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New
York Times...
More Unwed Parents
Live Together, Report Finds
By Sabrina Tavernise
8/16/11
WASHINGTON — The number of Americans who have children and live
together without marrying has increased twelvefold since 1970,
according to a report released Tuesday. The report states that children
now are more likely to have unmarried parents than divorced ones.
The report was published by the National Marriage Project, an
initiative at the University of Virginia, and the Institute for
American Values, two partisan groups that advocate for strengthening
the institution of marriage. The report argues that the rise of
cohabitation is a growing risk for children, and that their lives are
less stable in such families.
The report cites data from the Census Bureau as well as the Centers for
Disease Control and Prevention, and includes work from 18 researchers
who study family issues.
According to the National Survey of Family Growth, part of the Centers
for Disease Control, 42 percent of children have lived with cohabiting
parents by age 12, far more than the 24 percent whose parents have
divorced.
The numbers also suggest a correlation with class. Americans with only
a high school diploma are far more likely to cohabit than are college
graduates, according to the report.
“There’s a two-family model emerging in American life,” said W.
Bradford Wilcox, director of the National Marriage Project and an
associate professor of sociology at the University of Virginia. “The
educated and affluent enjoy relatively strong, stable families.
Everyone else is more likely to be consigned to unstable, unworkable
ones.”
Cohabiting parents, Mr. Wilcox said, are more than twice as likely to
break up as parents who are married.
The increase in unmarried couples cohabitating and having children
swept poor communities beginning in the late 1960s, Mr. Wilcox said,
citing data from the National Survey of Family Growth, and now has
moved into working class and lower-middle-class families.
Out-of-wedlock births among white women with a high school diploma rose
more than sixfold in recent decades, the report said, jumping to 34
percent in the late 2000s, from 5 percent in 1982. In contrast, the
rate for white college graduates stayed flat at about 2 percent.
While births to white women in cohabiting relationships rose by about
two-thirds from the early 1990s to the mid-2000s, the proportion jumped
by about half for black women and nearly doubled for Hispanic women,
though that increase was affected by a large influx of immigrants, said
Sheela Kennedy, a research associate at the Minnesota Population
Center, which conducts demographic studies and whose work was cited in
the new report.
“There’s growing evidence that families that would be unstable anyway
are just skipping marriage,” Ms. Kennedy said.
The report cited studies in the Journal of Marriage and Family,
and in Sociology of Education, asserting that children in cohabiting
families tend to perform worse in school and be less psychologically
healthy than those whose parents are married.
It also cited a 2010 report on child abuse by the federal Department of
Health and Human Services that found that children living with two
married biological parents had the lowest rates of harm — 6.8 per 1,000
children — while children living with one parent who had an unmarried
partner in the house had the highest incidence, at 57.2 per 1,000
children.
Read it at the New York Times
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