Labor's Love Lost by Andrew J. Cherlin

Author:Andrew J. Cherlin [Cherlin, Andrew J.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781610448444
Publisher: Russell Sage Foundation
Published: 2014-12-04T06:00:00+00:00

Now skip directly to the white bars. They show the living arrangements of children whose mothers did not have a high school degree. The white bars are always the tallest, which means that in each year the children most likely to be living with an unmarried mother were those whose mother was in the lowest of the three educational groups. Between 1980 and 2010, the heights of the white bars rose from 18 to 30 percent. Now look at the gray bars—those whose mothers had a high school degree but no bachelor’s degree. Here we see the greatest proportional increase over time. The height of the gray bars nearly doubled, from 11 percent to 21 percent, in that span of time. The living arrangement of children in the middle group went from being closer to that of children with mothers in the highest group at the start of the thirty-year period to being closer to that of children with mothers in the lowest group at the end. The second chart in figure 5.2 shows the same information for nonwhites. All the bars are higher than among whites. Yet the story is broadly similar: the college-educated group, as was the case among whites, had by far the lowest percentage of children living with an unmarried mother, and the levels hardly increased between 1980 and 2010. Moreover, the percentage of unmarried mothers in the middle group had surpassed the percentage of those in the lowest group by 2010. For both whites and nonwhites, then, the living arrangements of children with highly educated mothers diverged more and more from the living arrangements of all children whose mothers did not have bachelor’s degrees.29

The timing and size of this change suggests that something important was influencing the family lives of the non-college-educated after 1980, particularly those with a high school degree but not a college degree. It had to be something that had not been as important before 1980 and that was not affecting the family lives of the college-educated middle class. To be sure, single-parenthood and cohabiting-parenthood had become more culturally acceptable. But there is no reason to think that this greater acceptability would have affected only those without bachelor’s degrees. That is to say, highly educated young adults also experienced the cultural shift toward the greater acceptability, and yet the percentage of their children living with an unmarried mother hardly increased. And if there were other cultural changes, such as a decline in the propensity to work hard, that change also should have affected all groups. Thus, cultural changes are necessary but not sufficient to explain the pattern we see in figure 5.2. For a fuller explanation, we need to find a development that mainly affected young adults without college degrees after 1980. The obvious candidate is the emergence after the mid-1970s of the hourglass economy.

A study of young adults in Toledo, Ohio, in 2002 showed how non-college-educated young adults may have factored the deteriorating economic situation into their decisions about cohabitation and marriage.

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