know how we did it, me working a job for $5 an hour and he was making nothing in the Navy. They pay you so low. But we did. We built it ourselves.”

Within a year, they had a son, Nicholas. Steve shipped out three weeks after Nicholas was born. “It was so hard,” Julie says. “My sister took time off from college and came and stayed with me cause I wouldn’t have been able to do it. I had mastitis. I was sick. I couldn’t get out of bed. Nicholas didn’t sleep. There’s no way you can do it by yourself.”

But she survived, and adapted. With Steve out to sea for three-month stretches, Julie ran the house like a tight ship. “We basically lived on just his salary, which wasn’t much. But I didn’t have to work because of the way I ran things around the house. I could save a lot of money here and there.”

Eventually, she would return to work so they could enroll Nicholas in preschool. She worked first at Dairy Queen and then at Taco Bell for three months. “I have nightmares about Taco Bell,” she laughed.  She moved on to Wal-Mart where she earned $5.25 an hour. Tired of retail, she enrolled in school part-time at a local community college, and would later manage to get a four-year degree.

When we interviewed them, they had been married for 10 years, and her husband has been in the Navy the entire time. Theirs is a “traditional” marriage in many respects. For many years he earned the salary, and she took care of the home.

“I still have most of the work,” she said. “Even when I was working, with Nicholas around and going to school I still had to, you know, do all the household chores, except for dishes. …It didn’t bother me so much then, but I’m takin’ all these sociology classes, and now I know, you know, I’m gettin’ screwed,” she laughed. “But he does more around the house than my dad does.”

Steve was about to end his service, and Julie had moved back to Minnesota, where they intended to live, while he finished up his duties in Georgia. She was living with her parents and working at a doctor’s office, making good money for the first time in her life.

“It’s not rewarding,” she says of the job, “but I’m very busy. And so I really don’t have time to think about it.” Although not rewarding, she likes the good pay and benefits, with room to move up into billing. “I’m almost up to the living wage. Right now I make enough to make a decent house payment. And Steve could just pay for the car payment, or everything else with what he makes, you know? So I, I mean it makes me actually feel like I’m worth something economically now.”

Although she was feeling more secure about life, her marriage was going through a difficult stretch. Steve was nervous about leaving the Navy, afraid no one would hire him on the outside. In the meantime, he was spending wildly while they were separated.

“Six months ago, he was a good dad,” Julie said. “He was a good provider, financially responsible. He was dependable I guess. Now, he goes and plays pool every night. Out ‘til three a.m. And yes, I am worried about it because he’s spending money left and right.”

Julie was also worried about the transition Steve was to make to civilian life and to life back in Minnesota with her and Nicholas. He had reverted to his bachelor ways, and just might be second-guessing their decision to marry so early. Julie, too, seemed, conflicted. On the one hand, she was excited about the prospect of finally having a “normal” family life outside the Navy’s demands and with a little money in their pockets. “I think I’ll be one of those moms that drives her kids to practice, and picks ‘em up from school, and goes to work, comes home. And that we’re gonna take vacations and go places, and do things. Just a normal life finally.”

On the other hand, she was also realizing that she had never known anyone but Steve, and now that she could stand on her own two feet should she need to, she had gained a little confidence, and perhaps curiosity, about her future.

“If I wanted to, you know like, get divorced and live on my own, I’d be able to do it,” she said, almost in passing before quickly changing the subject.

I related to Julie on some level. I was married early, at age 24 (our marriage was much easier than hers, however). But the parallel I saw was that my husband and I built our lives together, getting jobs, moving together to a new city, adding a master’s degree, switching careers, buying a house–all those “adult” things you’re supposed to do. Like Julie and Steve, we muddled through and figured things out together.

But as I continued reading and talking with other young adults, I came to realize that this path is about as common as an honest politician in Chicago.   I knew that people were delaying marriage much longer in life–a lot longer. But for some reason, it never dawned on me that with the delay meant another big change. You no longer built your life together as a couple. Instead, young people do all their building as individuals, on their own, and then as a capstone to a job well done, they get married. They’re more like John and his girlfriend Renee.

John, now 29, met his current girlfriend when he was 19. They worked side by side at the local Dairy Queen, although at the time both were in different relationships. The job exposed their warts as well as their good qualities.

“Working together so close you really got to know each other really well, before even dating, which was really nice,” he said. In his mind, the success of their relationship stems largely from the fact that they were friends first and they were able to “build our relationship off that.” They have been officially dating for five years now, and although they do plan to marry in the future, neither is in a huge rush.

Unlike Steve and Julie, John and Renee were becoming their own persons, developing their own lives as singles, not as a couple. They’d both finished master’s degrees. John was moving up in the ranks of his job, and had just bought a house. Renee had  her own condo and a job as well. It’s his and hers hand towels without the joint bathroom. They were clearly quite close, and he talked freely about their relationship in ways his father never would have.

“There’s nothing I can’t say to her,” he said. “So, you know, you are truly each other’s best friend. You mean the most to each other. And that’s what I like the best. I’m not depending on my brother to be my best friend, or my friend from high school to be my best friend. I know that the person I’m with will always be my best friend. And that’s, I think, what should mean most in any relationship.”

He is not alone. Nine in ten singles in the National Marriage Project’s annual survey agree that “when you marry you want your spouse to be your soul mate, first and foremost.”

But, this quest for a best friend, and getting one’s personal ducks in a row–buying the condo, getting the degree, settling into a career–often means that the twenties are spent searching and assessing, and the march down the aisle slows to a crawl. It gets more complicated to boot because the gender roles are all up for grabs. While we like to think of ourselves as way beyond any confusion over these roles, I don’t think we’re there yet.

In many respects, this is the first generation to live fully under a set of “new rules” of family life. Sure the Boomers started the ball rolling, but those who lived together or bought their own homes first or wanted to be well into a settled career first were still outliers, not the norm. But now, for the first time, these patterns dominate, and there’s a lot of choices along the way, with no guidebook to carry along on the trip.

So the question arises: Are young adults overwhelmed by the number of options? Or as my friend Maria Kefalas put it so succinctly: overwhelmed by choices and unburdened by social expectations. It’s a good question. I’d love to hear what people think.

One thing we do know, however. While the choices may overwhelm, getting married before age 25 is a fast-track to divorce today.  The divorce rates for those who marry before age 25 are much higher than those who wait. It’s not hard to see why.

Or as Julie said, “It makes things a lot easier if you do it the ‘normal’ way. I wish I had done that. I wish I had gone to school first. And then got a job, and then got married, and then had kids. It just makes everything so much easier. You don’t have to tune out Sponge Bob while you’re doing homework. You don’t have to find babysitters. You can pay things off in order. You start off with no bills making lots of money. That starts you off in a very different place in life.”

Note she said “the normal way.” The path she described has indeed become the new normal in a very short time, and with that relatively fast change comes confusion and carving new options, with a lot of different choices along the way, options that can be at once exhilarating and confusing.

 

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Posted in GenX, marriage and relationships, millennials

Marriage rates fall for less-educated white women; Is it time for a “Moynihan Report” for the white family?

Posted on October 8, 2010 | 2 Comments

For the first time in a more than a century, the number of young adults who have never been married surpassed the number married. The Population Reference Bureau, analyzing census data, attributes the sharp decline to the recession. Growing acceptance of cohabitation is also driving the shift.

Marriage has been on the decline for some time, but the trend picked up speed in the last two years.  In 2000, 55.1% of young adults aged 25 to 34 were married. By 2009, that had dropped to 44.9%. The decline in marriage is most pronounced among those with the least education (just a high school degree or less), down a full 10 percentage points in just ten years. For those with at least a bachelor’s degree, the share  married declined only 4 percentage points.

In the end 44% of those with the least education were married in 2010 compared with 52% with a BA. This is quite a reversal. Prior to the 1990s, marriage rates among those with a high school diploma or less were always higher than those with a four-year college education. So while all young adults are delaying marriage, those with the least education are more often opting to sidestep it than those with a BA or more.

Economics is certainly playing a role in these shifts, but the decline also comes on the heels of a growing acceptability of living together. Many more young adults today want to “test drive” marriage before they commit, and in these times, says The Transitions to Adulthood Network chair Frank Furstenberg, “cohabitation has become a way of managing uncertainty about the future.”

“A growing number of young adults are hedging their bets whether to make a long-term commitment when they chose to cohabit rather than to wed,” says Furstenberg, “Among the least educated, there is a very real question whether they will reach a level of economic security that persuades cohabiting couples to marry before and even after childbearing.  Among well-educated adults, it seems prudent, particularly when economic times are tough, to delay, but most will eventually wed.

“Most young adults still value marriage, but no longer are they willing to pledge commitment in advance.  Instead, marriage has increasingly become a celebration of commitment.  The recession brings this into high relief, but there seems little chance that the U.S. will revert back to the old ways of doing things.”

There’s another side to this trend that is interesting: working class and poor white women are “catching up” with their black peers in opting not to marry. For decades, black women have abandoned marriage, for a variety of reasons. One prominent reason, offered by those who have spent their careers studying this trend, including Furstenberg and my friend Maria Kefalas (author of Promises I Can Keep), is that there are so few “marriageable” men. After all, the pool is pretty shallow when a black man in his 30s is more likely to have spent time in prison than in college. A recent article by Christopher Wildeman and Bruce Western in Future of Children puts the risk of imprisonment for a black man in his 30s today with only a high school degree or less at 36%. (To get a glimpse of the racism involved in our penal system, the risk for white men with the same education is 6%.)

But now, it appears that white women are beginning to feel the same constraints that black women have been experiencing since Daniel Patrick Moynihan wrote his famous, and controversial, report on the black family in the 1960s. In that report, Moynihan worried that the black family was disintegrating before our eyes, with dire consequences for children, and by extension, the nation. The famed sociologist William Julius Wilson would follow-up that report with his own study, pointing not to declining values, but to the isolation in inner-city neighborhoods of poor black families, and the lack of jobs and productive outlets for men in particular.  Stranded in disintegrating inner cities when the jobs are in the burbs (and when fear of and stigma toward black men is on the rise) means men resort to the underground economy of pushing drugs or fencing stolen goods or doing odd jobs for quick cash. With that comes risk. The growing push to incarcerate, particularly for drug crimes, coupled with a “driving while black” syndrome pushed the numbers imprisoned sky-high. Black women in turn figured they could raise children better on their own, and frequently instituted a “pay to stay” rule in the house, which many black men could not abide or meet. (I’m obviously abbreviating this complex history here).

We see these choices in the numbers: today, seven in ten black children are born to single mothers. Some might wonder why a woman would have a child on one small income, alone, but as several poor black women in Philadelphia told Kefalas,  “it’s not like I’m ever going to make scads of money, so why wait to have children?” Children are a gift, and a central part of their life. Waiting until their finances are in order will be a long wait. Interestingly, these same women put marriage on a high, high pedestal–a capstone event with a gorgeous wedding gown and all the trappings followed by a white-picket-fence life. For many, a fantasy only.

And this begs the question: are we seeing the same thing for poor and even working class white women? Is marriage becoming an unattainable dream? As Hummer and Hamilton in the same issue of Future of Children put it, “Unmarried black women today are having fewer births than they did in 1970, while unmarried white women are having more.”

The recession has certainly brought this developing issue into sharp relief.  Money and security are often deal breakers in the decision to marry.  Creating better opportunities to gain an education, creating better paths to jobs, raising the minimum wage, bolstering the Earned Income Tax Credit, and carving out a secure and well-paid place in the workforce are just some of the challenges ahead of us. Sticking our head in the sand (abstinence education springs to mind) and ignoring the facts will not make this problem go away. And it is a problem. While half the children born “out of wedlock” (a creaky old term if there ever was one) are born to parents who are living together, those relationships are fragile without stable jobs and a steady living. Most end within four years or so. And the quickest route to poverty is being a single parent.

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Friends in a digital world

Posted on October 4, 2010 | Leave a comment

“Seven hundred friends and I was drinking alone” is how Hal Niedzviecki put it in his book “Peep Diaries.” He invited 700 Facebook friends to have a beer, face to face. Fifteen said they would show up. Sixty said maybe. The rest ignored the invitation. He figured 20 would show. But as the hours ticked by and his beer grew stale, only one person showed up. The two spent an hour or so of awkward small talk before she left to go meet her boyfriend. Hal was left alone with his thoughts.

He should have read Theodora Stites, in “Rock My Network“:

“I have friends on my buddy list who live in my neighborhood, but we only talk on IM. We would never dream of hanging out in person…. I honestly don’t know why anyone wants to socialize in person anymore. It’s so difficult to concentrate on talking to just one person at a time. Eye contact isn’t all it’s cracked up to be, and facial expressions are so hard to control.”

(I do believe she has her tongue firmly implanted in cheek on that one–let’s hope!)

Such is the crazy waters one must navigate in today’s social networks. In “Not Quite Adults,” we took a look at friendships in today’s world. If there’s another topic that is as bewildering to the older generation as this, I’m all ears.

One thing that struck me about friendships in today’s 20-something world is both how ephemeral and central they are. This generation is living alone for longer than ever before. In the past, young people more often went from  from their childhood home directly into their own home, with a spouse. If you think about it, it wasn’t all that long ago that Mary Richards got in her Pinto and drove to the big city of Minneapolis to live, gasp, on her own. She and Marlo Thomas were breaking new ground in the 1970s as solo girls with their own apartments. It heralded a new era. Today’s generation is really the first generation to be on its own, living independently, for an entire decade (or more). Sure, young people still marry, but more often than not, it’s not until their late 20s or early 30s. And while some are living at home with their parents, the majority are out on their own, doubling up in apartments or living in studios on their own.

But of course, no one is really alone. Friends fill the gap. Where once young people talked over problems and discoveries with their spouse across the dinner table, today they do so with friends across the bar or coffee house table.

Friends are central, no doubt about it. And just as friendships were taking center stage, in comes a new revolution in socializing: Facebook and social networks. These networks are an easy target for those alarmed at the speed of change. Kids can’t make eye contact anymore. They are always texting instead of talking it over. All this social networking leads to cyber-bullying. All of it true— to an extent. Friendship, after all, requires tending. It requires face to face. Life in a virtual world has a little too much wiggle room. “Virtual” removes the notion of social obligation that face-to-face imparts. Online, the cloak of anonymity may make it less awkward to share intimate details or personal ideas, but as the two dogs famously put it in the New Yorker cartoon, “On the internet,  no one knows you’re a dog.” Without the face-to-face commitment, people are more likely to fib, exaggerate, provoke, and bully. Behind the screen, we find it easier to do the things we would never do face to face.

In the end, one must ask, how much investment does someone put into a “friendship” when it is quite possible that this person is not who he says he is? Friendship injects an intimacy that requires more from us than the virtual acquaintance online. The intimacy holds us accountable for our actions, for our honesty, for the advice we render–for everything we say and do in a friendship. It is that accountability that keeps us honest, and most importantly, builds trust.

The good news is that we didn’t talk to many young adults for Not Quite Adults who relied solely on Facebook or twitter to conduct their friendships. Face to face friendships are alive and well. Texting, Facebook, twitter, and all the rest are tools, nothing more. They help young people keep tabs on one another, but they are not supplanting “real” friendships.

And there might be something good that comes of these social networks.

“I’m of two minds on social networking,” Geoffrey Grief told me many months ago. Grief is the author of “Buddy System” about friendships among guys. “Young people can stay in touch all the time without any great depth,” he said of the downside.

But men, he thinks, find this kind of social networking/friendship more comfortable, which is a good thing.

“Someone might feel more comfortable talking about their marriage in an email than he might in person or over the phone,” Grief said. “Some say they should be sitting at the bar and talking instead. Well, maybe he won’t come to the bar. This way, he can do it spontaneously when he’s in the mood. People  said the phone was not as meaningful as face to face and was the beginning of the end of friendships, too.”

Another strength of social networking that we often overlook is what it can do for those who are disconnected or marginalized, or who don’t have the web of connections that some of the more elite young people have at their fingertips. Sociologists call these “weak ties” and we need them along with strong ties in order to function successfully in society. Weak ties are those casual connections you know from work or at the gym. You know enough about them to nod and share some casual gossip, but you don’t know about the depths of their personal lives. It is these contacts that grease the wheels for job leads, references, and even just tips to good restaurants or where to get your shoes repaired in the neighborhood. It turns out these ties are pretty important to getting ahead. They serve as bridges to the bigger world outside your own self-imposed confines.

Ironically, the  small town, idealized for its Mayberry closeness, frequently has too many strong ties and not enough weak ties. This is fine if you’re in the “in” crowd, but if you’re from the wrong side of the tracks in these small, tight communities, it’s hard to break free. Your reputation (or your family’s reputation) precedes you.

As one young man from small-town Iowa put it, “You always knew from growing up whose parents had money, and I guess in a away depending on what your last name was, depended on if you were popular or not, or if the teachers would like you, or if you got into swing choir, or if you got into the National Honor Society, you know. I mean, you kind of knew.”

The tight cliques also limit your access to those contacts who might offer a tip to a problem or a job lead that can move you beyond your immediate circle of contacts. Before long, the only way of doing something is how your cousin does it or how your dad does it. And sometimes, that’s not the best way to tackle a problem. Life becomes too insular. It’s no coincidence that rural areas have more persistent poverty than even urban areas.

The internet to the rescue. The internet and social networking sites can be a stand-in for what the elite families often provide their children: exposure. It can open up vistas and offer new ideas. The web of contacts that sprout online elevate the chance for serendipity. And serendipity is where you pick up the new ideas and learn to think in new ways.

It seems that, like anything, we need some balance, and young adults for the most part are working that balance out. They have many face-to-face friendships. They still play basketball with the guys. The bars are still packed on Saturday nights. I still see couples at the movies. I still see girlfriends shopping. And they’re also extremely adept at using the social networks to expand their horizons and find their niche in this world.

We’re still in the early stages of these big online changes. As we saw with the Rutgers tragedy, young people can abuse the freedom that social networking provides from the social strictures of face-to-face. But with every new technology we must relearn our position in relation to it, and redesign the rules of conduct. This latest generation is at the forefront of this big change, as Hal Niedzviecki, the guy sitting alone at the bar, is figuring out. Whether it is used to its fullest potential is up to them. I for one think they’re up for the challenge.

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Boomers hanging on

Posted on September 29, 2010 | 3 Comments

Mary Quigley over at Mothering 21 blog has some fun with the “emerging adulthood” label bandied about in a recent Times article.

“Call us ‘emerging retirees’” she says of the Boomers’ reluctance or inability to retire and make room for the younger generation.

Pick a reason: rebuilding depleted 401Ks,   mortgages,  “double income, no kids” is a good thing,  or maybe we enjoy working  and  plan to stay, as Buzz Lightyear says, “to infinity…and beyond!”   That’s not exactly what some young adults want to hear.

Or as a recent headline kvetched: “Give up the reins, you geezers.”

She’s on to something. Young adults are squeezed out of the workforce (but not necessarily by older workers hanging on for dear life). And the result is alarming. Young adults are leaving the workforce (voluntarily or no) in large numbers. A recent report by The Hamilton Project (a project of the Brookings Institution) finds that:

younger age groups (ages 16 to 19 and 20 to 24) have experienced the most drastic drop in employment as measured by the employment-to-population ratio. In contrast, there has been almost no change in the share of older workers employed—the employment-to-population ratio for people 55 and older has barely dropped.

The employment-to-population ratio is the share of the working-age population that is employed.

Those age 20-24 saw a 7.5 percentage point decline in their employment-to-population ratio between November 2007 and August 2010. Their slightly older peers (age 25-34) saw a 5 percentage point drop.  But note the decline for those 55+. Nada.

The report attributes these declines to a plunge in both job openings and people quitting their job.

As others have pointed out, launching one’s career during a recession can have lingering effects on the pay check.  Lisa Kahn has estimated that entering the workforce during a recession means annual wages about 17.5% lower for several years than if one had found that first job during better times. The losses don’t level off for about 17 years. The Hamilton project does the math for us:

For the average college graduate this year, this translates into approximately $70,000 (in today’s dollars) in lost earnings over the next decade. For the 2008, 2009, and 2010 classes combined that amounts to over $330 billion in lost earnings over 10 years. The projected losses are even larger for graduates who cannot find a job upon graduation.

So young people are right to holler. It’s their future that is hit the hardest.

Quigley ends her post, like all good writers, by alluding to a larger issue: When does one generation shuffle off for the future to take the stage? Michael Kinsley in the October issue of the Atlantic leads the charge in answering that question by calling on Boomers to ask: How will history remember us? (I include myself in that generation, just barely: 1961).  What generational gestures, he asks, can we make that will match the ones our own fathers –the Greatest Generation–made for us? Can we push our own egos and self-indulged habits aside and leave a legacy, beyond the failed ideals of our youth (some less generously tag it as selling out)?

His answer is to leave the next generation debt-free. “Instead of ignoring it [debt], or arguing endlessly about whose fault it is and who should pay for it, Boomers …should just grab the check and say, ‘This one’s on us.’”

Even though Boomers are not solely responsible for this mess we’re in, he says, we should nevertheless man up and make a grand gesture for the future of the country.

“Fair? Of course it’s not fair. That’s the point. It it was fair, the gesture would be meaningless. Boomers are not primarily responsible for America’s debt crisis. Blame goes mostly to the WWII generation, which in this regard was not so Great. They’re the ones who notoriously want to ‘Stop the Government from messing around with our Medicare,’ and Boomers are the ones who have been paying to support the last vestige of old-fashioned fee-for-service medicine–for the old folks. The Boomers themselves and their children are more likely to go to an HMO.

But that’s ok. You won WWII so we’re going to continue this little pretense.

We also, he says, should make sure no more bridges collapse, fix some roads, invest in more research, work on public education, and reduce the national debt.

And where will we get that kind of money? Boomers could forswear all the inheritances we have coming to us, or instead, allow the government to tax it. The inheritance tax, after all, was designed to prevent too much power accumulating in the hands of the gentry of this country (oh wait, too late.) At the moment there is no federal estate tax, and next year when/if it returns, it will miss a lot of people through loopholes and what-not. Instead, Kinsley argues, we should broaden it in a progressive way. He also suggests we ration some expensive health care that extends our lives by a few months. I won’t go into detail here–read the article for that. But his larger point is that we should, and can, rally together one last time and make a difference, again.

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The Dutch, sex, and the invisible hand (and yes it’s connected to the path to adulthood)

Posted on September 9, 2010 | 1 Comment

“Not Quite Adults” is getting some great pre-publication reviews, which is exciting. Publisher’s Weekly called it  “admirably lucid and fair-minded” among other nice things. I’m loving the “admirably lucid” part :)   It’s hard to believe that publication day is coming down the pike (Dec 28), but we’ve been assigned a publicists and the outreach is already beginning, so I guess it’s true. Finally.

I was explaining the book to my tennis doubles partner on Monday and he asked a good question: So what does separate those who are treading water during this transition to adulthood and those who are swimming with the currents? (that’s a subtheme in our book.) His question boiled it right down, and what popped into my head–and I think it’s true–are two things: too few good-paying jobs, and having kids too soon.

A  large group of young people (I’d say two-thirds of them) are trying to do the fast-track to adulthood but are hitting some big barriers. It’s not a case of being spoiled or lazy or just needing a kick in the pants. They’re really trying, but they made some decisions early on that forked their path–decisions that were in turn shaped by those larger forces at work in their own neighborhoods, schools, and families.

Those bigger forces matter. Unlike the common belief that we can do anything if we put our minds to it, that we can pick ourselves up by our boostraps, I believe that  that an “invisible hand” (to borrow from Adam Smith) shapes our choices, even if we don’t realize it. That invisible hand includes things like whether our parents have a college degree; whether our schools are funded by property taxes; whether we had a good math teacher in fourth grade or a good reading teacher in third grade; whether we  live in a neighborhood where you talk with your neighbors and watch out for their kids or you skitter into the house after work or school to avoid the dangers; whether you live near the arts and culture of a city or the farms and gardens of a rural town—the list goes on. Of course we can overcome some of these conditions. Ours is still the land of opportunity. The exceptions, however, do not make the rule. On the whole, these factors shape our futures more than we care to admit.

Take one example: attitudes toward sex. America has a serious love-hate relationship with sex, and if you ask me, it gets us into trouble. This morning I read a piece over at Salon that reminded me of this point. Tracy Clark-Flory writes about how the Dutch “teach” sex ed to their kids. I was familiar with the study. I’d edited a book recently by Frank Furstenberg, “Destinies of the Disadvantaged,” and he’d talked about the same study.  Frank is a sociologist who has followed a group of poor women in inner-city Baltimore for the past 30 years or more after they had children as teens.

But back to the crazy Dutch. It turns out that instead of instilling fear and stigma about sex, as our American religion-dominated culture does, the Dutch approach sex like we approach driver’s ed. As Clark-Flory writes:

A 2003 survey “found that two thirds of Dutch fifteen to seventeen-year-olds with steady boy- or girlfriends are allowed to spend the night with them in their bedrooms, and that boys and girls are equally likely to get permission for a sleepover.” …

‘Dutch parents, by contrast, downplay the dangerous and difficult sides of teenage sexuality, tending to normalize it. They speak of readiness (er aan toe zijn), a process of becoming physically and emotionally ready for sex that they believe young people can self-regulate, provided they’ve been encouraged to pace themselves and prepare adequately.’”

Ok, just to show you how much “culture” affects us, are you still a bit stunned by that paragraph?

The driver’s ed analogy isn’t mine; it’s Frank’s.  We were talking about an op-ed when his book was due out, and he brought that up, and I thought the analogy was brilliant. In America, he said, we treat our teens as developmentally unable to act responsibly. We talk about raging hormones and out-of-control impulses that need to be stamped out with a taint of taboo and scarlet letters. The Dutch, in contrast, believe that young people ought to be taught to manage these potential risks by gradually introducing them to adult-like responsibilities during their teen years—like we do with driving. With driving, we gradually introduce teens to the rules of the road, and the feel of the wheel. They take courses in how to become a responsible driver, and we view driving ultimately a rite of passage. We have normalized the risks by treating it as a desirable transition to adult-like responsibility.  (Ironically, Europeans see driving as far riskier than sex and have far more restrictive driving laws for teens.)

The end result of our cultural attitudes toward sex? In 2007, teen birth rates in the US were 8 times higher than in the Netherlands. You can see how the big-picture cultural, neighborhood, and other forces are at hand here.

With “Not Quite Adults,” we’re not talking about teen births, although several of the young families who were seriously treading water had children at age 18. Even today, though, having a child in one’s early 20s is a risk. Having a child early too often forces a young woman to bypass education or training, the critical link to success today. As one young mother told us, “It just makes everything so much easier [not having kids too soon]. You don’t have to find a babysitter. You don’t have to tune out SpongeBob while doing your homework, you start off with no bills…that starts you off in a very different place in life.”

Most of the pregnancies were unplanned–the result of shoddy, if any, contraception, coupled with a sense that the future was not that exactly beckoning with big promises anyway. Both shoddy contraception (a result of hormones, politics, and mixed messages about sex) and a sense that the future wasn’t so bright are the invisible hand at work again.

Only in hindsight–after the struggles and the heartbreaks and the dashed plans–did they realize the impact the early birth had on their futures. All of the women loved their children dearly, but almost to a woman, they said that if they had it to do over again, they would wait to have kids.

The other stumbling block (and another invisible hand) to a successful start on adulthood is work and wages. One reason these young families are struggling so is that they can’t earn a livable wage without a bachelor’s degree today (and increasingly a master’s degree).

I’ve harped on the sorry state of the workforce for the working class quite a bit lately, mainly since I’m in the throes of early preparation for the next book on how the recession is affecting young people. But a recent report by the Economic Policy Institute brings it all home. Turns out that not only are the unemployed hurting during this recession. We all are feeling the effects in our paychecks.

Or as the report puts it, we’ve been experiencing “a broad-based collapse of wage growth over the last two years.” The falling wages come on the heels of a big sink in our living standards and incomes since 2000–even amid rising productivity. (Hey wait a minute.) Yes, we’re all working like dogs, for less money. And guess who’s raking it in? Increased productivity = increased shareholder and corporate CEO payoffs.

As the Economic Policy Institute says:

Economists generally assume that faster productivity growth generates higher living standards through increased average compensation, but from 1995 to 2007, the disconnect between productivity and compensation growth was dramatic, particularly during the 2002-07 recovery. From 2002 to 2007, productivity grew 11.0%, but the hourly compensation of the typical high-school- and college-educated worker actually fell.

In other words, the disconnect between pay and productivity hit us all, even those with a college degree. Something’s not right in the land of opportunity.

Unfortunately, the young women and men in the ranks of our working and blue-collar classes have borne witness to this collapse of wages and living standards for much longer than the college-educated. Working two jobs just to make ends meet is nothing new for this former group. Indeed,  I would argue that the collapse in their wages is one reason that the young women see no great futures ahead of them anyway. It’s not a big leap from there to see why they think, why wait to have kids? It’s not like the future beckons with big paydays anyway. Once again, our environment at work shaping our decisions in ways big and small.

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Women are outearning men in most cities

Posted on September 3, 2010 | Leave a comment

A new study that finds young women are outearning men is pinging around the internet. I blogged about it over at my other gig, so I’m going to be lazy and reblog it here…it’s that good.

The pay of young, single, and childless women between age 22 and 30, the new report finds, has “caught up and [is] now exceeding men in most of America’s cities.” Yes, you read that right: most American cities. About three years ago, we first saw this trend pop up in a few select big cities. But it didn’t take long to spread.

These women–a rather narrow demographic to be sure–earn about 8% more, on average, than their male peers, according to Reach Advisors, a consumer research company that announced the findings. In some cities the gap is even larger. In Atlanta, for example, women earn 21% more than men on average.

Given that women are “outlearning” their male peers, this should come as no surprise. As  Maria Cancian (Univ. of Wisconsin, Madison) and Deborah Reed (Mathematica), two leading experts on women and work, explained in an email, “It’s been more than a decade since young women outpaced young men in college graduation rates. Now we are seeing the results of that as the labor market continues to place high rewards on education.”

Indeed, in a knowledge economy such as ours, education pays. A Network brief documents the earnings gains from higher education here.

However, there are some nuances to the findings.  James Chung, president of the Reach Advisors, was kind enough to fill me in on the back story. The gender gap, he says, is evident in three contexts. Women earn more in cities with an abundance of  knowledge-based jobs, which are magnets for the college-educated; where minorities are a majority share of the total population; and in areas with a decimated manufacturing base, which makes it harder for men with less education to earn a decent wage.

In contrast, in areas with one dominant industry, as in some small towns, or in areas with male-dominated industries, men still outearn women. So areas in Louisiana dependent on oil rigs, or in places like Bellevue, Washington, home of Microsoft, men’s earnings are higher than women’s. However, in cities or towns heavy on blue-collar work, both men and women lost ground on wages, although men lost more ground. Here’s a chart for male-female earnings ratios by metro area.

This brings up another possibility in explaining part of the gender gap: Perhaps the significant decline in the earnings of men with lower skills and less education has been far greater than the gains of women, thus widening the gap–in a dispiriting hollowing out of the middle.

One also wonders how permanent the trend is. After all, only women who are in their 20s, still single and childless, are outearning men. This is a very small slice of the labor force.

“It will be interesting to see what happens over the next decade,” Cancian and Reed emailed. “Women in their thirties and forties tend to earn less than men, in large part because women are more likely to take time off to raise children and to take lower-paying, more flexible career paths for family reasons.

“Men still out-earn women with similar levels of education. This means that in couples with two college-educated parents, for example, it will still generally cost the family less if mothers are the ones to take time off.”

But, who knows what the future will bring. As the two also note, with young women now more educated and earning more than young men, big changes in work and family my be afoot.

To read more, see coverage in Time Magazine, Wall Street Journal, and Salon.

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