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.
