524521ANN
research-article2014
The Annals of The American AcademyFIFTY YEARS OF FAMILY CHANGE
Fifty Years of
Family Change:
From
Consensus to
Complexity
The first section of the article discusses how and why
we went from a relatively undifferentiated family system in the middle of the last century to the current
system of diverse family forms. Even conceding that
the family system was always less simple than it now
appears in hindsight, there is little doubt that we began
to depart from the dominant model of the nuclearfamily household in the late 1960s. I explain how
change is a result of adaptation by individuals and family members to changing economic, demographic,
technological, and cultural conditions. The breakdown
of the gender-based division of labor was the prime
mover in my view. Part two of the article thinks about
family complexity in the United States as largely a product of growing stratification. I show how family formation processes associated with low human capital
produces complexity over time in family systems, a
condition that may be amplified by growing levels of
inequality. The last part of the article briefly examines
complexity in a changing global context. I raise the
question of how complexity varies among economically
developed nations with different family formation practices and varying levels of inequality.
Keywords: marriage; social class; multiple-partner
fertility; inequality; family formation
By
Frank F. Furstenberg
E
ven for me—a student of family change for
the past half century—it is difficult to comprehend just how much the American family
has changed in the time since I entered graduate school in the early 1960s. In the United
States, we have gone from an era where almost
everyone acted in lockstep when forming families, to the present day when variation has
Frank F. Furstenberg is a professor of sociology and a
research associate in the Population Studies Center at
the University of Pennsylvania. His recent books are
Behind the Academic Curtain: How to Find Success
and Happiness with a PhD (University of Chicago
Press 2013) and Destinies of the Disadvantaged: The
Politics of Teen Childbearing (Russell Sage Foundation
2007). His current research focuses on higher education, the transition from adolescence to adulthood, and
cross-national research on intergenerational transfers.
DOI: 10.1177/0002716214524521
12ANNALS, AAPSS, 654, July 2014
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FIFTY YEARS OF FAMILY CHANGE
13
become the hallmark of how Americans form partnerships and have children.
Fifty years ago, a vast majority of young adults in the United States was married
and had children by their mid-twenties, while today only a small minority of young
adults has formed families by their mid-thirties, and close to a fifth will never
enter into a lasting partnership or have children (Kennedy and Furstenberg 2013).
True, family formation patterns in the 1960s also represented a sharp departure from the proceeding decades during the Great Depression and Second
World War (Cherlin 1981). Nonetheless, whether we cast our vision back to the
early decades of the previous century or begin with the anomalous “baby boom
era” at midcentury, it is difficult to construct a simple, linear pattern in the timetable for entering adulthood from past to present. Nor can we say that what has
been happening to the American family is truly distinctive. The patterns of postponement and variability that characterize contemporary family formation in the
United States are also evident in most nations with advanced economies. Though
some changes in the United States have been more pronounced than in other
Western nations, most countries have followed a similar course of family change.
Specifically, virtually all countries with advanced economies have undergone a
package of changes that demographers refer to as the Second Demographic
Transition (Lesthaege and Niedert 2006; Sobotka 2008):
•• The long-standing link between the initiation of sex and marriage has broken down. The value placed on virginity at marriage has been seriously
depreciated throughout the West and may be changing in parts of the developing world (Furstenberg 2007).
•• The institution of marriage, at least as we have known it, has weakened in
most nations. Cohabitation before or instead of marriage has become more
widespread and more acceptable as an alternative to legal marriage in
almost all Western countries and may be occurring in greater frequency in
post-industrial nations throughout most of the West and a growing part of
Eastern Europe (Kiernan 2002).
•• Rates of nonmarital childbearing have risen in all Western nations, albeit at
very different levels, leading to higher levels of union instability and singleparent families (Heuveline, Timberlake, and Furstenberg 2003).
•• Childbearing, especially in marriage, occurs much later, leading in part to
fertility declines and the growth of childlessness. Rates of childlessness are
growing especially quickly in the economically developed countries of Asia
(Frejka et al. 2008; Kohler, Billari, and Ortega 2002; Morgan 2003).
•• Social class differences in family formation have widened as inequality has
grown in virtually all countries with advanced economies (Smeeding 2005).
In particular, the differences between the haves and the have-nots have
widened in the timing of first birth and whether it takes place within or
outside of marriage.
All of these patterns of change have contributed to growing variability in
family formation within nations and probably within regional and cultural
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THE ANNALS OF THE AMERICAN ACADEMY
subgroups. Two leading social demographers, Francesco Billari and Aart
Liefbroer (2010), have labeled this pattern as “convergence to divergence.”
Accounting for these global changes in the postindustrial family and assessing
their consequences on the welfare of children have been topics of much debate
and a growing body of scholarship in the United States, Europe, and throughout
Anglo-speaking nations. Increasingly, it has become a topic of interest in Asia
(Yeung, Alipio, and Furstenberg 2013).
These changes were largely unanticipated 50 years ago. Indeed, the preeminent family scholar of the day at that time, William J. Goode (1963), predicted a
general convergence to the conjugal family (based on strong marital bonds and
weaker bonds across generations and within lineages). While Goode’s forecasts
were right in some respects, he largely missed the mark when it came to what has
happened in the United States and indeed throughout much of the West. It is not
even clear that his main projections will hold true for Asia or Africa, where the
strength of lineage may be declining but the growth of the conjugal family has
been uneven (Cherlin 2012; Furstenberg 2013).
In this article, I first touch on the reasons why family change has taken such
an unexpected turn, creating more variation and structural complexity than uniformity and simplicity, as Goode’s theory of family change would have predicted.
Elsewhere, I have argued that Goode simply did not see what was almost staring
him in the face in the 1960s: an impending gender revolution that unsettled the
seeming inevitability of the conjugal family. Marriage and marriage-like unions
are simply not organized the way they were 50 years ago; the creation of stable
unions has proven to be far more challenging than when the system that was
rooted in the gender-based division of labor prevailed.
The changes that were about to take place in gender roles within and outside
the family were barely evident in the 1960s when family sociologists and economists were still contending that the marked division of labor in the American
family contributed to its unique strength (Coser 1974; Parsons 1942). Isolated
from strong lineage bonds that dominated in most traditional family systems, the
Western model of the family had demonstrated the flexibility to “fit,” to use
Goode’s term, or adapt to the demands of an emerging industrial economy.
Males, we were told then, embodied the instrumental skills necessary for gaining
a livelihood, while females possessed expressive skills necessary for childrearing
(Zelditch 1955). Of course, variability still occurred, especially across socioeconomic strata, but those not living in nuclear households with children were seen
as more aberrant than they are regarded today (Cherlin 1981).
I offer a brief description of why and how the family shifted from a coherent
and dominant model of nuclear families formed early in life to a system that is
less prescribed and less uniform. There is no broadly accepted explanation, but
most scholars believe that a constellation of changing conditions undermined the
model of family formation in place in the middle of the last century. I share this
belief, but I also contend that the widening inequality in American society (and
postindustrial societies in general) has exacerbated the changes that have
occurred, amplifying the consequences for children who grow up in less advantaged circumstances (Carlson and England 2011).
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FIFTY YEARS OF FAMILY CHANGE
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I also consider some of the implications of the changes in how families are
formed for perpetuating social inequality. In particular, I focus on the growing
complexity of families in which children grow up with both biological and nonbiological parents and in kinship systems that are complicated by a succession of
multiple partnerships. While this pattern is not unique to the United States, it is
far more prevalent in that country than in any other wealthy nation with an
advanced economy (Cherlin 2009). In the final section, I speculate on whether
kinship complexity may increase in the West and among other nations with postindustrial economies.
Why the Changes Occurred
How did we get from there to here, and why did the changes unfold so rapidly?
Whenever demographic patterns change so swiftly, it is safe to assume that many
interrelated sources are operating simultaneously and most, if not all, are working
in the same direction. When they shift so quickly, there is also reason to suspect
that existing patterns may have concealed latent conflicts and contradictions that
become actively expressed in the larger culture in which the family system is
embedded. The early marriage pattern in the United States—let’s call it marriage, 1950s-style or, even, “traditional marriage”—was riddled with contradictions that were mostly unacknowledged at the time (Bernard 1982; Coontz 1993;
Komarovsky 1946; May 1988).
In the 1950s, the median age of marriage fell to just over 20 years for women
and to just below 23 years for men, figures substantially lower than in most other
nations with developed economies (Carter and Glick 1976). Following the
Second World War, courtship among couples was typically brief; in many
instances, it was almost nonexistent. Most couples wed after dating for barely
more than a year; among couples in their teens, the median length of courtship
was especially brief (Burgess and Wallin 1953; Hollingshead 1949; Moss,
Apolonio, and Jensen 1971; Pierce 1963). Marriage at this time constituted what
might be called the mainspring for the transition to adulthood, swiftly following
the completion of education and entrance to the labor force. Young people did
not linger in early adulthood as they do today (Modell, Furstenberg, and
Herschberg 1976; Furstenberg 2010).
Romantic love was regarded as the reason to marry, and many couples did so
impulsively, especially in the aftermath of the Second World War. Strict prohibitions on premarital sex, particularly for women, encouraged couples to “go
steady” or become engaged when they “fell in love” in part because sexual strictures were relaxed when couples were committed to marriage. Premarital pregnancies were a common prelude to matrimony, propelling many couples into
hasty and often ill-considered unions (Cannon and Long 1971).
In the mid-1960s, when I began my study of teenage parenthood in Baltimore,
this marriage pattern was still largely intact. My ringside seat allowed me to
observe why early marriage was breaking down among African American teens.
Though I did not realize it at the time, the changes that I saw among black teens
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THE ANNALS OF THE AMERICAN ACADEMY
foreshadowed trends in nonmarital childbearing that were to sweep the rest of
the population in the 1970s and 1980s.
Almost all the pregnant white teens in my study (about a fifth of the sample)
married before their child was born. The few who did not marry gave up their
children for adoption. Black pregnant teens faced a different choice, because
many of the fathers lacked steady employment and had poor prospects of finding
remunerative jobs in the immediate future. Because both the pregnant teens and
their mothers were interviewed in the first wave of the study, I was privy to the
conversations that were taking place inside families. Mothers were frequently
counseling their daughters to postpone marriage until they and the fathers of their
children completed their education and found employment. “I told her not to
marry him just to give the child a name,” was a phrase that recurred in the interviews. “Wait until he has something more to offer you,” mothers counseled their
pregnant daughters. The daughters did not always take their mothers’ advice, but
almost all confessed later that they wished that they had (Furstenberg 1976).
Similar family dialogues may well have occurred in previous eras because patterns of premarital pregnancy, especially among black teens, had existed throughout the first part of the twentieth century. American couples, it seemed, often
were prodded into marriage by impending parenthood. However, the situation
for low-educated males was changing dramatically in the 1960s, as well-paying,
low-skill jobs began to leave American shores, owing to the European recovery
and the beginnings of the globalization of capital. So at the macro level, the
economy in the United States was changing in ways that had a particular and
pronounced effect on the population that I was observing. The “logic” of early
marriage was beginning not to make sense to the most disadvantaged women and
their families. As more and more African Americans began to eschew early marriage, rates of nonmarital childbearing in this population soared. Had I began my
study 15 or 20 years later, the same discussions would have been occurring
among the families of the white teenagers. By then, the trade-off for pregnant
women between a precipitous marriage and having a child outside of marriage
had changed for the vast majority of American women, and the stigma of nonmarital childbearing had all but disappeared.
Early entry into marriage and parenthood became problematic for more
advantaged (and better-educated) women for a different set of reasons. Even
before the publication of Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique (1963), feminist
scholars such as Mira Komarovsky (1946) and Jessie Bernard (1942) had detected
a set of cultural contradictions in well-educated families. Well-educated parents
began sending daughters to college in growing numbers; at the same time,
women were electing to go directly from school into a married life that centered
exclusively on domestic activities. Feminism, especially during the 1970s and
1980s, became part of the volatile mix of conditions that propelled educated
women into the workforce even when economic conditions did not require them
to work. (Incidentally, it is interesting to note that a similar sort of cultural dialogue is taking place in parts of East Asia at the time of this writing.)
Rising standards of household consumption probably contributed to the
growth of all women in the labor force regardless of their educational attainment.
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FIFTY YEARS OF FAMILY CHANGE
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In the accounts of the time, many women in the middle class claimed that they
remained in or reentered the labor force to help afford the purchase of a home,
household appliances, televisions, and automobiles, or to support their children’s
college education. The stagnant wages of male earners and rising expectations for
what it took to secure a place in the middle class encouraged many women to
remain in the labor force even after they had children and even for some of those
who might have otherwise preferred not to continue working had males’ incomes
been rising more rapidly (Hoffman 1961; Rubin 1976).
The availability of widespread family planning services and, especially, the
advent of oral contraceptives, grew from the late 1960s onward, allowing women
to exercise greater control over the timing of their births (Furstenberg 2007).
This permitted married women to control their fertility, making labor force participation more feasible for women. And for the first time, unmarried women
could initiate sex without the fear of getting pregnant. In 1973, the Supreme
Court affirmed the right to legal abortion, giving women another strategy for
managing ill-timed and unwanted pregnancies. No doubt, the growing practice
of family planning facilitated and extended the work lives of women who increasingly were being counted on as supplementary wage earners or household heads
whose ranks were rapidly increasing.
Rising divorce rates beginning in the mid-1960s probably also figured into the
mix of conditions that encouraged women to enter and remain in the labor force.
Of course, a growing number of single mothers needed to work to support themselves and their children. But increasingly, women began to hedge their bets,
much as African American women had long done, by becoming more economically self-sufficient. Thus, increasing rates of marital dissolution probably had
both direct and indirect effects on increasing rates of women, with all levels of
education, in the labor force.
This combination of economic, technological, social, and cultural changes all
contributed to the weakening of the strict gender-based division of labor that had
prevailed throughout the Baby Boom era. Although demographic and historical
scholars have not completely sorted out all of the precise paths of influence, it
seems likely that different segments of the population were susceptible to varying
combinations of these altered conditions. What we do know is that from the late
1960s to the present day, in a broadly linear fashion women entered the labor
force in growing proportions, marriage age began to rise, women began to feel
more empowered and even compelled to pursue careers and full-time employment, use of contraceptives steadily increased, and the fertility of married couples declined accordingly.
The Emergence of a Two-Tier Family System in the
United States
We now know that the changes that have occurred over the past 50 years affected
family formation and family stability differently for the disadvantaged
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and advantaged: marriage, as we knew it, became unattainable or at least more
problematic in the bottom half (and perhaps two-thirds) of the population. When
marriages do occur among poor, near-poor, and middle-income couples, they
display as much or even more instability as in the past. Conversely, marriages
among the affluent and college educated have actually become more stable over
the past several decades (Goldstein and Kenney 2001). While marital instability
has long been more common among the less advantaged, the gap in marriage
practices between the top and bottom has grown over the past 50 years. As a
result, the United States has moved toward a two-tier family system in which
practices in establishing and maintaining families among the affluent and the
disadvantaged have become more dissimilar.
At the top tier of well-educated and affluent Americans, couples typically do
not enter marriage until late in the third or early in the fourth decades of life.
They usually do so only after an extended period of cohabitation where the relationship is tested before they enter marriage and before having children. As I
have written elsewhere, marriage is increasingly regarded as less of a pledge to
commitment than a celebration of commitment that has already been
demonstrated.
In the second tier of family formation, couples generally begin forming unions
earlier than their well-educated counterparts; the formation of their relationships
occurs almost as swiftly as it did 50 years ago (Manning, Brown, and Payne 2013).
They usually begin cohabitating either shortly before or just after conception. The
pregnancy and inception of the partnership is often viewed as a prelude to an
eventual marriage, but their hopes are usually unrealized. Most of these unions do
not survive the test of time; indeed, they frequently end before children even
enter school. Typically, the cohabiting relationship dissolves before a marriage
occurs; they are in effect “stillborn” marriages that never see the light of day.
It is worth dwelling for a moment on just why the family system of poor
Americans has diverged so sharply from that of their better-off counterparts.
Scholars have multiple explanations, ranging from shifts in cultural values to
structural accounts that are rooted in changes in the economic conditions among
men and women (see, for example, the debate generated by Charles Murray’s
book Coming Apart [2012]). In my view, the debate over cultural and structural
explanations that rages in professional and popular venues is crudely constructed.
Individuals and the family systems that they build must adapt to changing circumstances as I suggested in the introduction of this article. Doing so often
involves altering time-honored practices that no longer work or have become
unattainable. Both these behavioral adaptations and the accounts that people
provide to explain their behavior are likely to change over time more or less
simultaneously. Cultural change usually accompanies—sometimes proceeding
and sometimes lagging—changes in economic circumstances (see Small, Harding,
and Lamont 2010). This adaptive process usually feeds itself as cultural norms
adapt to current structural realities and vice versa. This is surely part of the reason why cohabitation in the United States became so prevalent over such a short
span of time and quickly is becoming an alternative to formal marriage among
couples with limited means and prospects.
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FIFTY YEARS OF FAMILY CHANGE
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Inequality and the Growth of the Two-Tier Family
The larger backdrop under which the two-tier family has emerged is the growth
of economic inequality that began in the final third of the last century and continues today. Though much of this growth has been driven by the rapid increase
at the very top of the income distribution, it has also been fed by the economic
stagnation of incomes in the bottom two-thirds of the income distribution. In
part, the relatively slow pace of growth in the proportion of young adults who
graduate from college (compared to more rapid increases in other rich nations)
suggests that college graduation may have become more difficult for young people from low- and moderate-income families. During the past several decades,
the United States has lost its position as the nation with the highest proportion of
college graduates and now ranks thirteenth, slightly below the OECD average
(OECD 2012).
Though the matter is far from settled empirically, I suspect that income inequality, when combined with the slower growth of the college population, is
contributing to the divergence of family patterns. Specifically, it seems likely that,
apart from other sources of family change mentioned earlier in this article, the
growth in inequality has made the family system that was in place 50 years ago
far more difficult to sustain for lower-income and less well-educated couples: in
other words, they are compelled to settle for cohabitation because they believe
that a successful marriage is out of their reach (Edin and Kefalas 2005).
In growing numbers, young couples without means have begun to find
entrance to marriage daunting as they contend with the challenge of finding stable and well-paying jobs in an era when remunerative jobs have all but disappeared for couples with a high school education or less (Lichter, Turner, and
Sassler 2010). This in turn has led young adults to question the wisdom of entering matrimony before they are “settled.” In a recent article that examined the
process of settling into permanent relationships, young couples told of the difficulties of becoming committed when they were still trying to complete their
schooling and enter a job with some future prospects (Kefalas et al. 2011). The
problem for many couples in the bottom and even the middle third of the socioeconomic distribution is that they may never enjoy the level of economic security
that their counterparts expected or had 50 years ago.
Cohabitation and even childbearing within cohabiting unions seem like sensible steps, a hedge against the uncertainties of a poor labor market. Like the
young mothers in the Baltimore study, a growing number of women are reluctant
to enter marriage with men who offer them little or no economic security. Better,
they reason, to wait until their partners have a more secure foothold in the
economy. Though this more provisional form of a union may make sense to those
with limited means and uncertain prospects, a large body of evidence suggests
that cohabiting unions in the United States are a highly unstable family form, far
more so than marriages, especially when pregnancy and childbearing precedes
coresidence. Thus, the problem is not so much entering these partnerships but
making them stable and enduring unions, as seems to occur more commonly in
parts of Northern Europe.
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The churning of relationships that occurs among cohabiting couples, especially
among young parents with children, might be predicted for several different reasons. First, lower-income and less-educated couples are far more likely to have an
unintended birth because they are less adept at practicing contraception and have
less access to abortion in the event that they become pregnant (Guzzo and Payne
2012). Arguably, they are less motivated to avoid a birth, too, if only because they
have less to lose if an early birth occurs. Elsewhere, I have argued that the political
culture in the United States provides less support for pregnancy prevention than
in many European nations (Furstenberg 2007). Whatever the explanations, many
lower-income couples are more likely than their better-off counterparts to enter
partnerships facing impending parenthood. Second, the relationships are less
likely to survive because of the very reasons that lead couples to cohabit rather
than to marry. The absence of resources is probably a good part of the explanation
for the transience of these fledgling families. Lower-income couples are under
constant economic pressure, a source of guilt and resentment that not infrequently leads to conflict and recrimination. Often, these recriminations take the
form of “gender mistrust.” Women complain that men are not ready to stop running around and settle down; men, in turn, complain that their partners expect too
much from them. These complaints have long occurred, but the cultural force that
marriage once held no longer keeps people in officially sanctioned unions, and
people who are not in officially sanctioned unions have great difficulty compelling
each other to stay together when they are not getting along.
As far back as 20 years ago, I learned from interviewing young couples in
Baltimore that relatively few appear to possess the interpersonal skills necessary
to establish a harmonious, gratifying, and sustainable union, especially under conditions of high stress. At the same time, it also seems that emotional expectations
for a relationship—what constitutes a good partnership—have been rising.
Working mothers feel entitled to emotional support and practical assistance from
their partners, and men (especially when they lack steady employment) often feel
inadequate in the face of these demands. Many of the women whom I interviewed
complained that the men who fathered their children were not only unreliable as
partners but were also unreliable as parents. When asked why she did not marry
the father of her child, one woman explained to me, “I already have two children.
I don’t need a third,” referring to the child’s father (Furstenberg 1995).
Communication, problem-solving skills, the development of trust—especially
when these attributes are not cultivated in childhood—are in short supply in
families where parental education is low, work is unstable, and life is continually
stressful. These interpersonal skills can be acquired in later life through education, work, and experience in relationships, but lower-income couples do not
easily develop them, especially when they enter relationships early in life and
especially with offspring on the way. Data from a number of sources, most notably from the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study, reveal that nonmarital
unions with children are quite volatile; the presence of a child does not seem to
stabilize the partnership. Five years after the birth of their children, about half of
the women who were cohabiting but not married at the time that their child was
born were no longer living with the father of their child (Kiernan et al. 2011).
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This pattern of family formation, often centered on an early and unplanned
birth in couples that are unprepared to assume the responsibilities of parenthood, stands in stark contrast to the practice of couples possessing a college
degree or more. Similar to those with less education, first unions often start out
as a cohabiting relationship. While cohabiting unions do not invariably evolve
into marriages among the well-educated, they almost always do when childbearing is initiated. Marriage is a transition, signaling that the couple is ready to have
a family. They have acquired, in the words of some, “the marriage mentality”
(Kefalas et al. 2011). In other words, they are ready and able to settle into family
life because they have deemed that they are emotionally well suited to each other
and have sufficient resources to support a family even if they have not decided
that they want children immediately or, for that matter, ever. Under these conditions, it is not surprising that when marriages occur, their prospects of surviving
are greater than they were 50 years ago (Goldstein and Kenney 2001).
Multiple-Partner Fertility and the Growth of Complex
Families
A number of circumstances contribute to the volatility of cohabiting unions
among less-well-educated and lower-income couples that are hastily constructed
around the birth of a child. A pattern of family flux that used to be associated
almost exclusively with teenage childbearing has now become more common
among women in their early and mid-twenties (Manlove et al. 2008). It is no
longer primarily confined to African Americans but now occurs among lowerincome whites and Hispanics in growing proportions. Families in lower-income
circumstances are often formed before the partners are really ready to take on
the responsibilities of parenthood in part because many “truly disadvantaged”
(Wilson 1987) couples suspect that they may never reach a point when they
become “truly secure.”
When I examined the family formation patterns of the women in Baltimore, I
discovered that both men and women who had children from an early relationship often moved on quickly to have an additional child in a new partnership
(which typically occurred soon after the earlier relationship dissolved). Whether
they did so deliberately, they appeared to regard another pregnancy and child as
a means of securing this new union, hoping that parenthood a second (or third)
time would generate a sense of commitment to the new family (Furstenberg and
Berkowitz King 1998; Furstenberg, Brooks-Gunn, and Morgan 1987).
This effort frequently failed. If anything, having children with their new partners only reduced their prospects of forming a stable second union. Multiplepartner fertility brings a series of new challenges to couples that are often
ill-suited to manage them by dint of their limited resources and interpersonal
skills. Of course, multiple-partner fertility does also happen among college-educated couples (usually after divorce and remarriage), but its impact may not be
as consequential for the children involved when serial childbearing partnerships
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occur to couples who have more resources and better skills to manage the complex families created by childbearing with two or more partners (Bronte-Tinkew,
Horowitz, and Scott 2009; Dorius 2012). In any event, multiple-partner fertility
occurs far less frequently among the well-educated (Carlson and Furstenberg
2006; Evenhouse and Reilly 2010; Guzzo and Furstenberg 2007; Qian, Lichter,
and Mellott 2005).
An important but largely still unanswered question is how multiple-partner
fertility affects children (Meyer and Cancian 2012; Tach 2012). The research
challenge is sorting out the selection of couples with very different demographic
and psychological attributes from the social process generated when couples
encounter the challenges of supporting and raising children across different
households. If couples with low resources and poor interpersonal skills are
prone to forming families involving multiple-partner fertility and those with
ample resources and high interpersonal skills are forming families that do not
involve this, it is very difficult to tell whether their children are affected by distinctive family structures or merely by an array of prior conditions that produce
these different family structures. Researchers must take great care to sort out
this methodological problem before they reach the conclusion that complexity
resulting from a family system created by multiple-partner fertility really has
adverse consequences for children over and above what would occur by virtue
of their parents’ social standing, available social support provided by kin and
friends, interpersonal skills, psychological, and cognitive capacities.
Family Complexity and Its Consequences for Children
There is little evidence from anthropological studies that household complexity
per se creates greater problems for children’s development and welfare, though
cross-cultural studies show that characteristic strains exist in families created by
plural marriages or joint families. As far as I know, there is no evidence that children growing up in complex households in family systems across the globe experience more problems in later life; indeed, there are reasons to expect just the
opposite if multiple caregivers (parents, grandparents, uncles, and aunts) provide
attention and care to children in the household. The greater number of parent
figures, one might hypothesize, the greater the investment in children so long as
the attention and care is stable and coordinated. There are institutionalized patterns of authority, control, and caring in joint families and in households with
plural marriages where these forms are common (Altman and Ginat 1996; Hill
and König 1970; LeVine and New 2008). Moreover, complex family systems generally are associated with the presence of greater, not fewer, resources, in stark
contrast to the pattern of multiple-partner fertility that especially characterizes
the family formation patterns of lower-income Americans.
In fact, very little is known about how such families function: whether and how
biological parents and stepparents or social parents (parents formed by cohabitation) collaborate, how they relate to biological and nonbiological children, and
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FIFTY YEARS OF FAMILY CHANGE
23
the practices of extended kin in family systems created by multiple-partner fertility. However, there is a great deal of research on the complex family systems
created by divorce and remarriage—a more familiar form of a complex family
system (Cherlin and Furstenberg 1994; Furstenberg and Cherlin 1991; Ryan,
Kalil, and Ziol-Guest 2008; Sweeney 2010). Family scholars have discovered that
family systems resulting from marriage/divorce/remarriage can and often do create distinctive problems for couples and their children (Smock and Greenland
2010). There are a number of reasons why this is so, apart from the selection
issues mentioned earlier:
1.There is more competition for fewer resources in these families. Parents
(mostly fathers) must allocate money, time, and emotional support to biological children with whom they may not be living and stepchildren who
may be part of their current household but with whom they have tenuous
relationships. Given the limited supply of these resources, the average
investment in children is likely to be lower than it is in a comparable
nuclear family if only because of the greater number of obligations that
must be managed across different households (Thomson and McLanahan
2012).
2. Organizing time and establishing regular routines across households is difficult to achieve, especially among parents who may harbor misgivings or
jealousy toward previous partners. Coordination of parenting responsibilities is complicated to work out when ex-partners feel aggrieved and supplanted. It requires communication, restraint, and strategic skills that often
exceed what is required in managing a two-biological parent household or
even one formed by a single parent and her parent(s).
3.Divorce and remarriage frequently disrupt intergenerational exchange.
Grandparents may not see their biological grandchildren (especially if they
reside with the other parent). They may be reluctant to treat their
stepgrandchildren as they would the offspring produced by their own children. This can produce tensions across the generations, as parents may
resent the lack of involvement by their own kin.
4.Systems external to the family, such as schools, health care providers, and
social services, may find it more difficult to access appropriate parents
when problems or needs arise. Stepparents frequently complain that they
are left out of the loop and may feel compelled to withdraw when nonresidential biological parents step into problem situations.
All of these issues arise in a more acute form in the family systems of unmarried couples who have children in successive partnerships:
1.Bonds between cohabiting couples are often weaker than they are for married couples; this suggests that parenting issues surrounding authority and
control in the family could readily occur. For example, social parents might
be inclined to defer to biological parents even when the latter are unin-
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THE ANNALS OF THE AMERICAN ACADEMY
volved in childrearing. Or, conversely, they might find themselves competing with biological parents living apart from their children. They may expect
their partner’s ex to help support his or her children and resent the financial
burdens imposed if he or she does not. The unclear boundaries of parental
responsibilities may create conflicts that undermine the relations in both
new and former partnerships.
2. Children may receive even less investment from social parents than they do
from stepparents. To my knowledge, we simply do not know how surrogate
parents relate to their children. When and under what circumstances do
they “adopt” their surrogate children, treating them as if they were their
own? There is still not a sufficient body of evidence to answer this question.
The anecdotal evidence is not particularly reassuring; from most accounts,
children do not easily assimilate new parents into the household.
3.Extended kin may withhold support that they would otherwise provide in
the event of a marriage. For example, the parents of the surrogate partner
may not claim or enact the grandparent role as readily as they would if the
couple enters marriage. Once again, it would be useful to know much more
than we currently do about how grandparent relations evolve over time and
the involvement of extended kin.
4.The ambiguities of cohabitation may make the interface with bureaucratic
systems even more difficult than they are when remarriage occurs. States
and localities differ in the degree to which they have institutionalized
cohabiting partnerships. It may be possible to examine questions regarding
the interface between families and bureaucracies by comparing the impact
of state practices on families of different structures.
5.Finally, we know relatively little about the ties that develop between full
and half siblings in childhood and beyond. Indeed, I know of no research
that follows families formed by cohabitation for a long enough time to get
a good fix on how kinship obligations are carried over into the adult years.
Possibly, as legal and social conventions will eventually respond to the new
realities of provisional families, relationships across households and the obligations they entail may become more institutionalized. In the meantime, they
constitute both a less stable and less well-established form of the family. Many
developmental researchers, not to mention social critics, think that the complexities of multiple-partner fertility contribute to poorer prospects for children’s success in later life, beyond what can be attributed to the adverse selection of
parents forming second-tier families (Brown 2010; Sassler 2010). But at this
stage, our speculations outrun the data required to test them.
Inequality in American society has widened over the past four decades and is
probably both a precursor and a product of the two-tier family system. In the top
tier, we see growing evidence that parents expect to provide more resources for
and interaction with their children and have actually increased their investments
in their offspring, especially in spending on childcare and higher education.
Moreover, they are in a better position to do so, as marital homogamy among the
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FIFTY YEARS OF FAMILY CHANGE
25
highly educated has increased over time (Schwartz and Mare 2005), helping twoearner professional families enter the top of the income distribution. At the bottom and in the middle of the distribution, evidence suggests that families are also
spending more per capita on their children than they did several decades ago, but
the gap between what is required of contemporary parents and what they have
to spend has grown (Kornrich and Furstenberg 2013). At the bottom of the
income ladder, the costs of childrearing have been partially offset through government programs aimed at assisting poor families and children, but the economic position of middle-income families has stagnated over the past several
decades even as costs of raising children have mounted.
Inequality and the Two-Tier Family System in
Comparative Perspective
As I noted in the beginning of this article, the changes in the family system that
have occurred in the United States, notably the weakening of marriage and the
growth of nonmarital childbearing, are widespread throughout Europe and other
Anglo-speaking nations. However, it is not as clear whether the two-tier family
system that has emerged in this country is as evident elsewhere. This is a critical
question because its helps to elucidate the reasons why family change may take
different forms in varying contexts. It is entirely possible that the features of the
Second Demographic Transition may play out quite differently depending on
local conditions that moderate the impact of family change such as culture and
public policy, the strength of religious institutions, and the quality and openness
of the educational-employment system for young adults coming from families
with moderate means.
In particular, I would expect to find far lower rates of multiple-partner fertility
in Europe and other Anglo-speaking nations for several different (but perhaps
related) reasons:
First, the volatility of relationships in this country occurs in part because young
adults, especially those who are more economically disadvantaged, are far less
adept at practicing contraception and preventing unwanted conceptions than
their counterparts in Canada, Australia, and most of Europe. Unintended pregnancies and births are far more common in the United States than in Europe or
the other Anglo-speaking nations (Mosher and Jones 2010). So Americans, especially those who are educationally and economically disadvantaged, enter relationships earlier, and these unions are more frequently accompanied by
parenthood. These partnerships are especially vulnerable to dissolution.
Second, commitment to existing partnerships may be weaker in this country
than elsewhere. Or to put it differently, Americans may tolerate or prefer more
discretion in changing partners. This could reflect a long-standing cultural difference, as Andrew Cherlin (2009) has argued, in explanation of why union instability is particular high in the United States. Cherlin argues that religion has played
a unique role, but other factors surely contribute as well, such as higher rates of
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THE ANNALS OF THE AMERICAN ACADEMY
geographical mobility, which conceivably undermine the power of families to
influence both marriage and divorce decisions. Moreover, there are significantly
higher levels of poverty and economic disadvantage in the United States. The
higher proportion of people living less well may contribute to the greater volatility in relationships that occur in the bottom socioeconomic strata.
These explanations are not mutually exclusive and may well combine to produce a family system in which multiple-partner fertility may be common in the
United States but relatively infrequent elsewhere. Over the past several years,
there has been a small stream of studies on the incidence and consequences of
multiple-partner fertility in Europe, using a variety of data sources. In this volume, Elizabeth Thomson reviews some of her own research and cites others,
showing that, compared to the United States, the rate of multiple-partner fertility
is far lower in Sweden and in some other nations for which longitudinal data on
fertility and partnerships were available (see also Thomson et al., forthcoming).
The evidence that Thomson and her collaborators have assembled along with
other scattered reports indicate that multiple-partner fertility may be growing
outside of the United States but from a far lower baseline. The incidence of
childbearing across partnerships among mothers with two or more children is
substantially higher in the United States than in the Nordic countries of Norway
and Sweden (33 vs. 20 and 16 percent, respectively) and almost 40 percent higher
than in Australia (33 vs. 24 percent). The differences are largely accounted for by
higher levels of earlier and presumably unplanned births of younger unmarried
women in the United States. Thomson suggests that multiple-partner fertility
may be more prevalent in some Eastern European nations, which have very high
rates of union instability.
Both union stability and the absence of early childbearing appear to depress
the incidence of multiple-partner fertility. No doubt, more effective contraceptive use outside of the United States also explains the relatively low levels of
childbearing across multiple partnerships in Europe and other Anglo-speaking
countries. Still, it is very likely that childbearing across partnerships may be growing with the decline of union stability that is occurring as marital unions are
replaced by cohabitating unions throughout much of the Western world.
Conclusion
This article explained how a set of conditions in the United States has given rise
to a changing family system that has become more distinctively different across
socioeconomic strata. Longer delays into adult transitions have had different
consequences for young adults from well-educated families than from families
with low education and limited resources. Among the affluent, the family system
has become more stable over time, while just the opposite has occurred for young
adults from more disadvantaged circumstances.
In large measure, the timing and conditions of first births (the age of the parents and the level of resources that they possess) create divergent pathways for
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FIFTY YEARS OF FAMILY CHANGE
family formation. When births are delayed until first unions have been tested by
cohabitation (often leading to marriage), the likelihood that parents will have
children by two or more partners greatly decreases. If first births are unplanned
and occur before the partners have much experience living together if any at all,
the union is much less likely to survive, and one or both partners will often proceed to have a child with another father or mother.
Currently, the United States has conspicuously higher levels of multiplepartner fertility than the rates reported among other nations with advanced
economies. There are several reasons accounting for this demographic difference: higher levels of poverty, early formation of partnerships among men and
women who are not ready to have children, greater fluidity of relationships, and
lower levels of contraceptive practices. The product of these conditions is higher
rates of unintended births that often destabilize fledgling partnerships. The
United States also has a higher level of single women bearing children outside of
a stable relationship. The good news is that over the past decade and a half, early
childbearing has dropped precipitously; the less good news is that women in their
early twenties (married and unmarried) still have much higher rates of unintended births than occur in Europe, Canada, and the other Anglo-speaking countries. Thus, multiple-partner fertility is likely to continue to be higher in the
United States than elsewhere, though we may see some convergence of the
incidence of parenting across partnerships in the next several decades.
The research on the consequences of more complex families for children is
still inconclusive. There are many theoretical reasons why children may fare less
well when their parents have obligations to children from other partners. We
know that parents who have children with more than one partner are also different in many sociodemographic and psychological ways from those whose parenting is confined to a single union. Without effectively ruling out selection, it is very
difficult to conclude that complexity per se undermines good parenting, couple
collaboration, and successful child development. For the time being, it makes
good sense not to rush to a judgment on the questions of whether or how family
complexity compromises child well-being.
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