THE EMERGENCE OF THE NOT-SO-NUCLEAR FAMILY: A STUDY OF MODERN AMERICAN MATRIMONY AND FAMILY STRUCTURE

ISABEL R. ARNOLD
PROFESSOR HENRY
SO 326: FAMILY IN CONTEMPORARY SOCIETY
MAY 2014
ABSTRACT

American matrimony has experienced radical shifts within the last decade due to social and economic transformations. Rather than argue that marriage is dying, this study addresses marriage as a metamorphic dynamic promoted by various factors unique to this modern age. These shifts affecting marriage dynamics end up affecting the children as well, thus altering the family dynamic. The notion of marriage is a cultural ideal that is promoted here in the United States, but this notion has become a political and social battlefield. In this study, I argue that different patterns of childrearing are the key to understanding class differences in marriage and parenthood, not an unintended by-product of it. Marriage is the commitment mechanism that supports high levels of investment in children and is hence more valuable for parents adopting a high-investment strategy for their children.

INTRODUCTION
Since the 1950s, the sources of the gains from marriage have changed radically. As the educational attainment of women overtook and surpassed that of men and the ratio of men 's to women 's wage rates fell, traditional patterns of gender specialization and division in work weakened. The primary source of the gains to marriage shifted from the production of household services and commodities to investment in children. For some, these changes meant that marriage was no longer worth the costs of limited independence and potential mismatch. In 1960, more than 70 percent of all adults were married; half a century later, just 20 percent of 18-29-year olds were married in 2010 (Amato, Passel, Wang & Livingston, 2011). Marriage was the norm for young America – now it 's the exception. Marriage is undergoing a metamorphosis, prompted by a transformation in the economic and social status of women and the virtual disappearance of low-skilled male jobs. The old form of marriage, based on antiquated social codes and gender roles, is disappearing. A new version is emerging—this version is egalitarian, committed, and focused on children. There was a time when college-educated women were the least likely to be married. Today, they are the most important drivers of the new marriage model. Unlike their European counterparts, increasingly ambivalent about marriage, college graduates in the United States are reinventing marriage as a child-rearing machine for a post-feminist society and a knowledge economy (Murray, 2013). It’s working, too: their marriages offer more satisfaction, last longer, and produce more successful children. The glue for these marriages is not sex, religion, or money, but a joint commitment to high-investment parenting (HIP) marriages. Right now, these marriages are concentrated at the top of the social ladder, but they offer the most promising hope for saving the institution of marriage in America.

FINDINGS

Matrimony is thriving among the wealthy, but dissipating among the poor – creating a marriage gap. Today, educated women are more likely to marry in their early 40s than high-school dropouts (Amato, Passel, Wang, & Livingston, 2011). In 2007, American marriage trends reached a crucial benchmark – this was the first year that rates of marriage by age 30 were higher for college graduates than non-graduates. Young professionals, both men and women are now more likely to delay marriage as they focus on their careers or furthering their education, yet these individuals are the main purveyors of the new model of marriage we see today. Marriage today is difficult to analyze because it has multiple structures. The legalization of same sex marriages, divorce and remarriage, cohabitation, step families and even delayed childbearing renders the typical monolithic institution almost obsolete. Even among these mixed marital shapes, three models can be identified: traditional marriage, romantic marriages and high investment parenting “HIP” marriages, each motivated by different key elements. Figure 1 addresses these models.
I. TRADITIONAL MARRAIGES: Reverence for Marriage as an Institution

This marriage structure is slowly becoming obsolete with the promotion of feminism and the shift to a service based economy. These marriages are divided by gender roles and are often underpinned by religion, duty and the high respect for the notion of marriage as an institution. The father is typically the breadwinner, as the mom focuses attention on household chores and tending the children. Preserving this marriage model would mean reversing attitudes about sex, feminism, and labor market economies. The rise of feminism has made the solo-breadwinning male effectively redundant. The expanded opportunities for women’s education and work have allowed women to establish themselves as financial contributors. 40% of the household breadwinners in America today are women, and for every three male college graduates, there are four women (Amato, Passel, Wang, & Livingston, 2011). However, a class gap exists in regards attitudes on the fading importance of gender roles within marriage. The attitudes toward gender roles are taking the longest to evolve among those with the lowest education. Figure II demonstrates this gap.
The irony of this data shows how those who are more likely to disprove of female breadwinners would benefit the most by dual-earner households. The men who want to be breadwinners are very often the ones least able to fill that role. This marriage model was founded on the bases of providing sexual fulfillment, personal happiness and financial security, but these factors are being undermined on all sides. Most Americans today agree that marriage is not necessary to obtain these factors. Marriage is an important goal for most Americans, although it may not be their top priority. Having a successful marriage is “one of the most important things” in life for 36% of adults, according to a 2011 Pew Research survey. An additional 48% said it is “very important but not the most” important. Being a good parent was seen as “one of the most important things” by a larger share of adults (53%). Men and women overall do not answer differently in rating the priority of a successful marriage to them, but there are differences among young adults, ages 18 to 34. About four-in-ten young women say that having a successful marriage is “one of the most important things” in their life, compared with about three-in-ten young men who say so. But in other realms of life asked about in the 2010 Pew Research survey, most people do not think either married or single people have an easier time of it. In fact, about half or more think there is no difference between being married or single in the ease of having a fulfilling sex life, being financially secure, finding happiness, getting ahead in a career or having social status.
II. ROMANTIC MARRIAGES: Cohabitation with a Cake

Romantic marriages are driven by the desire to find love, promoted by a figment of our Hollywood fueled imaginations, and sub-optimal for children. Spousal love drives these relationships and allows individuals to achieve self-actualization by having such an intimate relationship with the ritual and celebration that comes with marriage. These are the marriages most are referring to when talking about the ‘deinstitutionalization’ of marriage. After studying relationships in poor Philadelphia neighborhoods, Kathryn Edin and Maria Kefalas concluded that “marriage is a form of social bragging about the quality of the couple relationship, a powerfully symbolic way of elevating one’s relationship above others in a community, particularly in a community where marriage is rare” (2005). More recently, Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers have suggested that the family has shifted from being “a forum for shared production, to shared consumption.” As a consequence, marriage has become a “hedonic” relationship that is “somewhat less child-centric that it once was” (2008). While these marriages are ideal for the couple, they are not ideal for raising children. The focus of these marriages is on the relationship between spouse and spouse, not parent and children. The sexiness and passion of these marriages are dampened by the heavy involvement, labor and repetition that come with parenting. Even when divorced parents re-marry, the negative effects on children can be detected, perhaps because the necessary investment in a new relationship “crowds out” investment in the children. (Half of the parents unmarried at the birth of their child are in a new relationship by the time they start kindergarten.) These parents are engaged in the intense emotional work of building a new adult relationship, at a time when their children may need them the most. It is hard to have sleepless nights with a new lover when you are having sleepless nights as a new mother.

III. HIP MARRIAGES: Future of Marriage in America
Married, well-educated parents are pouring time, money and energy into raising their children. This is a group for whom parenting has become virtually a profession. When it comes to the most basic measure of parenting investment—time spent with children—a large class gap has emerged. In the 1970s, college-educated and non-educated families spent roughly equal amounts of time with their children (Cohen, 2013). But in the last 40 years, college-grad couples have opened up a wide lead, as work by Harvard’s Robert Putnam shows. Dads with college degrees spend twice as much time with their children as the least-educated fathers. Although college graduates tend to be a reliably liberal voting bloc, their attitudes toward parenting are actually quite conservative. 40% of college grads agree that “divorce should be harder to obtain than it is now” which is a slight increase since the 1970s (Cohen, 2013). Although it is difficult to pinpoint why, this is likely connected to the accumulating evidence that single parenthood provides a steep challenge to parenting. Engaged, committed parenting is hugely important. Simply engaging with and talking to children has strong effects on their learning; reading bedtime stories accelerates literacy skill acquisition; encouraging physical activity and feeding them balanced meals keeps them healthy, strong and alert. Marriage is becoming, in the words of Shelly Lundberg and Robert Pollak, a "co-parenting contract" or "commitment device" for raising children:
"The practical significance of marriage as a contract that supports the traditional gendered division of labor has certainly decreased: our argument is that, for college-educated men and women, marriage retains its practical significance as a commitment device that supports high-levels of parental investment in children." Scholarly disputes over whether marriage causes or merely signals better parenting miss the point. As a commitment device, HIP marriages do not cause parental investments—but they do appear to facilitate them. Forthcoming work from Brookings suggests that stronger parenting is the biggest factor explaining the better outcomes of children raised by married parents” (2013) The HIP model of marriage is built on a strong, traditional commitment to raising children as a couple. But in respect, it differs sharply from the traditional model. Most importantly, the wife is not economically dependent on the husband. HIP wives have a good education, an established career, and high earning potential. We cannot understand modern marriage unless we grasp this central fact: The women getting, and staying, married are the most economically independent women in the history of the nation (Mseka, 2013). Independence, rather than dependence, underpins the new marriage. Affluent couples may decide that for a period, one parent will devote more of their time to parenting than to career, especially when the children are young. If the mother takes some time out, these marriages masquerade, briefly, as traditional ones: a breadwinning father, a home-making mother, and a stable marriage. But HIP marriages are actually recasting family responsibilities, with couples sharing the roles of both child-raiser and moneymaker. There will be lots of juggling, trading and negotiating. Since the 1960s, fathers have doubled the time they spend on housework and tripled their hours of childcare as seen in Figure III. College graduates are more likely to approve of women working, for example, even when her husband’s “capable of supporting her.” The greater liberalism of well-educated Americans extends beyond gender roles, too. Compared to less educated Americans, for example, college graduates are more liberal about abortion, pre-marital sex, legal marijuana, and gay marriage.

CONCLUSION: To Promote Marriage, Promote Parenting
The debate about America’s “marriage crisis” focuses on failure—on the forces working to undermine marriage, especially in the poorest communities. It would serve our purposes better to turn our attention to success. Against all predictions, educated Americans are rejuvenating marriage. We should be spreading their successes and promoting their family structure. Given the implications for social mobility and life chances, we should be striving to accelerate the adoption of new marriages further down the income distribution. Perhaps propaganda—or, more politely, social marketing—has a role to play. The elites running our public institutions aren’t abandoning marriage: but maybe they aren’t encouraging it either. In Coming Apart, social analyst Charles Murray accuses the affluent of failing to “preach what they practice”:
“The new upper class still does a good job of practicing some of the virtues, but it no longer preaches them. It has lost self-confidence in the rightness of its own customs and values, and preaches nonjudgementalism instead. [They] don’t want to push their way of living onto the less fortunate, for who are they to say that their way of living is really better? It works for them, but who is to say it will work for others? Who are they to say that their way of living is virtuous and others’ ways are not?” (2013).
Murray casts the new marriage as a reversion to old virtues, especially religion. But HIP marriages are based on a new virtue, appropriate for the modern economy: heavy investment in children. More important, it is hard to know what Murray wants from the “new upper class.” What would it mean to "push their own way of life onto the less fortunate"? Americans, in particular, react badly to the government passing judgment on voluntary relationships between adults: that’s one reason the bar on gay marriages has gone. What we need is a not a Campaign for Marriage, but a Campaign for Good Parenting, which may, as a byproduct, bring about a broader revival of marriage. The Polish anthropologist Bronislaw Malinoski once described marriage as a means of tying a man to a woman and their children. Nowadays, women don’t need to be tied to a man. Sex and money can be found outside the marital contract. But children do need parents—preferably loving, engaged parents. Indeed they may need them more than ever. In 21st century America, nobody needs to marry, although many will still choose to. Recast for the modern world, and re-founded on the virtue of committed parenting, marriage may yet have a future. That future of marriage matters most for the individuals in the house that aren 't in the union: our children.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

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