The divorce rate in America, having more than doubled in the 1960s and 1970s, peaked around 1980 and then began to taper off. That broad national pattern, however, concealed another significant class divergence, for the divorce rate among college-educated Americans fell significantly after 1980, whereas it continued to rise among their high-school-educated counterparts, even as marriage itself was becoming less common in that stratum of society.24 By 2000 the ratio of divorced to married people was nearly twice as great among high-school-educated Americans (roughly 24 per 100) as among college graduates (14 per 100), and by 2008–2010 the gap had grown further (roughly 28 per 100 to 14 per 100).25 Once again, the families of Andrew and Kayla perfectly illustrate this sharpening contrast.
At all levels of contemporary American society, cohabitation (an unmarried couple living together) has become common. But among younger Americans it rarely amounts to “marriage without a license.” Although about two thirds of marriages nowadays follow a period of cohabitation, the average cohabitation in America lasts about 14 months and generally does not end in marriage.26 Cohabitation patterns also increasingly differ according to class. The percentage of high-school-educated women who had ever cohabited doubled in the two decades after 1987, from about 35 percent to about 70 percent, while the percentage among college-educated women during that same period rose only from 31 percent to 47 percent.27
Among college-educated Americans, cohabiting couples seldom have children, but when pregnancy does occur, it tends to derive from a stable relationship, and a stable marriage is the likely outcome.28 Among high-school-educated Americans, by contrast, cohabitation is generally not a way station to permanent partnership. Children are often born to cohabitating couples, but such cohabitation does not typically lead to marriage, nor do the partnerships generally last. Low-income men and women have children while searching for a long-term partner, not after they have found one. Nowadays, in short, most high-school-educated women cohabit; most college-educated women don’t, and those who do, rarely have children.
To be sure, few of the nonmarital births in the lower third are the result of one-night stands. Most are to cohabiting couples who, like Joe and Darleen, are hopeful of making a go of it at the time their child is born. But most of these relationships will not survive for more than a few years. The shared desire to have a child usually fails to provide enough of a bond to persist through the trials of raising an infant amidst precarious work, fragile families, and dangerous neighborhoods. McLanahan and her colleagues found that five years after the birth of a child, more than two thirds of all women who were unmarried at the time of the birth (and about half of all who were cohabiting at the time of the birth) were no longer even romantically involved with the child’s father.29 The anticipated marriages are, in effect, “still-born,” in the words of the demographer Frank Furstenberg.30 What follows is often another round of cohabitation, conception, and dissolution, characterized by Kathryn Edin and Timothy J. Nelson as “a cycle of redemption and despair.”31 Indeed, most unmarried parents end up having children with other partners as well. This is exactly the tale told by Kayla’s parents, Joe and Darleen.
Demographers use the term multi-partner fertility to describe the emergence of the complex, impermanent structure characteristic of less educated American families today—“blended families,” as family counselors describe them.32 The “family” within which Kayla was raised, involving five temporary adult partnerships and eight step-siblings, and the “family” in which David (whom we met in Port Clinton) was raised, with uncounted adult couplings and nine step-siblings, in many ways typify this new pattern.
Many kids, especially from less affluent, less educated backgrounds, live without their fathers. Figure 2.4 portrays this aspect of the two-tier system, showing how many men of fathering age (15–44) have any biological children with whom they do not live, and of those nonresident fathers, how many have essentially no contact with their children. (In complex families, sometimes a father will engage intensively with offspring from one mother at the expense of his other offspring with other mothers.) Compared to college graduates, high-school-educated men are four times more likely to father children with whom they do not live, and only half as likely to visit those children.33