Study: Delaying marriage hurts middle-class Americans most

[Redfairen]

Source: Washington Post

The tendency of young adults to put off marriage has taken a harsh toll on Americans without college degrees, according to a new study by a group of family researchers.

The study, titled Knot Yet, belies the mythology popularized on shows such as “Girls,” with characters spending their 20s establishing careers and relationships before deciding to settle down and have children. While that scenario portrays the experiences of many college-educated Americans, women with only high school degrees or a year or two of college are more likely to have their first child while cohabiting with a man who struggles to find a stable job that pays enough to support a family, the study said.

.......

The study found a large educational and class divide. College-educated women typically have their first child two years after marrying. The high school graduates as a group have their first child two years before they ­marry.

In a statistic that runs counter to the image of unmarried mothers as reckless teenagers, the study said 58 percent of first births to women who have graduated only from high school are out of wedlock.

Read more: http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/study-delaying-marriage-hurts-middle-class-americans-most/2013/03/15/8117bcde-8d9b-11e2-9f54-f3fdd70acad2_story.html

[RainDog]

1. If Republicans really wanted to encourage strong families

they would vote to raise the minimum wage.

people in this nation pretend that everyone has the same opportunities and options.

they don't.

[Demeter]

17. And Institute a MASSIVE Jobs Program ala WPA

the armed services are NOT an equivalent.

[RainDog]

20. Including, as did the New Deal, arts programs

to bring arts to people no matter their income or age.

The U.S. needs to build a 21st c. infrastructure but the fossils who hold sway are doing everything they can to stop this from happening.

[Lydia Leftcoast]

2. A common Republican talking point is that people wouldn't be so poor if they were married

They talk as if getting married automatically leads to prosperity, but if two poor people get married, you end up with two poor people, often living with one or the other set of parents.

Even my socially conservative Lutheran pastor father used to tell young couples, "Don't get married till you can afford your own place, even if it's just a studio apartment. You'll never work through your issues as adults if you're living with parents."

[Xithras]

4. There's a grain of truth to it...

...because two poor people sharing a single household will generally save money by pooling their resources. Of course, the Republicans fail to mention that you can get the same benefit simply by moving in together. Marriage isn't required. And if your motivation is strictly financial, it's not even recommended.

[Lydia Leftcoast]

14. The Republican talking point has it backwards

Financial stability makes it easier to get married.

Marriage by itself doesn't cause financial stability.

[mbperrin]

3. Taking things out of order is always a problem.

1. Get established financially (which means educationally first, whether college, voc school, or whatever).
2. Marry.
3. Stay married a decade.
4. Now you have stable finances and a stable marriage. If you choose, have a child.
5. This means that most people will have their child around 35 years of age. How great to be able to say yes to your child.
6. Yes, I can take time today to play or to help you or just to hang out.
7. Yes, we can take time to have an actual childhood.

In order.

I tell my high school students that I didn't learn the above in a book - I lived it AFTER I did the other first.

Learning to swim is hard enough without being handcuffed to someone else AND having a baby strapped to your back while you're doing it.

[Sen. Walter Sobchak]

6. My parents put off children to the very fringes of biological potential,

And while there were some awkward situations where it was assumed they were my grandparents and something terrible therefore had happened, I can't say the situation had many disadvantages on a practical day-to-day basis.

[DebJ]

13. This also means very few children would have any concept whatsoever

of what a 'grandparent' is. My daughter married at age 30 to a wonderful man age 38. They immediately
started their family. My son in law's father had also started HIS family quite late in life. He died when his
first grandchlld was just a few month's old, and he didn't live to even see the second child.

I am glad I wasn't in retirement mode when my children graduated from high school and college.

[mbperrin]

15. Nearly no children have contact with their grandparents now, what with 20% of the US population

moving every year.

Congratulations if you can retire at 53 - most of the population can't, and that's how old you'd be if you had a child at 35.

But the truth is, I'm nowhere nearly as interested in the adults as I am in the kids - and the more stable and safe their childhoods are, the better.

My mother's father worked as a carpenter until age 86 - alert and funny and very particular.
My mother's mother outlived him by two years, happy and active in the VFW and the American Legion.
My dad's father was a drunk, a womanizer, and a gambler, dead at 62 of cancer of everything.
My dad's mother was an unhappy woman who had to be the actual support for her family and worked herself to death by 63.

So the grandparent thing is kind of a crap shoot, and I sure do know that my particular anecdotal circumstances don't mean a thing in the grand scheme, but this is just a life experience I pass on. There are 125 teenage girls in attendance at the high school I teach at who have given birth or who will give birth this year, and who have registered for a special program we offer, so there probably are more.

I tire of seeing young women in their 20s walking up a busy 4 lane street on their way to the Dollar Store being followed by two or three little stairsteps because their "dad" either is absent or doesn't make enough of a living to even afford a junker to drive in the 100 degree heat we get here. And it's a common sight. Half the population of this county over age 25 does not have a high school diploma, and 85% of the kids I teach qualify for free or reduced lunch. Now that's what makes me tired.

[DebJ]

24. My sister in law and her husband adopted a child

When she was 40 and he a bit older. They now feel painfully everyday the truth that your max stamina is in you're thirties. Working full time and raising a small active boy leaves them so used up and tired, I never see them not exhausted. Dad does construction, heavy work so maybe that is a factor, too, as the years have accumulated various work related damage to his body.

But I can see my 40 year old very athletic son in law feeling it too.


My grandparents were certainly not perfect either, but it was a huge comfort to have that more expansive sense of family and I have missed them dearly in a most personal way and treasure my memories of them, and knowing them helped me to understand myself and the influences that made me who I am who I came to be. My children on the other hand, lost one set of grandparents too early to really know them, and they FEEL a void in their lives from that. So does their cousin.

[Demeter]

18. Stay married a decade?

And when the spouse turns Psycho or financially imprudent, it's back to the drawing board....

I'd rather my daughter had children out of wedlock than married a loser, no matter how much money he ostensibly made...

[mbperrin]

21. My point. If they turn into a psycho or drunk or whatever, divorce them and get rid of them.

Don't become a parent with them. And it takes time to find out what people are really like.

By no means marry only for money. BUT don't marry for the lack of it, either. Electric off because the bill wasn't paid is NOT romantic chance for candles - it sucks, and everything in the freezer will run, and no cooking can occur, nor heating nor air conditioning.

Throwing children into an unstable situation cannot make it better - only worse. The children of divorce typically live with their money, and the usual outcome is poverty - not a character builder, a character destroyer and a maker of unhappy lives.

That's all I'm saying - be sure it will last BEFORE we throw kids in there.

Truth is, if someone is not willing to commit just far enough to get "on just a piece of paper" they'll be sure to be there for you when the cancer hits, right? But no, don't stay in a bad deal - get out and get gone. It will be far more complex with kids, and they are the ticket for the psycho to get regular contact. Bad.

[DFW]

5. Weird, it didn't hurt me any

I say "me" instead of "us" because my wife is not a middle-class American. She is not American at all. I met my wife to be when we were both 22. We never found the time to get married, and if my brother hadn't invited us to our own wedding (long story), we probably still wouldn't be married. As it is, we only got married at age 30, 8 years after we met, and became parents for the first time a year after that. Mythology or not, we spent our 20s establishing careers and relationships (mostly our own) before deciding to settle down and have children. The "settle down" part is still open to some serious debate.

Even so, we both have college degrees, and so do both of our children. So much for statistics.

[Ikonoklast]

7. Study sort of flat-out ignores the marraige failure rate, too.

Life doesn't end at the altar, show me statistics to twenty years out for ALL couples.

[muriel_volestrangler]

9. The study doesn't ignore it, just the WP write-up

One of the first things the study says is:

The Benefits. Delayed marriage has elevated the socioeconomic status of women, especially
more privileged women and their partners, allowed women to reach other life goals, and
reduced the odds of divorce for couples now marrying in the United States. Specifically:

• Women enjoy an annual income premium if they wait until 30 or later
to marry. For college-educated women in their midthirties, this premium
amounts to $18,152.

• Delayed marriage has helped to bring down the divorce rate in the U.S.
since the early 1980s because couples who marry in their early twenties
and especially their teens are more likely to divorce than couples
who marry later.

http://nationalmarriageproject.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/KnotYet-FinalForWeb.pdf

[muriel_volestrangler]

8. The WP seems to be saying the typical middle class man is a Walmart checkout guy

who "struggles to find a stable job that pays enough to support a family". Combine that with the recent definitions of middle class to be people earning up to $250,000, and it seems that 90% of the USA must be middle class now.

And I agree with Lydia above that the article implies that getting married would somehow fix the problems of the guy struggling to get a decent stable job. All in all, the article seems a complete mess.

[PSPS]

10. The thinly veiled message here: No college degree? You're never going to ever earn a livable wage.

In many cases, even a college degree is no guarantee of comfortable financial independence especially now with the institutionalization of diploma mills whose sole purpose is to just sign up people who qualify for federally-guaranteed student loans. Any college instructor will tell you that NCLB beings them a yearly batch of poorly-educated students.

Welcome to the new normal: A life of endless toil to eke out a subsistence lifestyle.

[JVS]

23. I was wondering why they were counting high school grads as middle class.

Nearly everyone graduates high school now. Non-HS grads would be all the way down in "fucked beyond belief" category.

Middle class takes at least a college degree, and even then there is the matter of being able to parley it into a career.

[MindPilot]

11. I don't see the connection.

Yes, people with better educations will tend to delay marriage and childbearing, that's a given. But the article seems to be trying to present some causal link that somehow a well-educated person's decision to not have children somehow influences the person who didn't finish high school to have four kids and move into mom's double-wide.

It also assumes that marriage and children are inevitable.

[Igel]

12. Idon't see that.

For its own purposes it divides the population into two groups. Those better educated wait until marriage, and wait until after marriage to have kids. By and large.

This helps women. I didn't read the whole thing; this may be because the women because they can become better educated, because they can put in more time at work, or possibly work at careers and not jobs.

Less educated tend to flip the scenario. Women have kids before marriage, if they marry. Kids stress a relationship. The men aren't able to as easily take care of the "down time" the woman has because of having the kid(s). The women, if the relationship collapses, are less able to take care of their kids financially. Single parents make worse parents, anecdotes and exceptions notwithstanding.

There's also a decent body of research--with causality usually not clearly established--showing that the commitment that is marriage matters a lot. If a man is in a long-term unmarried relationship, his kids do worse in school and have more behavioral problems than if they're actually married. If the man isn't related to the kids, things are even worse. Short-term relationships are often bad for the kids.

There's also the income #s for married versus long-term relationship versus short-term. Control for race/ethnicity, age, SES, education, geography and if you're a married man you'll earn more than if you're not married. Causality's a question on this one, but the correlation's robust and has held for the last 40 years.

[Orangepeel]

16. Stupid headline

Would middle-class Americans be better able to find a stable job that pays enough to support a family if they were married rather than cohabiting? If not, it isn't delaying marriage that hurts them.

I haven't read the actually study, but I think it probably didn't actually say that what "hurts" a 22 year old single mother with a high school education is that she didn't get married at 20.

[Demeter]

19. What is the Priority?

to continue your gene pool, or to attain a certain lifestyle?

Can you do both? Not easily, not any more. That's so 50's.

[mbperrin]

22. Now THAT is a fine frame of a question!

Good. And I must say to establish the lifestyle first. You can always get kids. I got two great ones when I got married. Got another one a few years later, and no one has worried about DNA around here.

Heck, you're only related to your ancestors if they say so unless there really has been DNA work, right?

Run an ad in the paper: "Wanted. Kids. Drop off at the following address between 9 and 5 Wednesday." You'll get all the kids you want, need, or can handle. They're not scarce. Really great parents? Really scarce.

[elleng]

25. Some interesting comments to the Article in WAPO:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/study-delaying-marriage-hurts-middle-class-americans-most/2013/03/15/8117bcde-8d9b-11e2-9f54-f3fdd70acad2_allComments.html?ctab=all_&