A study on “When Marriage Disappears: The Retreat from Marriage in Middle America” was published Monday by the National Marriage Project at the University of Virginia and the Center for Marriage and Families at the Institute for American Values. W. Bradford Wilcox, director of the project, talks to National Review Online’s Kathryn Jean Lopez about what the study says, what it means, and what we should and can do about the retreat.
KATHRYN JEAN LOPEZ: Why are “moderately educated” Americans abandoning marriage?
W. BRADFORD WILCOX: Moderately educated Americans (Americans with a high-school degree but no four-year college degree — 58 percent of the adult population today) have traditionally constituted the backbone of the American family. Until recently, these middle Americans were more likely to get married, to value marriage, and to be involved in institutions such as churches and other civic organizations that lent direction and stability to their marriages.
No more. In the last three decades, nonmarital childbearing, divorce, low-quality marriages, and family instability have all been on the rise in middle-American homes. For instance, nonmarital childbearing among women with high-school degrees more than tripled in the last three decades — from 13 percent in 1982 to 44 percent in 2006–2008.
Why? Over this same period, the cultural, civic, and economic foundations of marriage in middle America have been eroding. Middle Americans are markedly less likely to attend church, to embrace what I call a marriage mindset, and to hold down stable, decent-paying jobs than they were 40 or 50 years ago. And “When Marriage Disappears” finds that all of these trends help to account for the retreat from marriage among middle Americans.
LOPEZ: How is this affecting their lives?
WILCOX: Among adults in middle America, family breakdown inhibits the accumulation of assets, increases stress and depression, and raises the mortality rate — especially among men. So, the health, wealth, and happiness of middle Americans is taking a serious hit.
Among children in middle America, family breakdown typically doubles delinquency, drug use, psychological problems, and teenage pregnancy. Children who grow up without two married parents are also significantly less likely to do well in school, to graduate from college, and to hold down a steady job later in life.
Thus, the retreat from marriage in middle America is taking a marked toll on millions of adults and children around the nation.
LOPEZ: How is this affecting American life?
WILCOX: We are now witnessing the emergence of a “separate and unequal” marriage regime in American life, where highly educated and more affluent Americans are enjoying comparatively stable, high-quality marriages at the same time that middle Americans, as well as Americans in poor communities, are seeing their marital fortunes fall. This leaves middle Americans doubly disadvantaged — they have fewer material resources and weaker families, compared with their highly educated peers.
As importantly, we are witnessing the emergence of a whole new class of communities — especially in rural and small-town America, and the outer suburbs — where scores of children and young men are growing up apart from the civilizing power of marriage and a stable family life. (Think of Levi Johnston, minus the access to the money his temporary fame has brought him). This does not bode well for the economic and social health of these communities.
LOPEZ: Why is marriage stable and strong, according to your report, among highly educated and affluent Americans?
WILCOX: The one place marriage is not suffering is in the precincts of highly educated and affluent America (college-educated adults make up 30 percent of the adult population), where the quality and stability of marriage has improved since the tumult of the 1970s. Take divorce. Over the last three decades, the divorce rate in the first ten years of marriage fell from 15 percent to 11 percent among Americans with a college degree. (It rose from 36 to 37 percent among moderately educated Americans over this same period.) This means that college-educated Americans are much less likely to divorce than their less-educated peers, and their risk of divorce appears to be continuing to decline.
Marriage is comparatively strong among highly educated Americans for four reasons. First, they have access to better-paying and more stable work than their less-educated peers. This is important because marriage still depends on money — especially the financial success and stable employment of men.
Second, highly educated Americans are more likely to hold the bourgeois virtues – self-control, a high regard for education, and a long-term orientation — that are crucial to maintaining a marriage in today’s cultural climate.
Third, highly educated Americans are now more likely to attend church or to be engaged in a meaningful civic organization than their less educated peers. This type of civic engagement is important because being connected to communities of memory and mutual aid increases men and women’s odds of getting and staying married.
Finally, highly educated Americans are increasingly prone to adopt a marriage mindset — marked, for instance, by an aversion to divorce and nonmarital pregnancy, and a willingness to stick it out in a marriage — that generally serves them well through the ups and downs of married life. They recognize that they and their children are more likely to thrive — and to succeed in life — if they get and stay married.
So, we are witnessing a striking reversal in American life where highly educated Americans are more likely to be connected to the religious and moral sources of a strong marriage culture than their fellow citizens from middle America.
LOPEZ: Do public debates about marriage address what’s going on in the institution itself, in the lives of Americans?
WILCOX: Our public debate has focused for much of the last decade on same-sex marriage. As a consequence, the growing retreat from marriage in middle America has largely been overlooked.
Indeed, the biggest marriage story among ordinary Americans is that cohabitation is mounting a major challenge to marriage as the preferred site for childbearing and co-residence in Middle America (as well as in many poor communities). This is disturbing because children and cohabitation do not mix. Children born to cohabiting parents are at least twice as likely to see their parents break up before they turn five, and they are much more likely to suffer educational and emotional problems, compared to children born into married homes. Finally, children in cohabiting households are at least three times more likely to be physically, sexually, or emotionally abused than children in intact, married families. And yet scholars estimate that more than 40 percent of American children will spend some time as the wards of cohabiting adults (one of whom is often unrelated).
Unfortunately, the growing challenge that cohabitation poses to the nation’s children has largely been ignored — on both the left and the right.
LOPEZ: “Divorce is high, nonmarital childbearing is spreading, and marital bliss is in increasingly short supply.” Is that last quote part of the problem? That Americans have an overly romanticized view of marriage?
WILCOX: Yes. “When Marriage Disappears” points out that a “soul mate” model of marriage has overtaken an “institutional” model of marriage in the minds of many Americans. What I mean by that is that more and more Americans think that marriage is about an intense and fulfilling couple-focused relationship that, by the way, is made possible by a comfortable and secure income.
More and more Americans have jettisoned the older, institutional view that marriage is also about raising a family together, offering mutual aid to one another in tough times, and becoming engaged in larger networks of kin and community.
The problem with the soul-mate model is that romance is an unreliable servant of marital stability. In most marriages, the emotional and sexual intensity of the couple relationship waxes and wanes. So, couples who hold a soul-mate view of marriage are more likely to be disappointed and, consequently, to head for divorce court.
Moreover, because Middle Americans are facing more financial instability than their highly educated peers, they are less likely to enjoy the strong financial base that today’s soul-mate model depends upon. It’s hard to establish and maintain an intense, fulfilling relationship when you’re struggling to pay the rent or hold down a steady job. So middle Americans are tempted to just forgo marriage.
LOPEZ: What’s wrong with a “laissez-faire approach to sex and parenthood”?
WILCOX: One of the reasons that we’re seeing a wholesale retreat from marriage in middle America is that a majority of Americans do not believe that sex needs to be connected to marriage and a growing minority of Americans do not think that parenthood needs to be connected to marriage. And they act accordingly. Indeed, my statistical models indicate that shifts in sexual norms play an important role in explaining the growing marriage gap in American life.
But what is fascinating here is that highly educated Americans — and their kids — have responded to our laissez-faire cultural approach to sex and parenthood by erecting a new ethic of sexual responsibility that encompasses delaying teen sex and using contraception consistently among older teens and young adults. For instance, 76 percent of teens from highly educated homes indicate they would be embarrassed by a pregnancy, compared to 61 percent of teens from moderately educated homes and 48 percent of teens from the least educated homes. And, as a consequence, sexually active teens and young adults from highly educated homes are markedly more likely to use contraception consistently than their peers from less-educated homes.
So, highly educated Americans have been able to establish new guardrails around sex and parenthood — at least for now — but less-educated Americans have not succeeded in following suit.
LOPEZ: What surprised you most about your findings in this study?
WILCOX: The most surprising finding in my study is that in some important respects highly educated and affluent Americans are now more likely to embrace a marriage mindset than are less-affluent Americans.
LOPEZ: What worries you most about marriage in America?
WILCOX: I’m worried that we’re moving in the direction of an old-style Latin model of social life, where the elite enjoys money, power, and stable families — and everyone else faces high levels of economic and familial instability. This cannot be good for the American experiment in democracy, which has always been predicated on a stable, secure, and prosperous middle class.
LOPEZ: What encourages you most about marriage in America?
WILCOX: That college-educated Americans seem to be coming around on marriage — at least for their own. “When Marriage Disappears” notes, for instance, that college-educated Americans have become more averse to divorce in recent years. Now we just need to convince our educational elite to pass their hard-won wisdom on to the larger society.
LOPEZ: Time magazine recently asked, “Who Needs Marriage?” What’s ultimately the answer?
WILCOX: In a word, children. Marriage is the original Department of Health and Human Services for our children, insofar as it is designed to provide children with access to the financial, social, and emotional support that they need from both of their parents. When marriage breaks down, children are hit hardest.
So, for the sake of children in middle America — not to mention the children in poor and affluent communities — we need to shore up the economic, cultural, and civic foundations of marriage in America. This means improving the employment prospects of middle-American men, reconnecting marriage and parenthood in the public imagination, and encouraging our nation’s religious and secular civic organizations to reach out to Americans from less-privileged backgrounds.
It also means that highly educated Americans need to put their privilege in service of the public good by doing a better job of extending their marriage mindset to the rest of America. To wit, they need to stress the value of marriage in our nation’s companies, schools, social-service agencies, hospitals, religious institutions, and, especially, popular culture.
The alternative is a nation where a prosperous elite enjoys stable and happy families and everyone else is consigned to increasingly unstable, unhappy, and unworkable families.
— Kathryn Jean Lopez is an editor-at-large of National Review Online.