For background, click headlines below to read previous articles:
44% of 'Middle America' Births are Out of Wedlock
More Women Shack Up & Give Birth; Marriage Rare
Young Adults Rarely Marry, Seniors Divorce Often
Fewer Get Married, but Stay Married: Census
Demise of Family Counters Upward Mobility: Harvard Study
Violence & Poverty due to Absence of Intact Family
ObamaNation: Perpetual Poor Barred from Marriage
UPDATE 7/29/14: Marriage Rates Low Among Millennial Generation
UPDATE 12/3/14: Divorce Rates Drop, as well as Marriage Rates
-- From "Non-College Graduates Do Not Wait Until Marriage to Have Children, Study" by Stephen Adkins, UniversityHerald Reporter 6/17/14
"Clearly the role of marriage in fertility and family formation is now modest in early adulthood and the lofty place that marriage once held among the markers of adulthood is in serious question," sociologist Andrew J. Cherlin said in a press release.
The researchers found that 81 percent of births reported by women and 87 percent of births reported by men had occurred to non-college graduates. Overall, 57 percent of births had occurred outside wedlock for both men and women. Plus, 64 percent of women and 63 percent of men had at least one child outside of marriage. It was 74 percent among women and 70 percent among men without 4-year college degrees.
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From "More Millennial Mothers Are Single Than Married" by Belinda Luscombe, Time Magazine 6/17/14
Motherhood is beginning to show the fissures along income and education lines that have already appeared in other aspects of U.S. society, with a small cluster of wealthy well educated people at one end (married with kids), a large cluster of struggling people at the other (kids, not married) and a thinning middle. While many children raised by single parents are fine, the advantages of a two parent family have been quite exhaustively documented. Some of these advantages can be tied to financial resources, but not all.
Among people with kids between the ages of 26 to 31 who didn’t graduate from college, 74% of the moms and 70% of the dads had at least one of those kids while single, Cherlin found.
The study points out that unmarried couples have a high break up rate in the first few stressful years after the birth of a child and that this often leads to what’s called “multi-partner fertility” in the academy and “a lot of different baby mamas” in the rest of the world. This kind of family instability, with step-siblings and half siblings and a lot of fleeting parental figures can be tough on both finances and on kids and leads to the calcification of social inequality “The sharp differentiation by education in the transition to adulthood,” says the study, “is another indicator that American society is moving toward two different patterns of family formation and two diverging destinies for children.”
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From "The Luxury of Waiting for Marriage to Have Kids" by Olga Khazan, The Atlantic 6/17/14
. . . the cornerstone theory of marriage no longer applies. Culturally, young adults of all social classes and income levels are less likely to think of marriage as the “cornerstone” of their lives—that is, the first thing they do as adults.
. . . marriage is increasingly something only educated people do. . . . College-educated people are increasingly only marrying other college-educated people, and they’re more likely to get married overall. One reason less-educated women are having children out of wedlock is that college-educated men are not interested in marrying them.
Unlike in Western Europe, where couples cohabit for years and sometimes decades, often with kids, less-educated Americans tend to rotate in and out of cohabiting relationships as the years wear on. They have children with multiple different partners, creating complex webs of child obligations, step-parents, and half-siblings.
For the study, researchers examined the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, which interviewed 9,000 young people born between 1981 and 1998 annually from 1997 to 2011.
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From "Most Millennial moms who skip college also skip marriage, data shows" by Jill Rosen, John Hopkins University 6/16/14
The study is detailed in "Changing Fertility Regimes and the Transition to Adulthood: Evidence from a Recent Cohort," a paper by Cherlin, Elizabeth Talbert, and Suzumi Yasutake recently presented to the Population Association of America.
Of mothers with four or more years of college, 32 percent had at least one baby while unmarried. Of mothers with one to three years of college, 67 percent had at least one baby while unmarried. Of mothers with a high school diploma, 71 percent had at least one baby while unmarried. Lastly, among mothers with no high school diploma, 87 percent had at least one baby while unmarried.
Only 36 percent of the mothers had all of their babies while married —that's 46 percent of whites, 10 percent of blacks and 28 percent of Hispanics. Those numbers are roughly the same for men.
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From "Millennials in Adulthood" posted at Pew Research 3/7/14
The median age at first marriage is now the highest in modern history—29 for men and 27 for women. In contrast to the patterns of the past, when adults in all socio-economic groups married at roughly the same rate, marriage today is more prevalent among those with higher incomes and more education.
Perhaps because of their slow journey to marriage, Millennials lead all generations in the share of out-of-wedlock births. In 2012, 47% of births to women in the Millennial generation were non-marital, compared with 21% among older women. Some of this gap reflects a lifecycle effect—older women have always been less likely to give birth outside of marriage. But the gap is also driven by a shift in behaviors in recent decades. In 1996, when Gen Xers were about the same age that Millennials were in 2012, just 35% of births to that generation’s mothers were outside of marriage (compared with 15% among older women in 1996).12
Millennials join their elders in disapproving of this trend. About six-in-ten adults in all four generations say that more children being raised by a single parent is bad for society; this is the most negative evaluation by the public of any of the changes in family structure tested in the Pew Research survey.
To read the entire article above, CLICK HERE.
Also read Utopian Dream Shattered by Reality of Birth Rate as well as American Trend: Fewer Children, More Animals/Pets
