Science tells us why the family is dying

Larry Kummer, Editor

8 years ago

Summary: The family is dying. Scientists tell us the bad news, but we don’t listen. This is one of the most important stories of our time.

The family is one of America’s foundational institutions. It is dying in America. Slowly, incrementally, generation by generation. We see it but rationalize. Divorce is good for the children. Cohabitation is the best path to marriage. Cohabitation is as good as marriage. Children are adaptable, and can withstand instability at home. Scientists tell us what’s happening. But we’re not interested in hearing. Let’s take a quick look at some.

Background: the key to the success of marriage

The reward for marriage was patriarchy. In a patriarchal system, a good wife was wonderful. She provided a boost to a man’s ego, an aid to his career, a wonderful home. The family defined his existence and gave meaning to his life.

Even with that reward women still had to entice men to join the rat race. Women dressed to attract the “male gaze” (stockings and pantyhose, skirts and dresses, makeup and nice hair). They deferred to men, pretending that men had “headship” in the home. From an early age, they learned how to understand and manage men – preparing for courtship and marriage.

Women have the right to be whatever they choose to be. Just as men have the right to marry or not, as fits their needs. Flashing forward to today, life in America has changed.

How women have changed.

Before discussing the causes and effects of changes, we need to understand what has changed. The numbers are out there, although often too radical for dispassionate analysis.

Sandra L. Bem created the Bem Sex-Role Inventory in 1974. It provides a consistent benchmark to measure the gender traits of American college students. In the four decades since (1974–2012) the masculine trait scores for women increased significantly from 1974 to 1994, then remained stable from 1994 to 2012. Women’s androgyny scores followed the same pattern: they increased from 1974 to 1994, then remained stable. Women’s femininity scores did not change, nor did men’s scores for masculinity, femininity, or androgyny. {Per a paper by Kristin Donnelly and Jean M. Twenge in Sex Roles, May 2017.}

Why women divorce so often.

Another example of seldom discussed changes, see “‘These boots are made for walking’: why most divorce filers are women” by Margaret F. Brinig and Douglas W. Allen in American Law and Economics Review, January 2000. Gated. The numbers in the paper are interesting. The analysis is largely story-telling driven by ideology.

“Because of the financial and social hardship faced after divorce, most people assume that generally husbands have instigated divorce since the introduction of no-fault divorce. Yet women file for divorce and are often the instigators of separation, despite a deep attachment to their children and the evidence that many divorces harm children. Furthermore, divorced women in large numbers reveal that they are happier than they were while married. They report relief and certainty that they were right in leaving their marriages.

“This fundamental puzzle suggests that the incentives to divorce require a reexamination, and that the forces affecting the net benefits from marriage may be quite complicated, and perhaps asymmetric between men and women. This paper considers women’s filing as rational behavior, based on spouses’ relative power in the marriage, their opportunities following divorce, and their anticipation of custody.”

The author’s conclusion is a revelation of the blindingly obvious: “Our results are consistent with our hypothesis that the filing behavior is driven by self-interest at the time of divorce.”

Now for the bad news

The family is the central ring of the 21st Century American circus. For an introduction to its evolution, read the Fall 2015 special issue of The Future of Children about “Marriage and Child Wellbeing Revisited”. Lots of news. It is all dark.

The introduction by Sara McLanahan and Isabel Sawhill.

“Men and women of the youngest generation are either marrying in their late twenties or not marrying at all. Childbearing has also been postponed, but not as much as marriage. The result is that a growing proportion of children are born to unmarried parents – roughly 40% in recent years, and over 50% for children born to women under 30.

“Many unmarried parents are cohabiting when their child is born. Indeed, almost all of the increase in nonmarital childbearing during the past two decades has occurred to cohabiting rather than single mothers. But cohabiting unions are very unstable, leading us to use the term “fragile families” to describe them. About half of couples who are cohabiting at their child’s birth will split by the time the child is five. Many of these young parents will go on to form new relationships and to have additional children with new partners. The consequences of this instability for children are not good. Research increasingly shows that family instability undermines parents’ investments in their children, affecting the children’s cognitive and social-emotional development in ways that constrain their life chances.

“With these trends as background, the Future of Children first addressed the issue of marriage and its effects on children a decade ago, in 2005. Then, we found that children raised in single-parent families didn’t fare as well as those raised in two- parent families, that the rise of single parenthood was contributing to higher rates of poverty …”

“Why marriage matters” by David Ribar.

“Marriage between two parents, compared with other family living arrangements, appears, on average, to enhance children’s wellbeing and development. Some of the positive association between marriage and children’s wellbeing comes from positive associations between marriage and other things that also contribute to children’s wellbeing. …

“Digging more deeply, he then examines specific mechanisms through which marriage may operate to improve children’s lives. …Yet studies of child wellbeing that control for the indirect effects of these mechanisms typically find that direct positive associations remain between children’s wellbeing and marriage, strongly suggesting that marriage is more than the sum of these particular parts. Thus, Ribar argues, the advantages of marriage for children’s wellbeing are likely to be hard to replicate through policy interventions other than those that bolster marriage itself.”

“The Evolving Role of Marriage: 1950-2010” by Shelly Lundberg and Robert A. Pollak.

“Since 1950, marriage behavior in the United States has changed dramatically. Though most men and women still marry at some point in their lives, they now do so later and are more likely to divorce. Cohabitation has become commonplace as either a precursor or an alternative to marriage, and a growing fraction of births take place outside marriage. We’ve seen a retreat from marriage within all racial and ethnic groups and across the socioeconomic spectrum.

“Lundberg and Pollak argue that the sources of gains from marriage have changed in such a way that families with high incomes and high levels of education have the greatest incentives to maintain long-term relationships. As women’s educational attainment has overtaken that of men, and as the ratio of men’s to women’s wages has fallen, they write, traditional patterns of gender specialization in household and market work have weakened. The primary source of gains from marriage has shifted from production of household services to investment in children. For couples whose resources allow them to invest intensively in their children, marriage provides a commitment mechanism that supports such investment.

“For couples who lack the resources to invest intensively in their children, on the other hand, marriage may not be worth the cost of limited independence and potential mismatch.”

“Cohabitation and Child Wellbeing” by Wendy D. Manning.

“In recent decades cohabitation has become a central part of the family landscape in the United States – so much so that by age 12, 40% of American children will have spent at least part of their lives in a cohabiting household. Although many children are born to cohabiting parents, and cohabiting families come in other forms as well, the most common cohabiting arrangement is a biological mother and a male partner.

“Cohabitation is associated with several factors that have the potential to reduce children’s wellbeing. Cohabiting families are more likely than married families to be poor, and poverty harms children in many ways. Cohabiting parents also tend to have less formal education – a key indicator of both economic and social resources – than married parents do. And cohabiting parent families don’t have the same legal protections that married parent families have.

“Most importantly, cohabitation is often a marker of family instability, and family instability is strongly associated with poorer outcomes for children. Children born to cohabiting parents see their parents break up more often than do children born to married parents. In this way, being born into a cohabiting family sets the stage for later instability, and children who are born to cohabiting parents appear to experience enduring deficits of psychosocial wellbeing. …

“Turning to stepfamilies, cohabitation’s effects are tied to a child’s age. Among young children, living in a cohabiting stepfamily rather than a married stepfamily is associated with more negative indicators of child wellbeing, but this is not so among adolescents. Thus the link between parental cohabitation and child wellbeing depends on both the type of cohabiting parent family and the age of the child.”

Trust us! You’ll love the new family we’re creating.

Destroying a system that worked so well for so long

Marriage has been an institution in flux for centuries, but the rate of change accelerated after California Governor Ronald Reagan signed the revolutionary Family Law Act of 1969, retroactively abolishing the “traditional” binding contract of marriage and replacing it with no-fault divorce. The feminist revolutions which followed forced further changes in marriage. Few experts predicted the result: a large fraction of women valued their independence more than their husbands. This is the truth too dark to say. However their sincerity when they look into a man’s eyes and say “till death do us part”, over a third of them will later decide to dump him.

Women have learned to play Girls’ Game (men’s Game is a pale imitation, successfully used by few). Marry, have kids (with a husband helping raise them during those early difficult years), divorce after they’re in school, and collect child support. This gets the children she wants without the bother of having a husband (after some years of marriage). The resulting high divorce rate – roughly 50% – with roughly 70%+ initiated by wives, makes marriage a risky proposition for men.

The numbers tell the tale. In 2005/06 less 60% of US adolescents (11, 13, and 15 years old) lived with both birth parents, per the OCED Family Database (source). That was the lowest level among OECD nations. That number is probably lower today. The numbers are worse among the poor and some minorities.

This is America’s new hybrid family system. Its pillars are easy no-fault divorce and and the government’s child support system. The government aggressively collects child support from fathers, and supports the children when the father cannot (or does not). It is a subsidy for divorce. In Economics 101 we learn that if we subsidize something, we get more of it.

The family system-that-once-was did not die. We killed it.

Conclusions

“If we want things to stay as they are, things will have to change.”
— Don Fabrizio in The Leopard by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa (the top-selling novel in Italian history), and a 1963 film with Burt Lancaster.

These trends are not irresistible. No future is inevitable. But maintaining a functioning society requires that we work at it, not let it drift like a paper boat in a stream. But first we must clearly see what is happening, and then decide what we want America to be.

Dalrock’s insights about marriage

He is a married man living with his wife and two kids in the Dallas/Fort Worth area. He wants to know how the post feminist world impacts himself and his family. He explores these issues and produces powerful insights. Dark insights. See some of his posts about marriage.

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Books about the post-marriage world

The classic about this subject: Men and Marriage by George Gilder (1986).

A look at men’s response to the feminist reforms of marriage: Men on Strike: Why Men Are Boycotting Marriage, Fatherhood, and the American Dream – and Why It Matters by Dr. Helen Smith (2013).