American
households have never been more diverse, more surprising, more
baffling. In this special issue of Science Times, NATALIE ANGIER takes
stock of our changing definition of family.
Harini
Indrakrishnan, a high school senior, was born in the United States. Her
parents, from Sri Lanka, became American citizens a decade ago.David Walter Banks for The New York Times
CHELSEA, MICH. — Kristi and Michael Burns have a lot in common. They
love crossword puzzles, football, going to museums and reading five or
six books at a time. They describe themselves as mild-mannered
introverts who suffer from an array of chronic medical problems. The two
share similar marital résumés, too. On their wedding day in 2011, the
groom was 43 years old and the bride 39, yet it was marriage No. 3 for
both.
Today, their blended family is a sprawling, sometimes uneasy ensemble of
two sharp-eyed sons from her two previous husbands, a daughter and son
from his second marriage, ex-spouses of varying degrees of involvement,
the partners of ex-spouses, the bemused in-laws and a kitten named Agnes
that likes to sleep on computer keyboards.
If the Burnses seem atypical as an American nuclear family, how about
the Schulte-Waysers, a merry band of two married dads, six kids and two
dogs? Or the Indrakrishnans, a successful immigrant couple in Atlanta
whose teenage daughter divides her time between prosaic homework and the
precision footwork of ancient Hindu dance; the Glusacs of Los Angeles,
with their two nearly grown children and their litany of middle-class
challenges that seem like minor sagas; Ana Perez and Julian Hill of
Harlem, unmarried and just getting by, but with Warren Buffett-size
dreams for their three young children; and the alarming number of
families with incarcerated parents, a sorry byproduct of America’s
status as the world’s leading jailer.
The typical American family, if it ever lived anywhere but on Norman Rockwell’s Thanksgiving canvas,
has become as multilayered and full of surprises as a holiday turducken
— the all-American seasonal portmanteau of deboned turkey, duck and
chicken.
Researchers who study the structure and evolution of the American family
express unsullied astonishment at how rapidly the family has changed in
recent years, the transformations often exceeding or capsizing those
same experts’ predictions of just a few journal articles ago.
Kristi
and Michael Burns, whose marriage was the third for each, with three of
their four children at home in Chelsea, Mich. All are from previous
relationships.Fabrizio Costantini for The New York Times
“This churning, this turnover in our intimate partnerships is creating complex families on a scale we’ve not seen before,” said Andrew J. Cherlin,
a professor of public policy at Johns Hopkins University. “It’s a
mistake to think this is the endpoint of enormous change. We are still
very much in the midst of it.”
Yet for all the restless shape-shifting of the American family,
researchers who comb through census, survey and historical data and
conduct field studies of ordinary home life have identified a number of
key emerging themes.
Families, they say, are becoming more socially egalitarian over all,
even as economic disparities widen. Families are more ethnically,
racially, religiously and stylistically diverse than half a generation
ago — than even half a year ago.
In increasing numbers, blacks marry whites, atheists marry Baptists, men
marry men and women women, Democrats marry Republicans and start talk
shows. Good friends join forces as part of the “voluntary kin” movement,
sharing medical directives, wills, even adopting one another legally.
Single people live alone and proudly consider themselves families of one
— more generous and civic-minded than so-called “greedy marrieds.”
“There are really good studies showing that single people are more
likely than married couples to be in touch with friends, neighbors,
siblings and parents,” said Bella DePaulo, author of “Singled Out” and a visiting professor of psychology at the University of California, Santa Barbara.
But that doesn’t mean they’ll be single forever. “There are not just
more types of families and living arrangements than there used to be,”
said Stephanie Coontz,
author of the coming book “Intimate Revolutions,” and a social
historian at Evergreen State College in Olympia, Wash. “Most people will
move through several different types over the course of their lives.”
At the same time, the old-fashioned family plan of stably married
parents residing with their children remains a source of considerable
power in America — but one that is increasingly seen as out of reach to
all but the educated elite.
“We’re seeing a class divide not only between the haves and the
have-nots, but between the I do’s and the I do nots,” Dr. Coontz said.
Those who are enjoying the perks of a good marriage “wouldn’t stand for
any other kind,” she said, while those who would benefit most from
marital stability “are the ones least likely to have the resources to
sustain it.”
Yet across the divide runs a white picket fence, our unshakable
star-spangled belief in the value of marriage and family. We marry,
divorce and remarry at rates not seen anywhere else in the developed
world. We lavish $70 billion a year on weddings, more than we spend on pets, coffee, toothpaste and toilet paper combined.
We’re sappy family romantics. When an informal sample of 52 Americans of
different ages, professions and hometowns were asked the first thought
that came to mind on hearing the word “family,” the answers varied
hardly at all. Love! Kids! Mom! Dinner!
“It’s the backbone of how we live,” said David Anderson, 52, an
insurance claims adjuster from Chicago. “It means everything,” said
Linda McAdam, 28, who is in human resources on Long Island.
Yes, everything, and sometimes too many things. “It’s almost like a
weight,” said Rob Fee, 26, a financial analyst in San Francisco, “a
heavy weight.” Or as the comedian George Burns said, “Happiness is
having a large, loving, caring, close-knit family in another city.”
In charting the differences between today’s families and those of the
past, demographers start with the kids — or rather the lack of them.
The nation’s birthrate today is half what it was in 1960, and last year hit its lowest point ever. At the end of the baby boom, in 1964, 36 percent of all Americans were under 18 years old; last year, children accounted for just 23.5 percent of the population,
and the proportion is dropping, to a projected 21 percent by 2050.
Fewer women are becoming mothers — about 80 percent of those of
childbearing age today versus 90 percent in the 1970s — and those who
reproduce do so more sparingly, averaging two children apiece now,
compared with three in the 1970s.
One big reason is the soaring cost of ushering offspring to functional
independence. According to the Department of Agriculture, the average
middle-class couple will spend $241,080
to raise a child to age 18. Factor in four years of college and maybe
graduate school, or a parentally subsidized internship with the local
theater company, and say hello to your million-dollar bundle of oh joy.
As steep as the fertility decline has been, the marriage rate has fallen
more sharply, particularly among young women, who do most of the
nation’s childbearing. As a result, 41 percent of babies are now born
out of wedlock, a fourfold increase since 1970.
The trend is not demographically uniform, instead tracking the nation’s
widening gap in income and opportunity. Among women with a bachelor’s
degrees or higher, 90 percent adhere to the old playground song and put
marriage before a baby carriage. For everybody else, maternity is often
decoupled from matrimony: 40 percent of women with some college but no
degree, and 57 percent of women with high school diplomas or less, are
unmarried when they give birth to their first child.
More than one-quarter of these unwed mothers are living with a partner
who may or may not be their child’s biological father. The rise of the
cohabiting couple is another striking feature of the evolving American
family: From 1996 to 2012, the number jumped almost 170 percent, to 7.8
million from 2.9 million.
Nor are unmarried mothers typically in their teens; contrary to all the
talk of an epidemic of teenage motherhood, the birthrate among
adolescent girls has dropped by nearly half since 1991 and last year hit
an all-time low, a public health triumph that experts attribute to
better sex education and birth-control methods. Most unmarried mothers
today, demographers say, are in their 20s and early 30s.
Also démodé is the old debate over whether mothers of dependent children
should work outside the home. The facts have voted, the issue is
settled, and Paycheck Mommy is now a central organizing principle of the
modern American family.
The share of mothers employed full or part time has quadrupled since the
1950s and today accounts for nearly three-quarters of women with
children at home. The number of women who are their families’ sole or
primary breadwinner also has soared, to 40 percent today from 11 percent
in 1960.
“Yes, I wear the pants in the family,” said Ana Perez, 35, a mother of
three and a vice president at a financial services company in New York,
who was, indeed, wearing pants. “I can say it brings me joy to know I
can take care of my family.”
Cultural attitudes are adapting accordingly. Sixty-two percent of the public, and 72 percent of adults under 30, view the ideal marriage
as one in which husband and wife both work and share child care and
household duties; back when Jimmy Carter was president, less than half
of the population approved of the dual-income family, and less than half
of 1 percent of husbands knew how to operate a sponge mop.
Mothers are bringing home more of the bacon, and of the mortarboards,
too. While most couples are an even match scholastically, 28 percent of
married women are better educated than their mates; that is true of just
19 percent of married men. Forty years ago, the asymmetry went the
other way.
Some experts argue that the growing legion of mothers with advanced
degrees has helped sharpen the already brutal competition for admission
to the nation’s elite universities, which stress the importance of
extracurricular activities. Nothing predicts the breadth and busyness of
a child’s after-school schedule better, it turns out, than the mother’s
level of education.
One change that caught many family researchers by surprise was the
recent dip in the divorce rate. After many decades of upward march,
followed by a long, stubborn stay at the familiar 50 percent mark that
made every nuptial feel like a coin flip, the rate began falling in 1996
and is now just above 40 percent for first-time marriages.
The decline has been even more striking among middle- and
upper-middle-income couples with college degrees. For them, fewer than
one in three marriages is expected to end in divorce, a degree of
stability that allows elite couples to merge their resources with
confidence, maximally invest in their children and otherwise widen the
gap between themselves and the struggling masses.
There are exceptions, of course. Among baby boomers, the rate of
marriage failure has surged 50 percent in the past 20 years — perhaps
out of an irritable nostalgia, researchers said, for the days of free
love, better love, anything but this love. Nor do divorce rates appear
to have fallen among those who take the old Samuel Johnson quip as a
prescription, allowing hope to triumph over experience, and marrying
again and again.
For both Mike and Kristi Burns, now in their 40s, the first marriage
came young and left early, and the second stuck around for more than a
dozen years.
Kristi was 19, living in South Carolina, and her Marine boyfriend was
about to be shipped to Japan. “I wasn’t attached to him, really,” she
said, “but for some reason I felt this might be my only chance at
marriage.”
In Japan, Kristi gave birth to her son Brandon, realized she was lonely
and miserable, and left the marriage seven weeks after their first
anniversary. Back in the States, Kristi studied to be a travel agent,
moved to Michigan and married her second husband at age 23.
He was an electrician. He adopted Brandon, and the couple had a son, Griffin. The marriage lasted 13 years.
“We were really great friends, but we weren’t a great husband and wife,”
Kristi said. “Our parenting styles were too different.”
Besides, she went on, “he didn’t verbalize a lot, but he was mad a lot, and I was tired of walking around on eggshells.”
After the divorce, friends persuaded her to try the online dating service match.com, and just as her free trial week was about to expire, she noticed a new profile in the mix.
“Kristi was one of the first people to ping me,” said Mike Burns, an
engineer for an e-commerce company. “This was at 3 in the morning.”
They started chatting. Mike told Kristi how he’d married his first wife
while he was still in college — “definitely too young,” he said — and
divorced her two years later. He met his second wife through mutual
friends, they had a big church wedding, started a software publishing
company together, sold it and had two children, Brianna and Alec.
When the marriage started going downhill, Mike ignored signs of trouble,
like the comments from neighbors who noticed his wife was never around
on weekends.
“I was delusional, I was depressed,” he said. “I still had the attitude that divorce wasn’t something you did.”
After 15 years of marriage, his wife did it for him, and kicked him out
of the house. His divorce papers hadn’t yet been finalized, he told
Kristi that first chat night. I’ll help you get through it, she replied.
Mike and Kristi admit their own three-year-old marriage isn’t perfect.
The kids are still adjusting to one another. Sometimes Kristi, a
homemaker, feels jealous of how much attention her husband showers on
his daughter Brianna, 13. Sometimes Mike retreats into his computer. Yet
they are determined to stay together.
“I know everyone thinks this marriage is a joke and people expect it to
fail,” said Kristi . “But that just makes me work harder at it.”
“I’d say our chances of success are better than average,” her husband added.
Reposted from The New York Times
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