Marriage in America: It's a Class Thing

As the June wedding season swings around The Economist(sub) is taking a look at marriage in America, keying off Kay Hymowitz’s Marriage and Caste in America.  What do they find?

There is a widening gulf between how the best- and least-educated Americans approach marriage and child-rearing.

They have a handy little graph which shows the percentage of children living with single parents since 1964.  It looks like this:

Mother’s education	1964	1995	2001
Less than high school	13%	42%	37%
High school	7%	27%	29%
Post high school	6%	25%	23%
College degree	5%	11%	10%

 Yes.  It’s special, isn’t it?

Now the question is, why?  How could the child-raising practices of Americans have diverged so much over half a century?  It couldn’t be anything to do with the War on Poverty, could it?

Let us do some reckless speculation.  The reason that college-educated women don’t go in for single parenthood is that you can’t raise a middle-class kid in a neighborhood with decent schools and send them to college if you are a single mother.  The numbers just don’t add up. For college-educated women it just makes sense to dial in a husband and father when you are planning to have children.

But if you have no education then the government offer of support looks pretty good.

But notice that the incidence of single motherhood has been going down among the least educated since 1995.  That’s interesting, isn’t it? 

Now let’s see.  In 1996 Congress enacted welfare reform.  It could be that since the end of welfare-as-we-know-it more under-educated women have been choosing marriage for raising their children. 

It’s a concept.