One older newcomer muses about the implications of this segregation.
When I grew up back East, rich people and poor people, or rich people and middle-class people, lived in the same neighborhood. Here you have your rich neighborhood, your middle-class neighborhood, and then there are less than middle-class neighborhoods. How that’s gonna play out is difficult to see. It reminds me of when I go to Mexico and some of the houses have high walls with glass on top, and some have low walls but they have gates, and some of the houses have no walls at all.
Another resident reflects on the invisibility of economic distress in Bend:
Many people have a stereotype of what it means to be poor. And it may be somebody they see on the street corner with a sign: “Will work for food.” And what they don’t think about is that person who’s struggling every day. Could be the person who waited on us, took our bank deposit, works in retail, but who is barely above the poverty line.
These economic disparities are reflected in the families of young people in Bend and thus affect the futures of the kids. Kids raised on the east side and on the west side have radically different life chances. One important reason for this is that families on the two sides of town tend to be structured differently, a result of the economic disparities that have arisen in recent decades. These family differences produce very different starting points for rich and poor kids—as we learned by talking with two recent graduates of high schools in Bend who come from white families with deep roots in and around the city. Andrew, a loquacious and sunny-side-up college sophomore whose family lives in a sprawling home on a large lot in the hills on the west side of town, graduated from Summit High School. (Summit High School opened in 2001 and has a dropout rate of about 15 percent.) Kayla, wary and somber and adorned with a lip ring, lives about five miles from Andrew in a trailer on the east side of town and graduated from Marshall High School. (Marshall High School opened in 1948 and has a dropout rate of about 50 percent.)7
We open each of the two stories with flashbacks to their parents’ lives growing up, drawing on interviews with both the parents and the kids, so that we can see how Andrew’s and Kayla’s very different family origins affect their prospects today.
Andrew’s father and mother, Earl and Patty (both 50-something), come from modest middle-class backgrounds in and around Bend. Earl’s father was a crusty, hardworking small businessman in town, and he and his wife nurtured a close family, living in a small house on the east side of Bend. Earl was a self-described mediocre student in high school, earning Bs and Cs, but did well enough to head off to a four-year state college. At that point his parents’ marriage failed, and then his father’s business failed, but Earl (who had inherited his father’s drive) put himself through school by selling life insurance part-time and taking out loans. Earl and Patty met when he was a senior and she was a sophomore, and within a month they were engaged. After he graduated, she dropped out of school in order to stay with him.
Earl is a hard-driven strategic planner, both in his business and in his family. “When we came out of college,” he recalls, “we knew we wanted to have kids at a certain timeframe, so we could get a family started.” Before taking this step, however, he and Patty, who is the sociable, levelheaded member of the couple, planned to pay off their college loans and wedding bills, buy a home, and get on track financially. After a few years in Portland, where Earl worked as a stockbroker and Patty as a florist’s assistant, they returned to Bend and founded what proved to be a remarkably successful construction business. Earl’s business timing was perfect: the 1990s construction boom in Bend was about to take off, and within a few years they had passed all Earl’s financial checkpoints.
Ten years after getting married, Earl, a self-described workaholic, had made his first $1 million, and he and Patty had paid off their loans and owned a new home “free and clear.” Even before they’d had their first child, they had already started saving for college. They felt ready to start a family. On schedule, Andrew arrived, by which point the family was well on their way to serious wealth. A daughter, Lucy, followed. As Patty and Earl had planned from the outset, Patty stopped working once she started having kids, and she resolved to remain a stay-at-home mom until they were ready for college, after which she planned to return to finish her college degree (which she, in fact, did).
Earl feels parenthood changed him for the better. “It really brought us from a ‘me’ world to a world that was a unit,” he says. “My business was such that everything revolved around me and my business. Then you have a kid, and all of a sudden you recognize that it’s not all about you anymore. You start putting your energy into your kids. I mean, our generation has read every damn book you can read about being parents. Even more with this generation behind me, they’ve done all the homework for it.” As part of that effort, Earl and Patty have committed themselves to making their marriage work. “You know,” Earl says, “her parents divorced. My parents divorced. And our kids won’t see us divorce.”
Andrew confirms that he and his younger sister, Lucy, have been priorities for their parents. “My dad and my mom have always made sure that we eat dinner together,” he says. “During the school year, when we are all busy, it’s our only real time that all four of us could talk.” Education, too, has been a priority. “Patty and I are on our kids about their education,” Earl says. “ ‘Is your homework done?’ We ask more questions in a week than my parents probably asked in four years through high school.” Andrew (a solid B student in high school) backs up that account. Even though he’s now in college, his parents still frequently check his grades, and he welcomes their concern.
Throughout high school, Andrew played soccer and ultimate Frisbee, but never as a zealous competitor. “It’s hard for me to get really disappointed that we didn’t win,” he says. “I was just more into hang out and have fun.” He focused instead on music, playing guitar with a group of close friends who eventually formed a successful band that continued into his college years. His parents furnished him with a guitar and six or seven years of lessons. Music, he says, remains his “number-one passion, next to firefighting.”
Patty and Earl’s affluence allows them unselfconsciously to help their kids in ways that are inconceivable to most families in Bend. Andrew attended a private school from pre-K through the eighth grade. “My parents wanted the best for me,” he observes. Later, when Lucy fell in with what Andrew calls “a tough crowd” at Summit High, and was doing poorly, Andrew and his parents worried about her a lot—and intervened.
“We tried everything,” Andrew recalls. “And finally she really connected with horseback riding and animals. So my dad jumped on it and built a barn out at our ranch and Lucy got a horse, and it was just a complete turnaround. She switched to Mountain View, the other high school here, which is well known for agriculture, and [suddenly] it’s all hers. It’s incredible. Last year she became a 4.2 student.”
Patty and Earl honed their kids’ work ethic and helped along the way, as Andrew proudly recounts. “I started working when I was 14 at the market right down the street from my house. My dad is pretty old-fashioned. So by 14 it was a big deal getting a job. And I wouldn’t have wanted it any other way, honestly. It taught me work ethic. I went with one of my parents, I don’t remember which, and I dressed up, went in, and asked for an application. I had always known them [the store owners] growing up, and I was really cool about it. So I took it home, filled out the application with my dad that night, put it all together, got all my references, and took that back and turned it in, and got the job there. It was probably a quarter mile from our house just down the hill, and my mom didn’t like me walking by myself, so she usually would drive me, but it was close enough that I could get back and forth from home if I wanted to.”
Andrew also fondly recalls how his parents helped him celebrate his birthdays at a cabin the family owns on the river north of Bend. “When I was younger,” he says, “my dad helped me make it a tradition that every year I take my two best friends to the cabin for my birthday. And I haven’t missed a year yet.”
Andrew is now a sophomore at a nearby state university, where he hopes to get a business degree. Earl had expected that Andrew would join the flourishing family firm after graduating, but Andrew is more attracted to working as a firefighter. “I didn’t want to look at blueprints for my life,” he says. “I knew I loved this [firefighting]. So I met the chief when I came back after the first term, and I just told him that I wanted a job when I came out of school, and what do I need to do to line me up for the next four years to get it done?”
Earl was remarkably supportive when he discovered that Andrew did not plan to follow in his footsteps. When he learned that Andrew wanted to do a summer internship at the fire department, he gave Andrew the chief’s phone number. (Earl and the chief were childhood friends.) Nevertheless, he insisted that Andrew make the call himself. Andrew got the internship, which was unpaid, and Earl paid him the equivalent of what he would have made working in the family business. Similarly, Andrew’s parents gave him a pickup truck for high school graduation but required him to contribute toward it. “Their theory is for me to work and pay it off,” Andrew says, “so that I can build credit and can learn paying off the truck. I like doing that, because I can manage my money, and I’m learning how to balance.”
In ways that he probably doesn’t even realize, Andrew’s relaxed attitude toward his future has been molded by his comfortable upbringing. “I would rather live without all the big money and be happy. I can make good money doing this [firefighting]. It’s a great life, you know. It’s good money.” On the other hand, he mentions casually that, like his parents, he may “do real estate on the side,” and later, reflecting on his newfound interest at college in debate and public affairs, he allows that he might end up in politics. He confidently faces a future with many options.
Andrew is aware that he has benefited from his family’s good fortune in many ways, both material and nonmaterial. Still, he seems unaware of the lives of hardship being led on the east side of town: “Bend is a small community and you don’t see a whole lot of poverty.” On the other hand, he says “I’ve never worried about money. My dad is very good at what he does. I always felt secure. I am sure lucky that I have a good situation.” The family frequently travel together to Hawaii, San Francisco, the East Coast, and even occasionally Europe.
Andrew is very rooted in the Bend community. Life has taught him that his environment is stable and benevolent. He has lived in the same house with the same trustworthy neighbors and the same close friends since he was an infant. “There’s nowhere I’d rather be than here at home,” he says. “I know Bend like the back of my hand. The people are great. I just love the community life. I feel secure in Bend. For the most part, Bend is a community of really trusting people.”
Not surprisingly, Andrew envisages a rewarding future that mirrors the life his parents have led. “The first thing that would be good for me,” he says, “would be if I could build a home and have a family. Hopefully I will meet somebody that’s like my best friend, and then give my kids close to the same as what I had. Ideally, if I could plan it perfectly, I want to get married at 25. And I would want to have a kid by the time I was 30. And I want to have two kids. I tell myself, if I could give them the same life that I have, that would be the way to go.”
Perhaps the most striking feature about Andrew’s view of life is the exceptional warmth he feels, even as a late adolescent, toward his family. “My friends love and trust my parents. They could talk to my parents more than they could talk to their parents. And I love that. I have no problem telling my parents something, because they are so understanding. I always feel bad for some of my friends who say ‘I wish that my parents were as open, wish I could talk to my parents or they were understanding.’ My dad always reminds me every day how much my mom and my dad love me,” he says. “It’s a good feeling, you know? Some of my friends give me a wisecrack like, ‘Andrew’s parents say they love him again!’ But, it’s like, yeah, that’s how I want it.”
Kayla’s life has been very different from Andrew’s, and the roots of that difference lie deep in the life histories of her parents, Darleen and Joe.
Life has disappointed Darleen in many ways, both materially and emotionally, leaving her looking older than her 45 years. She grew up in a calm and settled family, on an isolated ranch several hours outside of Bend, and she remains close to her aging mother. Like Earl, she describes her high school record as mediocre. After graduating, she worked as a retail clerk in a fast food restaurant and pumped gas, and at about 20, she got married and had two children. Her husband turned out to be abusive, however, and eventually she left him. He retained custody of the kids, perhaps because he had a steady job and she did not. Darleen left the marriage badly damaged, and all she will say about it today is that it was “a bad move.”
After the split, Darleen got a job at Pizza Hut, where she struck up a casual relationship with her boss, Joe. Within two months, she was pregnant. “It didn’t mean to happen,” she says now. “It just did. It was planned and kind of not planned,” she says. The result was Kayla.
Joe came from a background that was unusually deprived and tormented. Though seven years younger than Earl, he appears 10–15 years older. His father spent most of his life (before and after Joe was born) in the Texas State Penitentiary for bank robberies and assorted other crimes. Joe has had virtually no contact with him.
Joe’s mother suffered from serious alcoholism throughout her adult life. After Joe was born, she had relationships with a number of other men, but they were always casual and temporary, so from an early age Joe was his mom’s primary caregiver. “They wasn’t really around,” Joe says of the boyfriends. “They was always drinking, and basically I ended up taking care of her, rather than her taking care of me.” She never remarried and remained without a regular job, living with Joe’s ailing grandmother. Always worried about money, the family was constantly on the move throughout the rural West.
When Joe was eight, he was placed in a foster home, the first in a long series. He felt very much an outcast, but the last of those homes did provide him with the only stable parental figures in his life, Maddy and Pop. The few years he spent with them—wearing new clothes instead of hand-me-downs, celebrating his birthday, fishing in the nearby creek with Pop—represented the only time of contentment in his childhood. The librarian in the local school taught him to read during her lunch break. Joe recalls Pop with nostalgia. “He taught me things that nobody else taught me,” he says.
At 14, however, Joe left Maddy and Pop to resume caring for his mother. It was a mistake, he says, because “my mom wasn’t ready for it. I’d wait at the bar from 9:00 p.m. to 2:30 a.m. so I could walk home with her.” One night the police found her crawling in the street on her hands and knees, drunk, and called Joe to pick her up. “I loved her with everything I had,” he says, “and I always tried to show her that, but it wasn’t enough. I wished I’d stayed with Maddy and Pop.”
Joe dropped out of school after the eighth grade. Living with his mother and caring for her as they bounced from town to town, he worked at various temporary jobs—yard work, chopping wood, “anything people would let me do.” At the age of 18, he became involved with a young woman who soon announced that she was pregnant. Believing that he was the father and that he faced a choice between jail and marriage because she was underage, Joe felt compelled to marry her. She was, it turned out, heavily into drugs, and after their second child was born, Joe learned that she was in an incestuous, abusive relationship with her stepfather, and that the stepfather was actually the father of their first child. Concluding that he had been the victim of a marriage trap, Joe left her, although he continued to feel responsibility toward the two kids. Deeply depressed and lacking any economic prospects, he moved back in with his mother, now living with her latest boyfriend in a trailer outside of Redmond, just north of Bend, and found yet another impermanent job as a cook at Pizza Hut—where he met Darleen.
Joe and Darleen were both very fragile, economically and emotionally, when they met—low-wage refugees from disastrous first marriages. “We probably didn’t know each other,” Darleen recalls. Joe agrees: “We wasn’t really that stable. I kept thinking ‘Okay, we’re just barely making ends meet now. Now we got a baby on the way.’ And Darleen really wasn’t ready to be a mom again, because she was still struggling with her own life, getting it back on track and figuring out who she was. So we really struggled when we had Kayla.”
Desperately poor, the family lived hand-to-mouth in a trailer, surviving on Joe’s transient, minimum wage jobs: first as an unskilled laborer working the graveyard shift at a local mill and then, when the mill eliminated that job, as a short-order cook and a gas station attendant. Through it all, Joe’s budding relationship with his infant daughter kept him going. “It gave more meaning to life to me,” he says, “because I had a reason to do everything I could. It gave me more hope. And I took care of her from then on.”
Kayla grew up in a confusing web of five step-siblings—Kayla, the two children from Darleen’s first marriage, and the two children from Joe’s first marriage. This made for complex sibling relationships, as Kayla recalls. “We all got separate moms or separate dads. Bill and Clara: those are brother and sister from my mom. We’ve got the same mom. And then my brother Mathew, we have the same dad. And then Luke: he’s kind of like a stepbrother, in a way. He is from my dad’s first marriage. [Luke is actually the child of Joe’s first wife and her stepfather.] They’d all come down for the summers and just hang out. We had a two-bedroom house, and my mom and dad had their room. I had to share a room with Clara, and the three boys slept downstairs. It worked for a while, and then everybody got on each other’s nerves, and we’d start a big fight.” Family dinners in this environment were a rarity. “We tried to get it like that,” Darleen says, “but it wasn’t always like that. You know, it took two parents. We would watch TV together.”
Family finances in Kayla’s youth were often strained to the breaking point. Kayla recalls wistfully her tenth birthday: “I couldn’t have a cake or anything like that because we were struggling so bad. My dad said, ‘We don’t really have the money for it. We’re going to do it in May or June.’ I was like ‘Oh, okay.’ I was pretty sad about it, but I was like ‘whatever.’ ”
After seven years of emotional and economic friction, Darleen fled the family with a new boyfriend, Charlie, whom she had met at work back at Pizza Hut (“my boss’s boss,” she laughingly explains). Charlie and Darleen led an itinerant life for a number of years, moving around the inland West and ending up homeless, with nowhere to stay but the bed of Charlie’s Ford Ranger. For most of her youth, Kayla stayed with Joe, though for several years after puberty she wandered with Charlie and Darleen across the country, living in motels and, for a while, at what Joe calls “a Gothic” (perhaps some sort of commune) in Missouri.
Joe eventually married another woman (his third wife), who moved in with her three children from a previous marriage. The new arrangement did not work out well for Kayla, who didn’t like her stepmother. “She’d treat her sons and daughter like royalty,” she says, “and I was kind of like the peasant of them all.” But Kayla didn’t move in with Darleen and Charlie at this point, because they had no room for her in their trailer. Eventually, Joe’s third marriage also dissolved. Joe—the one consistent, loving adult in Kayla’s life—retained custody of her, even though he was desperately struggling to make ends meet.
Unsurprisingly, Darleen, Kayla, and Joe have very different perspectives on their relationships, but all agree on this fundamental fact: however difficult the marriage had been, Kayla was deeply scarred by her parents’ divorce. Indeed, it was the seminal event in her life. It’s useful to see that event from the perspective of each of the three.
Perhaps because Kayla was a not entirely intended product of a very traumatic period in Darleen’s life, Darleen expresses an oddly detached and fatalistic perspective on her daughter’s life throughout our interview, recounting Kayla’s story less as a mother than as a bystander. “It don’t do no good to worry about your children,” she says. “Kids will do what they want.” She does recognize, however, that her decision to leave the family hurt Kayla. “The split affected Kayla a lot,” she says. “It was the hardest thing she went through.” At the urging of a school social worker, Kayla began to see a professional counselor, but she soon stopped going, Kayla says, because she found it ineffective. Darleen agrees. “I think it just made her more depressed,” she says. “So her dad and I were just there for her. Be there for her.”
Joe remembers Darleen’s role in Kayla’s life during that time differently. “It was hard,” he says, “because at that time her mom really didn’t want to spend much time with her. So I ended up taking care of her. My biggest struggle was keeping her in school. From the seventh grade, she kept wanting to drop out of school, and I said, ‘No, you ain’t dropping out. You ain’t making the mistakes I made.’ ”
Kayla, for her part, denies that her mother was “there for her” after the split. Her mom’s departure, which was the most difficult experience of her life, left her with a lasting sense of abandonment that permeates her view of life. “That was pretty hard for me. I was pretty upset about it, pretty angry,” she says. “I was like, ‘Well, you know they’re not getting along, but I’d like to have both of them growing up.’ She’d leave the city, go to different states and everything, so I could see her only once in a great while.”
Later we ask Kayla what it would mean for her to be a good mother to children of her own. “I think I would try to pay attention to them more than what my parents did,” she replies. “I think a good parent would be somebody that’s stable, that can actually be there for their kid and is actually old enough to be able to know right from wrong. . . . [My parents] could have waited a little bit longer [to have a child].”
Kayla hated school and had no outside activities during the years after the split. “She doesn’t associate with the kids,” a school social worker told Joe. “She just goes off by herself and sits.” After school, Kayla retreated to her bedroom to read fantasy books and watch cartoons. In the mornings, she recalls, “I didn’t want to get up at all.” She was sent to a program for troubled adolescents at Marshall High School, and then to a Job Corps training program. She found the Job Corps program restrictive and isolating, however, and returned to Marshall, where administrators sympathetic to her plight allowed her to matriculate again, even though official policy discouraged that.
The administrators at Marshall offered Kayla much support. To Joe’s surprise, a counselor arranged to pay for Kayla to get braces, to correct her embarrassingly crooked teeth, but made her promise not to miss any orthodontic appointments. “If you miss one,” they told her, “you lose your braces.” Later, a school librarian worked with her to identify a promising opportunity at the local community college and even helped her arrange financial aid.
During her months at the Job Corps program, Kayla acquired a boyfriend, and the two of them now live with Joe. Both Darleen and Joe are unhappy about the boyfriend. Darleen calls him “a worthless bum,” and even Kayla seems uncertain about him. Like Joe and Kayla, he is unemployed, although he claims to be looking for a job. For now, all three are surviving on disability payments that Joe receives, and on Section 8 housing assistance. Compounding Kayla’s problems, Joe now suffers from inoperable brain tumors, and Kayla has become his main caregiver. “He does weird stuff sometimes because of the tumors, like he’ll kind of freak out for no reason, or he’ll just sit there and talk to himself,” she anguishes. “I worry about him a lot.”
Kayla’s hopes for the future, unlike Andrew’s, are disconnected from any realistic plan of action in the here and now. “One of my biggest dreams,” she says, “is to go all around the world and just study different things, like culinary things. Where I want to end up is probably in London. I heard it’s really pretty there. I’m looking for a job, but it is hard, especially when you got no experience at all. People don’t really want to take the time to train you or anything.”
Kayla remains troubled psychologically, displaying classic symptoms of depression. At a fundamental level, her outlook is deeply skeptical and distrustful. Not unreasonably, given her life experiences, she finds the world unpredictable, intractable, and malign.
Kayla has a lot to worry about—her dad’s illness, her finances, her uncertain college prospects, her boyfriend, her future. Essentially, she has no stable, trustworthy adults in her life. Confronted with the realities of her situation as she moves into adulthood, she has one great fear—“kind of having my life go downhill,” she says, “everything kind of falling apart.”
Interviewer: Do you feel like that might happen?
Kayla: Yeah, I feel like it.
Interviewer: What do you think will happen?
Kayla: Like, college isn’t going to go through, or my grants ain’t going to go through or . . . And then my dad getting sicker, where he just isn’t really there anymore.
Interviewer: When you’re feeling really overwhelmed, what do you do?
Kayla: I just kind of hang out on my own.
Interviewer: Have you ever had a time where you just felt like you couldn’t make it?
Kayla: A lot actually.
“Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way,” Leo Tolstoy claimed. Each of the scores of families whose lives we have explored in this research, however, seems distinctive—the fortunate as well as the forlorn. Relatively few American kids live like Andrew, in thoughtful, loving families that have attained extraordinary affluence. Only somewhat more live like Kayla, amidst the gloomy ruins of multiple broken families surviving at the edge of destitution. Neither is a “typical American family.” Yet in many important respects their two families epitomize the ways in which American family life has been restructured along class lines over the last half century.8
Fifty years ago, most American families consisted of a breadwinner dad, a homemaker mom, and the kids: a stable, Ozzie-and-Harriet–style union. Divorce was uncommon, and births outside of marriage were rare in all social strata—4 percent overall in 1950, although the rate was slightly higher among the economically disadvantaged.9 Although today this family structure is often considered “traditional,” historians of the family have demonstrated that in fact it did not predominate in earlier eras of American history.10
Two social norms helped make the Ozzie-and-Harriet family possible: 1) a strongly patriarchal division of labor, coupled with widely shared prosperity that allowed most families to get by on one male income, and 2) a strong norm against out-of-wedlock births, so that premarital pregnancy was typically followed by “shotgun” marriage.11 Most baby boomers, as a result, were raised by both biological parents.
In the 1970s, however, as the boomers themselves were coming of age, that family structure suddenly collapsed, in what demographers agree was the most dramatic change in family structure in American history. Premarital sex lost its stigma almost overnight; shotgun marriages sharply diminished, and then virtually disappeared; divorce became epidemic; and the number of kids living in single-parent families began a long, steady ascent.12
Those who have studied this change in family structure don’t agree on exactly what caused it, but most agree that these factors contributed:
• Sex and marriage were delinked with the advent of the birth control pill.13
• The feminist revolution transformed gender and marital norms.
• Millions of women, in part freed from patriarchal norms, in part driven by economic necessity, and in part responding to new opportunities, headed off to work.
• The end of the long postwar boom began to reduce economic security for young working-class men.
• An individualist swing of the cultural pendulum produced more emphasis on “self-fulfillment.”14
The collapse of the traditional family hit the black community earliest and hardest, in part because that community was already clustered at the bottom of the economic hierarchy. That led observers to frame the initial discussion of the phenomenon in racial terms, as Daniel Patrick Moynihan did in his controversial 1965 report, The Negro Family: The Case for National Action.15 But it would turn out that white families were not immune to the changes, and with the benefit of hindsight it’s clear that from about 1965 to 1980, American family life underwent a massive transformation.
During this period of seemingly anarchic change, it was possible to imagine that marriage and family were on their way to extinction. But the upheaval in family structure in the 1970s produced a different and unexpected outcome – a bifurcation into two very distinct family patterns. In the 1950s all social classes had largely followed the Ozzie-and-Harriet model, but the two family types that appeared after the 1970s were closely correlated with class. The result was a novel, two-tier pattern of family structure that is still with us today.16
In the college-educated, upper third of American society, a “neo-traditional” marriage pattern has emerged. It mirrors the 1950s family in many respects, except that both partners now typically work outside of the home, they delay marriage and childbearing until their careers are under way, and they divide domestic duties more evenly. The result is something like Ozzie-and-Harriet–except that Harriet is now a lawyer or a social worker, Ozzie spends more time with the kids, and on two incomes they can afford a few more luxuries. These neo-traditional marriages are more egalitarian in the gender division of labor, and they have become nearly as durable as the 1950s model, as divorce rates among this upper third have retreated from the peaks of the 1970s.17 For the children of these families the news is good, as we shall see: the way they are being raised leads to many positive outcomes.18
In the high-school-educated, lower third of the population, by contrast, a new, more kaleidoscopic pattern began to emerge in which childbearing became increasingly disconnected from marriage, and sexual partnerships became less durable. In this model, dubbed “fragile families” by the sociologist Sara McLanahan and her collaborators, a child’s parents may never have been married or even stably connected to each other.19 Even if the parents were married at the time of the child’s birth, that marriage was frail, as divorce rates in this social stratum continued to rise. Because both parents likely moved on to other partners, with whom they also had children, even family units with two adults often included step-parents and step-siblings. More common, of course, were single-parent families, when one parent jumped or got pushed off the marriage-go-round.20
Andrew’s family and Kayla’s family represent these two patterns almost perfectly. To be sure, Patty’s role as Andrew’s stay-at-home mom reflects a variant of the neo-traditional model, and Joe’s role as the central adult in Kayla’s life is atypical, since single fathers are much less common than single mothers. But it is not misleading to think of these two Bend families as representing the new two-tier family structure in America. Let’s review the dimensions of this class-linked change nationwide—keeping in mind, of course, that the correlation between social class and family structure, although strong and growing stronger, is not perfect, since some poor families are traditional or neo-traditional in their structure and stability, and some rich families are kaleidoscopic.
College-educated mothers now typically delay childbearing and marriage until their late twenties or early thirties, about six years later, on average, than their counterparts a half century ago. High-school-educated mothers, by contrast, typically have their first children in their late teens or early twenties, slightly earlier than their counterparts in the 1960s, and ten years earlier than college-educated moms today. (See Figure 2.2.21 This is the first in a series of “scissors charts” that will appear in this book, each showing a statistically significant divergence in trends between upper- and lower-class parents and children.) Delayed parenting helps kids, because older parents are generally better equipped to support their kids, both materially and emotionally. Andrew’s parents recognized this and planned accordingly. Kayla’s did not, as Joe, Darleen, and Kayla all now agree.
High-school-educated women don’t aspire to have more children than college-educated women, but research shows that the former typically start having sex earlier, use contraception and abortion less often, and have more unintended or semi-intended pregnancies.22 (“Planned and kind of not planned,” as Darleen put it.) These class-linked differences are widening. According to the sociologist Kelly Musick and her colleagues, the most plausible explanations for this class discrepancy include the mother’s ambivalence about pregnancy, the erosion of personal efficacy by low education and economic distress, and perhaps differential access or attitudes to abortion. Access to contraception doesn’t seem to explain the pattern.23