Marriage decline: Is the end of the 30-year 'family policy war' in sight?
Noted sociologist Andrew J. Cherlin thinks conservatives and liberals may finally agree they've both been right and wrong about what's driving the decline in U.S. marriages. At stake is stability and the future for children.
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Noted sociologist Andrew J. Cherlin thinks conservatives and liberals may finally agree that they've both been right and wrong when it comes to what's driving the decline in marriage. At stake is family stability and how well American children thrive.
Cherlin, director of Johns Hopkins University's Hopkins Population Center and author of the just-released "Labor's Love Lost: The Rise and Fall of the Working-Class Family in America," says most experts agree college graduates are much more likely to marry than those with less education.
The well-educated are securing jobs that make it possible to support a family, while those with less education struggle to make a livable wage and forge stable family lives. Instead of marrying, the less-educated cohabitate at much higher rates. Meanwhile, for better-educated parents, babies generally arrive after marriage, while less-educated parents often have babies outside of wedlock.
The theory of cause and effect, though, has been hotly contested, a discussion played out regularly in the national press and at academic roundtables because the stakes are very high.
New York Times Upshot editor David Leonhardt captured the core of the contention last week when he wrote that "one of today's most intriguing social-science debates is whether changes in family structure have helped cause the rise in economic inequality or are merely an effect of that rising inequality."
Leonhardt noted the conservative tendency to see "family structure as a cause and inequality as an effect." Liberals have usually viewed income and social inequality as driving the change to family structure.
As a new report from the Center for American Progress notes, fewer than half of American children will grow up living with their two biological parents, and fewer still with married biological parents.
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Marriage decline: Is the end of the 30-year 'family policy war' in sight?