In the 1970s, the two-tier family structure was closely correlated with race, but since that time it has become increasingly associated with the parents’ social class more than their race. The same two-tier, class-based pattern now appears among both blacks and whites. College-educated blacks are looking more like college-educated whites, and less educated whites are looking more like less educated blacks. The collapse of the working-class family, which began to happen to blacks in the 1960s, began to happen to whites in the 1980s and 1990s.40
Latino and Asian Americans account for an increasing fraction of American couples and children. Generally speaking, families in recent immigrant communities are much stronger by such conventional measures as marriage rates, nonmarital births, divorce, and two-parent families. This is true despite the lower educational and economic standing of most immigrant groups. In that sense, recent immigrants are the last exemplars of the “traditional” American marriage. On the other hand, some evidence suggests that second-generation immigrants are falling into the familiar two-tier pattern. In other words, this important exception to the class divide among American families may prove transitory.41
Marriage has not lost its allure. An overwhelming majority of Americans from all classes want to marry, and most expect to marry, although here, too, a class gap has begun to appear: in the late 1970s kids from high-school-educated homes (76 percent) were almost as likely as kids from college-educated homes (78 percent) to expect to get married in the long run, but by 2012 that figure among upper-tier kids had risen to 86 percent, while among lower-tier kids the figure remained unchanged.42 On the other hand, scores of studies have found that married people of all educational levels are more satisfied with life than comparable single people. So why has the two-tier class divergence in actual behavior—which did not exist in nearly so clear-cut a way throughout most of the twentieth century—become so marked in the last 30 years or so?
Economics is certainly a very important part of the story. “The wages of men without college degrees have fallen since the early 1970s,” the demographer Andrew J. Cherlin reports, “and the wages of women without college degrees have failed to grow.”43 The greatly reduced economic prospects experienced by poorer, less educated Americans over these four decades (greater job instability and declining relative earnings) have made it far more difficult for them to attain and sustain the traditional pattern of marriage. Unemployment, underemployment, and poor economic prospects discourage and undermine stable relationships—that is the nearly universal finding of many studies, both qualitative and quantitative.44 A growing number of women in the lower portion of the economic hierarchy are reluctant to marry men who can offer little or no economic security. As in the case of Joe and Darleen, deep and chronic economic stress is an important cause of the impermanence among poor couples, even when they are married, causing them to become less reliable partners and parents.
As we saw in Chapter 1, economic hardship is an important precursor for the breakdown of the working-class family: divorce rates and nonmarital birth rates both skyrocketed in Port Clinton during the decade following the collapse of the local economy. And it was primarily the factory closings of the 1980s, not the cultural turmoil of the 1960s, that triggered this collapse. This was a national phenomenon, not limited to the Rust Belt.
Culture is another important part of the story, however. Gender and sexual norms have changed, in particular, as have the roles of less educated men and more educated women.45 For poor men, the disappearance of the stigma against premarital sex and nonmarital birth, and the evaporation of the norm of shotgun marriages, broke the link between procreation and marriage. For educated women, the combination of birth control and greatly enhanced professional opportunity made delayed childbearing both more possible and more desirable.
The ethnographers Kathryn Edin and Maria Kefalas found that while poor women value marriage as much as affluent women, they also believe (just like their sisters higher up the economic hierarchy) that in order to be successful, marriage must be postponed until couples have achieved economic well-being.46 The problem for poorer women is that economic well-being always seems out of reach. Motherhood, by contrast, is open to all women, married or not; it doesn’t immediately require abundant resources, and it offers meaning to their lives. Like Darleen, they often believe that mothering basically involves “being there.” On the basis of long-term ethnographic evidence from poor single mothers, both urban and rural, Linda Burton concludes that “moms in this context seek romance over marriage as a respite from their everyday poverty and uncertainty.”47
Scholars debate the relative importance of “structural” (or economic) and “cultural” explanations for the emergence of the two-tier system. The most reasonable view is that both are important. Moreover, cause and effect are entangled here: poverty produces family instability, and family instability in turn produces poverty. A similar kind of mutual reinforcement occurs between affluence and stability. These complex causal dynamics and feedback loops are all plainly visible in the lives of Andrew’s and Kayla’s families.
One way of understanding this causal conundrum is to consider the impact of the Great Depression—the most massive economic dislocation in American history—on family formation and family life. Evidence from the Great Depression cuts both ways on the issue of economic versus cultural explanations. The Great Depression led to male joblessness and economic dislocation on a massive scale. As a consequence, the marriage rate fell, showing the perennial importance of economic stability in the marriage calculus. (“The boys have no jobs,” one Chicago woman said. “I want a man with a job,” said another.)48 Moreover, according to a 1940 survey, 1.5 million married women were deserted by their husbands, and more than 200,000 vagrant children were said to be wandering the country as a result.49 In a landmark study of the lives of 167 white children raised during the Great Depression, Glen Elder found that when fathers lost jobs and income, their ties with the family eroded, leading to a significant decline in the effectiveness of parental control. Eighty years (and several cultural revolutions) later, it’s still true that hard times deter and destroy marriages.50
On the other hand, in the 1930s the birth rate also fell sharply, and between 1920 and 1940 unwed births remained consistently low.51 In that era, men and women postponed procreation as well as matrimony. “No marriage license, no kids” was the cultural norm. Unlike today, desperately poor, jobless men in the 1930s did not have kids outside of marriage whom they then largely ignored. Today the role of father has become more voluntary, which means that, as Marcia Carlson and Paula England have put it, “only the most committed and financially stable men choose to embrace it.”52 This important cultural shift matters a good deal for the sorts of families within which poor kids today are raised.53
Could changes in public policy or political ideology have had the perverse effect of undermining the conventional two-parent family? The most commonly discussed possibility, by far, is that welfare benefits gave poor single women an incentive to have kids. Some careful studies have confirmed a modest, statistically significant effect of that sort. But the steady, accelerating increase in single-parent families over the last half century does not correspond to the ebb and flow of mothers on welfare. Welfare rolls increased in the late 1960s and early 1970s, declined gradually from 1972 to 1992, then declined more sharply throughout the 1990s. Moreover, since many mothers who experienced the collapse of the traditional family were not on welfare, the welfare system cannot have been the major cause. And the collapse continued apace even after welfare eligibility was tightened in 1996.54
“Family values” conservatives have sometimes argued that liberalism and secularism cause family disintegration. But unwed births and single-parent families are widely distributed across the country, and are concentrated neither in secular areas nor in “blue” states, which presumably have pursued more progressive policies. If anything, the opposite seems to be true: divorce and single-parent families are especially common in the Southeastern, heavily Republican, socially conservative Bible Belt.55 We can’t make any inferences about causality from such simple correlations, but these patterns should caution us against assuming that the collapse of the working-class family (white or nonwhite) can be attributed to the decline of organized religion or to any political ideology. Changing personal values are an important part of the story, but only in conjunction with adverse economic trends, and ideology seems to have very little to do with it.
There was a set of policy choices in the 1980s that probably did contribute to family breakdown: the War on Drugs, “three strikes” sentencing, and the sharp increase in incarceration. Figure 2.7 shows the explosion of incarceration rates in the years after 1980, despite a decline in violent crime during that same period. That explosion was heavily concentrated among less educated young men, especially (but not only) young black men—a disproportionate number of whom, surprisingly, were young fathers.56
For both black children and white children, the risk of having a parent imprisoned by the time they reached 14 rose significantly between the birth cohort of 1978 (kids born in 1978) and the birth cohort of 1990, and that risk was concentrated among children whose parents were less educated. Children born in 1990 to high school dropouts were more than four times as likely to have a parent sent to prison as were children born that same year to college-educated parents. More than half of all black children born to less educated parents in 1990 experienced parental imprisonment.57
This period of exploding incarceration is precisely the period in which single-parent families became more and more common in the less educated, lower-income stratum of the population. Correlation does not prove causation, of course, but mass incarceration has certainly removed a very large number of young fathers from poor neighborhoods, and the effects of their absence, on white and nonwhite kids alike, are known to be traumatic, leaving long-lasting scars. They certainly did in David’s life in Ohio and Joe’s life in Oregon.
Paternal incarceration (independent of other facts about a child’s background, like the parents’ education and income and race) is a strong predictor of bad educational outcomes, like getting poor grades and dropping out of school. Indeed, the pernicious effects of incarceration “spill over” onto the classmates of kids whose dads are imprisoned, even if the dads of those classmates are not in prison. Although imprisonment and its effects on kids are much more common among racial minorities, the effects of imprisonment itself are fully as pernicious among white kids.58 Having a dad in prison is, we shall see in the chapters ahead, one of the most common themes in the lives of poor kids.