The extended family is making something of a comeback, thanks to delayed marriage, immigration, and recession-induced job losses and foreclosures that have forced people to double-up under one roof, an analysis of census figures has found.

“The Waltons are back,” said Paul Taylor, executive vice president of the Pew Research Center, which conducted the analysis.

Multigenerational families, which accounted for 25 percent of the population in 1940 but only 12 percent by 1980, inched up to 16 percent in 2008, according to the analysis.

The analysis also found that the proportion of people 65 and older who live alone, which had been rising steeply for nearly a century — from 6 percent in 1900 to 29 percent in 1990 — declined slightly, to 27 percent.

At the same time, the share of older people living in multigenerational families, which plummeted to 17 percent in 1980 from 57 percent in 1900, rose to 20 percent. ...

The shift appears to have been accelerated by the recession. In 2008, at the beginning of the recession and the latest year for which figures are available, 2.6 million more Americans lived in a multigenerational household than did the year before.

Labels: culture, economics, extended family, grandparents, race

posted by Eve at 12:08 AM EMAIL SHARE PRINT

...We could have predicted these results. The US family system, which once differed little by class or region, has become a marker of race, culture, and religion. A new “blue” family paradigm has handsomely rewarded those who invest in women’s as well as men’s education and defer childbearing until the couple is better established. These families, concentrated in urban areas and the coasts, have seen their divorce rates fall back to the level of the 1960s, incomes rise, and nonmarital births remain rare. With later marriage has also come greater stability and less divorce. ...

These factors reflect class and cultural differences, but all of our research suggests that the great recession is likely to make things worse. The hallmark of what we have termed the blue family paradigm is training for autonomy.

With a more extended transition to adulthood, better educated youth also need greater flexibility – to navigate their developing sexuality; to switch jobs, cities, and specialties; and to renegotiate family and career responsibilities. In hard times, dual careers provide a cushion, and flexibility about gender and work roles makes it easier to trade off child care and employment.

Hard times, however, also increase calls for a return to more fixed and traditional values. The fact that traditional families are flailing often persuades them that a return to traditional values is that much more critical. In today’s world, however, almost all of the traditional nostrums have proved counterproductive.

Missing from this debate is recognition of the bankruptcy of traditionalist family values as policy for the postindustrial era. We are entirely sympathetic with those inclined to lock up their daughters from puberty until marriage, but we do recognize that the societies abroad most insistent on policing women’s virtue are locked into cycles of poverty. ...

The solution? As we outline in great detail in our book “Red Families v. Blue Families,” there are three critical steps we can take: (1) promote access to contraception – within marriage as well as outside it; (2) develop a greater ability to combine not only work and family, but family and education; and (3) make sure the next generation stays in school, learns the skills to be employed, and cultivates values that can adapt to the future.

Labels: abortion, abstinence, conservatism, contraception, culture, divorce, economics, liberalism, Marriage, poverty

posted by Eve at 2:30 PM EMAIL SHARE PRINT

As a long-time champion of the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, it pains me to have to criticize that organization, as well as the Los Angeles Gay and Lesbian Center, for its just-unveiled Rock for Equality action. The premise of the action is simple -- and misguided: that same-sex couples, who, even if they marry, cannot have their marriages recognized under federal law, are discriminated against in social security benefits. ...

This is a hard issue to understand and to explain. I'm going to try. One type of married couple gets this kind of windfall under Social Security -- it's the type of family that Congress had in mind in 1939, when it created the system and only 15% of married women earned their own income. When one spouse has earned all or the vast majority of the couple's income, the non-earner or low-earner spouse gets a retirement benefit equal to half her spouse's, even if she never paid into Social Security; and if her spouse dies first, she will then receive the amount of money he was receiving. Example: If his lifetime earnings entitle him to $1,800/month in benefits, she will receive $900 while he is alive and $1,800 once he dies. (So the household has $2,700/mo. while he is alive and $1,800 when he dies).

When a same-sex couple resembles this couple's earning pattern, that couple is, indeed, disadvantaged by being considered unmarried, when the couple is actually married in a state that allows it.

But same-sex couples with two earners, whose lifetime earnings are pretty close to each other(I'm pretty sure my friend and her partner fall into this category), will gain nothing by being considered married. Instead, they will find themselves, like equal-earning heterosexual couples (including most African-American married couples), paying more into the system and getting less out. Let's say each partner is entitled to $1,350/mo. based on her own earnings. Sure, if they are married, each can qualify for a spousal benefit. But that benefit is instead of, not on top of, what each qualifies for on her own. So the spousal benefit is only $675/mo. instead of $1,350, which, of course, no one would choose. So that household also gets $2,700/mo. while both are alive. But when the first spouse dies, the survivor simply keeps her own benefit -- $1,350. The surviving spouse sees a 50% cut in benefits to the household, compared to the 33% cut experienced by the surviving stay-at-home spouse whose deceased spouse earned all the family's income. ...

Scholars and advocates unconnected to the gay rights movement have been pointing out for years how unfair this system is...to equal earning married couples and to single parents, whose lifetime earnings suffer because of their childcare responsibilities and who have no income-earning spouse confering a spousal benefit. Research by the Institute for Women's Policy Research [pdf] and law professor Dorothy Brown [pdf] demonstrates that black couples are disadvantaged by the current Social Security system.

Labels: economics, family policy, gay couples, Marriage, Nancy Polikoff, race

posted by Eve at 8:25 PM EMAIL SHARE PRINT

Bankers are not the cause of the global economic crisis, according to the president of the Institute for the Works of Religion. Rather, the cause is ordinary people who do not "believe in the future" and have few or no children.

"The true cause of the crisis is the decline in the birth rate,” Ettore Gotti Tedeschi, said in an interview on Vatican Television's "Octava Dies."

He noted the Western world's population growth rate is at 0% -- that is, two children per couple -- and this, he said, has led to a profound change in the structure of society.

"Instead of stimulating families and society to again believe in the future and have children […] we have stopped having children and have created a situation, a negative economic context decrease," Gotti Tedeschi observed. "And decrease means greater austerity."

“With the decline in births,” he explained, “there are fewer young people that productively enter the working world. And there are many more elderly people that leave the system of production and become a cost for the collective.

“In practice the fixed costs of this economic and social structure increase. How dramatically they increase depends on how evidently unbalanced the structure of the population is and how much wealth it has. The fixed costs however increase: The costs of health increase and the social costs increase."

When this happens, the economist stated, "taxes can no longer be reduced.”

Labels: Catholic Church, demographics, economics

posted by Eve at 9:01 PM EMAIL SHARE PRINT

Maybe education can lead to marital bliss, too. College-educated women were more likely to be married at age 40 than women without a college education, new research showed.

And college-educated women were more likely to say they were happy in their marriages, said economists Betsey Stevenson and Adam Isen of the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School. The study, to be released Tuesday, was conducted for the research group Council on Contemporary Families. It was based on several data sets and surveys on men and women. ...

Having a college education also appeared to make women happier in their marriage. That's perhaps because both college-educated men and women were less likely to see marriage as a source of financial stability, Ms. Stevenson said, approaching it instead as "a source of personal fulfillment." That could also be a reason divorce rates among the college-educated were lower than for groups with less education.

Labels: economics, Marriage, men, universities, women

posted by Eve at 8:04 PM EMAIL SHARE PRINT

With more than one in five Japanese 65 or older, the government is encouraging citizens like Tsuneko Hariki of Kamikatsu to work well past traditional retirement age.

In Kamikatsu, on the Japanese island of Shikoku, officials have set up an agricultural cooperative whose members log on to computers daily to check the fluctuating prices of the produce that they grow. Then they go out and pick whatever is fetching the best price that day. Unusual, yes, but what’s truly surprising about this cooperative is the average age of its members: 70. In a country where lots of folks retire at 60, Kamikatsu’s residents are working well into their senior years—and they’re doing so not only to buoy retirement earnings but also to energize the local economy. With nearly half of the town’s residents 65 and older, the government realized that there simply wasn’t enough of a traditional workforce available to build or staff most typical industries.

Kamikatsu shows in microcosm what Japan and several other nations now face--and what others soon will. For decades, demographers and economists have watched the world’s fertility rate plunge as countries grew wealthier and more urban. These days, fertility rates in much of the industrialized world are far below replacement levels--that is, the number of kids that parents must have to replace themselves and adults who remain childless. Though the steepest declines happened first in wealthy countries like Japan, Italy, Germany, and Spain, even many developing countries have seen their fertility rates head downward. ...

Seeking solutions, a few policy experts have begun looking more closely at the United States. After a big drop in the mid-1970s, America’s fertility rate bounced back and has remained relatively stable, near replacement level--a 30-year-plus pattern that astounds European observers. For a time, demographers explained the difference between the U.S. and other industrialized countries by observing that America’s population was more diverse, with more recent immigrants who had more children. But fertility levels among native-born white Americans also remain higher than among native-born Europeans, and the U.S.’s overall fertility outpaces that of other countries with a high percentage of foreign-born residents.

Demographers have also speculated that the higher fertility rate is a function of America’s being a more religious country, reasoning that those who engage in organized religious activity favor larger families. One survey found 46 percent of Americans attending religious services regularly, compared with just 4 percent of Japanese, 7 percent of Swedes, and 16 percent of Germans. Yet fertility rates have remained stable in the U.S. even as they have plummeted in religious fundamentalist countries like Iran and Jordan, as well as in developing countries like Mexico, where rates of religious attendance remain higher than in America.

Faced with these contradictions, some scholars are now positing the distinctive nature of the U.S. economy and its labor market as a principal reason why Americans are having so many kids. “In general, women (and couples) are deterred from having children when the economic cost--in the form of lower lifetime wages--is too high,” wrote economists Francesco Billari, José Antonio Ortega, and Hans-Peter Kohler in a 2006 study. “Compared to other high-income countries, this cost is diminished by an American labor market that allows more flexible work hours and makes it easier to leave and then reenter the labor force.”

Labels: demographics, economics, Europe, Italy, Japan, natalism

posted by Eve at 7:54 PM EMAIL SHARE PRINT

Stand on the front lines of the recession, as therapist Erica Karlinsky has, and the view for married couples isn't rosy.

Karlinsky, a Lake Mary, Fla., psychologist, now spends a lot of her time counseling men who've lost their jobs -- or wives who are dealing with an unemployed husband who won't get off the sofa or won't stop crying.

The stress of job losses is impacting families from all backgrounds, but perhaps none are more affected than blue-collar families, who have been hit hard by the recession, according to a new report from the National Marriage Project.

And experts worry that when the recession ends and the economy improves, the divorce rate will spike again -- with many of the divorces concentrated among the working class. That may further widen what sociologists call the nation's "divorce divide" -- a growing gap between the divorce rates of working-class Americans and college-educated Americans.

"Working-class couples are already vulnerable," said Brad Wilcox, director of the National Marriage Project at the University of Virginia. "The recession is probably shaping up to be one more factor driving working-class marriages down."

Men have borne the brunt of this recession, accounting for 75 percent of the job losses, according to the report, titled, "The State of Our Unions, Marriage in America 2009." And blue-collar men have been hit hard. In September, the Bureau of Labor Statistics found that 4.9 percent of college-educated women and 5 percent of college-educated men were unemployed, while 8.6 percent of women with a high-school diploma and 11.1 percent of men with a high-school diploma had lost their jobs.

For those men particularly, the recession has been devastating.

Labels: divorce, economics, gender, Marriage, men

posted by Eve at 10:43 PM EMAIL SHARE PRINT

The American Academy of Matrimonial Lawyers (AAML) said more than half of the respondents to its latest survey among its 1,600 members had cited a drop in divorce filings during the current recession which has cut jobs, salaries and house prices.

In total, 57 percent of the attorneys noted fewer divorce filings since the last quarter of 2008. Only 14 percent noted an increase in filings during these difficult times.

Labels: culture, divorce, economics

posted by Eve at 2:26 AM EMAIL SHARE PRINT

Judging by recent press reports, the family fallout associated with the Great Recession has been severe. Take the Bachmuth family, profiled last month in the New York Times. After Paul Bachmuth lost his job at a Texas electric consulting firm in December of last year, his life and marriage took a turn for the worse. Often dejected, he would spend hours surfing the Internet or watching television.

Paul and his wife, Amanda, fought over money. She also resented the part-time job she had to pick up at a day-care center to keep the family solvent, especially since she continued to shoulder the bulk of the family's cooking, cleaning and laundry. "She kind of had something in the back of her mind that it was partly my fault I was laid off," Mr. Bachmuth told the Times. The couple is now seeing a counselor.

The Bachmuths' experience is by no means unique, according to "Money & Marriage," a report released this week by the National Marriage Project at the University of Virginia and the Institute for American Values. As the report notes, the financial pressures associated with the Great Recession can lead to a downward spiral of marital recriminations, tension and conflict as spouses struggle to pay bills, adjust to the loss of a job or find themselves forced out of their home. This downward spiral is especially likely to unfold when a husband loses his job—a particularly salient reality in the current recession, where more than 75% of the job losses have fallen on the shoulders of men.

In some cases, this spiral leads directly to divorce court. In recent years, couples who report disagreeing about money matters once a week are about twice as likely to divorce compared with couples who disagree about money less than once a month, according to the report.

But there may be a silver lining in all this financial pain. For most married Americans, the Great Recession seems to be solidifying, not eroding, the marital bond. The divorce rate is actually falling. It declined to 16.9 divorces per 1,000 married women in 2008 from 17.5 divorces in 2007 (a 3% drop), after rising from 16.4 divorces per 1,000 married women in 2005 (a 7% increase).

Labels: culture, divorce, economics, Marriage, National Marriage Project, W. Bradford Wilcox

posted by Eve at 9:29 AM EMAIL SHARE PRINT

The State of Our Unions monitors the current health of marriage and family life in America. Produced annually, it is a joint publication of the National Marriage Project at the University of Virginia and the Center for Marriage and Families at the Institute for American Values.

The 2009 State of Our Unions makes clear that money matters for contemporary American marriages. In particular, this edition of The State of Our Unions answers the following questions:

* How is the Great Recession affecting the institution of marriage, as measured by changes in marriage and divorce rates in the U.S.?
* How do family finances—especially credit card debt and family assets—shape the quality and stability of contemporary married life in America?
* What do evolutionary psychology and the contemporary study of finance have to tell us about the best division of financial labor for husbands and wives?
* Is the Great Recession likely to foster egalitarian relationships between husbands and wives?

Labels: culture, divorce, economics, gender, gender differences, Marriage, National Marriage Project

posted by Eve at 4:59 PM EMAIL SHARE PRINT

Here’s the glass half-full take on the National Marriage Project’s annual “State of Our Unions” report, which tackles the Great Recession’s impact on American wedlock. As it turns out, the strain of the downturn hasn’t pushed the divorce rate higher; instead, economic stress seems to have made American marriages slightly more stable overall, as couples develop a “new appreciation for the economic and social support that marriage can provide in tough times,” as the study’s lead author, Brad Wilcox, puts it. ...

Here’s the pessimistic take. Yes, divorce rates are dropping, but marriage rates are down as well. People aren’t getting divorced because they can’t afford it, not because they’re suddenly happier with their spouses. Meanwhile, the recession’s job losses have been heavily concentrated among working class men, who aren’t necessarily equipped to make a smooth adjustment to playing stay-at-home dads while their wives support the family. (Whelan’s essay acknowledges that “flexible or egalitarian gender roles may be more attractive to well-educated, affluent Americans than less-educated, working-class couples,” and Wilcox notes that his own research suggests that “husbands are significantly less happy in their marriages, and more likely to contemplate divorce, when their wives take the lead in breadwinning.”)

Labels: culture, divorce, economics, Marriage

posted by Eve at 4:56 PM EMAIL SHARE PRINT

What is a mancession, you ask? It's not this. It's a recession that hurts men much more than women, and we are allegedly in the worst mancession in recent history. Eighty percent of job losses in the last two years were among men, said AEI scholar Christina Hoff Summers, and it could get worse.

Here some graphs provided by Mark Perry, an economist from the University of Michigan who coined the term mancession that, with any luck, is not long for our world. Unfortunately this trend doesn't look to be reversing itself any time soon.

Labels: economics, gender differences, men

posted by Eve at 5:08 PM EMAIL SHARE PRINT

...But it's not just TV. Judging by People magazine stories on celebrity bumps, babies dominate pop culture these days. Interestingly, babies are dominating the real world, too. In 2007, according to the National Center for Health Statistics, the total fertility rate in the USA hit 2.12 lifetime births per woman, a bit higher than 2006, and much higher than the 1.74 births per woman in 1976.

Of course, the recession could change the trend, but annual changes are less important than this long-term reality: The U.S. is one of the few developed countries to have a fertility rate above replacement level — that is, the roughly 2.1 births per woman necessary to sustain a population. Demographers debate the reasons for this, but given our recent fiscal policies, there's a case to be made that not only is a high birthrate a good sign, we should be hoping it rises at least a bit more.

Certainly, surveying childbearing across the developed world, America is a fecund outlier. When I hauled my 1-year-old to Germany and Austria recently (fertility rates of 1.4), restaurants seemed puzzled by my requests for milk. Supposedly child-friendly Sweden posts a rate of just 1.67; Catholic Italy and Spain just 1.3; only France (1.98) comes close among the big economies.

Demographers have many theories, good and bad, for our exceptionality. The USA does have a lamentably high teen pregnancy rate. We also have many unplanned pregnancies among grown-ups who should know better.

But accidents don't explain everything. Across the developed world, many young women say they want two kids. In the U.S., unlike in Europe, the average woman is quite likely to hit that — and sometimes go over. In a 2008 paper, Steven Martin of the University of Maryland noted an increase in extremely affluent women having three or more kids. Judging from TLC's programming, we could be more accepting of larger families who can support their children (if not cases like "octomom" Nadya Suleman's). If millions of young moms watch these shows, the showcased families might even move the idea of "normal" up.

But compared with Japan's 1.2 rate, even getting the bulk of families to the desired two kids is noteworthy. What's most fascinating is that the USA has managed to do this even as the majority of women work outside the home. Our fertility rate rose 22% from 1976 to 2007, as women's workforce participation rates rose an equal amount (from 47.3% in 1976 to about 59% now — roughly a 25% increase).

Labels: culture, demographics, economics, family size

posted by Eve at 4:41 PM EMAIL SHARE PRINT

Renee Siegfort broke the news to her three teenagers on Mother's Day last year: She was pregnant.

She really wanted the baby. Her kids did, too. Her on-again, off-again boyfriend of three years did not.

"I talked to God a lot, asking what does this mean. What am I supposed to do?" she recalls. She was working long hours as an office manager at a chiropractic firm and just making ends meet. She would need to take on a new expense: child care.

"We live simply," says Renee, 36, looking around the living room of her three-bedroom town home. "There wasn't much more we could simplify in our lives." As much as she wanted the baby, she says, "I didn't want to hurt my children."

So after giving birth Dec. 30, she nursed Josephine Olivia Renee for six days. She then did something she would not have imagined nine months earlier: She gave her child to another family. ...

As parents struggle to raise children in a weak economy, a half-dozen large adoption agencies are reporting that more women with unplanned pregnancies are considering placing their babies for adoption rather than keeping them.

Many of these women are in their 20s and already have at least one child, says Joan Jaeger of The Cradle, the Chicago-area agency that placed Joie. She says 30% more women are inquiring about placing a child for adoption than a year ago.

"The economy has made them take a second look at adoption," says Scott Mars of American Adoptions, a private agency in Overland Park, Kan. In the past year, he's seen a 10% to 12% increase in women inquiring about placing a child for adoption and a 7% to 10% increase in actual placements, as strong demand for healthy infants continues to outstrip the supply. ...

The bond between the two families reflects a trend toward openness in adoption. In up to 90% of domestic infant adoptions, Pertman says, adoptive parents maintain some contact with birth parents.

Labels: adoption, economics

posted by Eve at 4:17 PM EMAIL SHARE PRINT

...The role reversal caused by men's job losses is one byproduct of the economic downturn that has many news outlets, if not outright cheering, at least tentatively applauding. In her online column for Forbes, Elisabeth Eaves likened stay-at-home mothers re-entering the workforce to more-permanent Rosie the Riveters, commenting, "thanks to the recession, we may be at just such another socio-sexual inflection point." New York Times contributor Lisa Belkin wondered if women might finally become the majority of American workers, suggesting that such a development would be a "silver lining" in these dark times. One Salon writer celebrated the possibility that the "long-awaited redistribution of domestic labor might prove crucial in finally evening the professional playing field," while another wondered whether the financial crisis could turn out to be "accidentally feminist."

It isn't just the media promoting the idea that increasing numbers of mothers putting in more hours in paid work represents progress for women. Left-leaning think tanks, as well as the Obama administration, are also undertaking efforts to further the trend the recession began. In mid-April, the Center for American Progress announced that it is teaming with the University of Southern California and Time Magazine to explore the impact the recession has had on women. While acknowledging that being the family breadwinner may be a burden to some mothers, Heather Boushey, a senior economist at the center and project co-editor, said that it can also be "an opportunity." On April 22 she informed Congress that the rising unemployment of men has provided many working moms much-needed domestic help.

That may seem a rather callous perspective to out-of-work men, but Ms. Boushey's take is perfectly appropriate to "A Woman's Nation," a venture that John Podesta, the CEO of the Center for American Progress, promises will consider "the central question of the role government, business, and faith organizations, as well as individual women and men should play in supporting women's role now in the workforce…. " Given how many of the center's former employees work for the Obama administration, it's little surprise how closely the project dovetails with a March 11 executive order forming a White House Council on Women and Girls that aims to increase women's employment in various male-dominated industries.

There's only one problem with all these efforts to support mom in her new financial-provider role, and Ms. Hemmert presents a stark picture of it. However empowered the media, the think tanks and the White House tell her she should be, she is profoundly unhappy to have changed places with her spouse. "I don't like coming home and seeing him in my apron," Ms. Hemmert says while watching her husband make dinner. She reacts with outright revulsion to the phrase "Mr. Mom," and her mouth hardens into a thin line when her husband explains that it isn't necessarily a man's job to earn a living for his family, that a man can also be "the person who handles children and sets up play dates."

Ms. Hemmert admits that she sees her own parental job as something separate and different from her husband's, and she not only resents him for usurping her role but has lost some respect for him. "I'm a woman, and I want to be a mother first," she states simply.

To be fair, many women who found themselves in Ms. Hemmert's position wouldn't experience the same level of displeasure and disappointment in their husbands that she expresses. But research indicates that most do share her desire to be a mother first and an earner second. And they, too, prefer a husband who's more interested in bringing home the bacon than in cooking it.

Labels: economics, family policy, gender differences, motherhood

posted by Imapp Staff at 5:38 PM EMAIL SHARE PRINT