The Uneven Retreat from Marriage

Over the past 50 years, demographic trends in marriage, divorce, and cohabitation have drastically changed in the United States. A new paper by Shelly Lundberg, Robert Pollak, and Jenna Stearns provides insight into these demographic shifts and the impact they may have on family structures in American society. In the United States, people appear to be getting married less and cohabitating more, and this trend is even more pronounced among people with lower socioeconomic status. Lundberg et al. show that women with less education are more likely to cohabitate, rather than marry, and have children while cohabitating. The authors suggest that this socioeconomic difference in trends may contribute to family inequality and have important implications for children.

Early economic models of marriage emphasized the fact that such a lifetime contract generated gains for both parties involved, especially in areas such as housing and child rearing. These models contemplated the traditional stereotypes of the roles of men and women in marriage. Men would contribute with labor and income, while women would be responsible for childbearing and specialize in housework. Since the 1960s, the United States has seen a sharp decline in the popularity and stability of marital unions. The authors suggest that this may be caused by both the reduction in benefits associated with marriage because of a decrease in gender-based specialization and changes in employment opportunities for women. Higher wages and better economic opportunities for women also resulted in an increase in the opportunity costs of raising children, which may have triggered the decline in birth rates between the 1960s and 1980s.

For modern couples, the benefits of marriage and cohabitation are no longer based on the division of labor between household and work, but instead are founded on the shared consumption of domestic public goods and enjoyment of spare time. As living together becomes an acceptable alternative to marriage, it complicates the decision to get married, since marriage has considerably higher dissolution costs than cohabitation in economic, social, and psychological terms. Divorce appears to be much more distressing than cohabitation dissolution, and regulations regarding child support and custody have changed enough that there is virtually no difference between how child support issues are handled after a divorce and after a cohabitation breakup. Because of the high exit costs of marriage, Lundberg et al. argue that marriage has been transformed into a commitment mechanism that encourages cooperation between partners.

The authors observe that there has been a rise in both childbearing outside of marriage and marital instability in the population in general, but this increase is particularly high in populations with lower educational attainment. College graduates tend to follow more traditional models of post-marital childbearing and exhibit greater marital stability. This divergence in partnering among socioeconomic groups is concurrent with a divergence in investment in children, understood as the time spent in childcare and expenditures on children. Studies show that there is a strong and consistent correlation between family indicators, such as how many years a child spends with an unpartnered parent or the number of changes in his or her family structure, as well as children’s outcomes in educational attainment, engagement in crime, and mental health issues. As couples choose to marry less and less, and cohabitation becomes more common, family instability increases, thereby imposing a greater burden on childbearing women, especially those without college degrees.

The changing trends in American family structure show a higher age for first marriages and, consequently, a rise in cohabitation, which is particularly high among couples with lower educational attainment. This divergence in partnering and parenting choices among different socioeconomic groups signals that children of less educated parents are more likely to experience changes in family structure. This inequality on the level of stability among families matches the income inequality of the households. Now, the job of policymakers is to understand how to help less educated couples reduce the instability in their family arrangements for the sake of their children.

Article Source: Lundberg, Shelly, Robert A. Pollak, and Jenna E. Stearns, “Family Inequality: Diverging Patterns in Marriage, Cohabitation, and Childbearing,” The National Bureau of Economic Research. No. 22078 (2016).

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