America’s marriage rate is falling and its out-of-wedlock birth rate is soaring. That should worry liberals, not just conservatives
By The Economist | OKLAHOMA CITY
A DOZEN young couples recently spent a cold Monday evening in a conference room in downtown Oklahoma City, answering tricky questions about their relationships, such as who their partner’s family most resembles: the Simpsons, the Addams Family or the cosily suburban Cleavers from “Leave it to Beaver”? Such lightheartedness had a serious aim: getting the couples to think about each other and improving their ability to communicate.
The couples—all new or expectant parents, none of them married—were taking part in a workshop run by the Oklahoma Marriage Initiative (OMI), a programme that aims to help Oklahomans build and sustain healthy marriages. Since 1999 OMI has served more than 315,000 people. It is the largest and longest-running of its kind, and probably the most successful. Still, the workshop’s leader, Boston Snowden, told his charges, “We’re not trying to make you get married. We’re trying to show you there’s research that shows that there are definitely a lot of benefits to marriage, so we want to point those out.”
As Mr Snowden’s careful phrasing suggests, the politics of marriage promotion is tricky. Some bristle even at the phrase “marriage promotion”, hearing in it browbeaten sinners being forced into church and down the aisle. One of OMI’s board members, a social scientist from a Democratic state, said that “marriage promotion gets the ire of left-leaning individuals who see it as really connected to the [George W.] Bush administration.”
Mr Bush’s Health and Human Services Department did indeed launch the Healthy Marriage Initiative, which financed an array of activities designed to encourage marriage. But federal marriage-promotion precedes that presidency: the 1996 welfare-reform bill (signed into law by Bill Clinton, a Democrat, but largely the work of a Republican Congress) called marriage “an essential institution of a successful society which promotes the interests of children”, and said that “prevention of out-of-wedlock pregnancy and reduction in out-of-wedlock births” are “very important government interests”.
Republicans are hardly alone in valuing marriage. A Pew poll taken in 2010 showed that 61% of adults who have never been married want to be; only 12% do not. A poll of high-school seniors taken in 2006 showed that 81% of them expected to get married, and 90% of those expected to stay married to the same person for life. Wedding-themed reality TV shows (“My Fair Wedding”, “Say Yes to the Dress”) abound.
And yet, as of December 2011, just 51% of all American adults were married and 28% never had been, down from 72% and up from 15% in 1960. The median age of first-time newlyweds is at an all-time high (which may make the marriage-rate decline appear sharper than it actually is: many may be delaying marriage rather than forgoing it entirely). However stark the overall rate decline, it is not spread evenly: marriage rates are higher, and out-of-wedlock birth and divorce rates lower, among wealthier and better-educated Americans. A bare majority of whites (55%) and minorities of Hispanics (48%) and blacks (31%) are married; majorities of all three races were married in 1960.
Similar declines and delays are occurring in much of the rich world, but Andrew Cherlin, a sociologist at Johns Hopkins University who studies families and public policy, maintains that in America “you don’t see the same pattern of long unmarried relationships you see in Scandinavia, France or Britain...in the United States marriage is how we do stable families.” Or used to be.
If marriage affected only the two people who choose (or not) to wed, it would be easier to ignore falling marriage rates. But with them come rising out-of-wedlock birth rates. In 2010, 40.8% of all births were to unmarried mothers. Among Hispanics that figure was 53%, and among blacks 73%. In 1965 Daniel Patrick Moynihan, later a Democratic senator from New York, called for emergency federal intervention to aid in “the establishment of a stable Negro family structure”, and justified it in part by an out-of-wedlock birth rate among blacks of 23.6%—half what it is today.
With illegitimate births come single-parent homes, in which 35% of all American children lived in 2011. Children brought up in such homes fare worse than children raised by married parents over a range of academic and emotional outcomes, from adolescent delinquency to dropping out of school. The poverty rate among single-parent, female-headed families is over five times that of married, two-parent families. Nearly 71% of poor families lack married parents. And children brought up in poverty tend to be poor themselves.
Out-of-wedlock birth rates (and divorce rates) are far lower, and marriage rates far higher, among the wealthier and better-educated. Small wonder that many support marriage promotion not for moral or cultural reasons, but for economic ones—as a way to drive down, or at least prevent further widening of, inequality.
To many, however, that simply puts the cart before the horse. Stephanie Coontz, a professor at Evergreen State University and a sceptic about marriage promotion, argues that poverty is a cause, not a result, of low marriage rates. Better, such critics argue, for government to help create more living-wage jobs, and to ensure access to family-planning services to keep unwed births down, rather than to promote marriage as a route to economic success.
Critics also seize on the programmes’ track records. A rigorous 36-month study of Building Strong Families (BSF), a federally-funded marriage-promotion initiative in eight cities, found that it had “no effect on the quality of couples’ relationships and did not make couples more likely to stay together or get married.” OMI, the largest of the eight programmes studied, was the notable exception. One member of OMI’s research advisory group found marked positive effects on low-income couples—precisely the subgroup least likely to marry and whose children suffer the worst effects of non-marriage. Overall, 49% of those couples enrolled in the OMI program stayed together, compared with 41% in the control group. That means roughly one in every 12.5 couples who enroll in Oklahoma’s BSF program can be expected to stay together when otherwise they would have split up. That may be a small number, but to the couples’ children, it is hugely significant.
