Divorce-onomics
Only 4% of the children of mothers with college degrees are born out of wedlock. Of those who first tied the knot between 1975 and 1979, 29% were divorced within ten years. Among those who first married between 1990 and 1994, only 17% were.
Among high-school dropouts, the divorce rate rose from 38% for those who first married in 1975-79 to 46% for those who first married in 1990-94. Among those with a high school diploma but no college, it rose from 35% to 38%. And many mothers avoid divorce by never marrying in the first place. The out-of-wedlock birth rate among women who drop out of high school is 15%. Among African-Americans, it is 67%.
A large majority — 92% — of children whose families make more than $75,000 a year live with two parents (including step-parents). At the bottom of the income scale — families earning less than $15,000 — only 20% of children live with two parents.
According to Barbara Dafoe Whitehead and David Popenoe, those who marry “till death do us part” end up, on average, 4 times richer than those who never marry.
According to Avner Ahituv and Robert Lerman, married men drink less, take fewer drugs and work harder, earning between 10% and 40% more than single men with similar schooling and job histories.
Using data from a big annual survey, Lerman looked at all the women who had become pregnant outside marriage. He estimated the likelihood that they would marry, using dozens of variables known to predict this, such as race, income and family background. He then found out whether they did in fact marry, and what followed.
Among those in the bottom quartile of “propensity to marry,” those who married before the baby was 6 months old were only half as likely to be raising their children in poverty five years later as those who did not (33% to 60%).
One of the most-cited measures of prosperity, household income, is misleading over time because household sizes have changed. In 1947, the average household contained 3.6 people. By 2006, that number had dwindled to 2.6.
A study by Adam Thomas and Isabel Sawhill concluded that if the black family had not collapsed between 1960 and 1998, the black child-poverty rate would have been 28% rather than 46%. And if white families had stayed like they were in 1960, the white child poverty rate would have been 11% rather than 15%.
According to Mary Parke of the Centre for Law and Social Policy, children in single-parent homes are more than 5 times as likely to be poor as those who live with 2 biological parents (26% against 5%). Children who do not live with both biological parents are also roughly twice as likely to drop out of high school and to have behavioural or psychological problems.
If parents detest each other and quarrel bitterly, their kids may actually benefit from a divorce. Paul Amato has found that 40% of American divorces leave the children better (or at least, no worse) off than the turbulent marriages that preceded them.
Two-thirds of American children born to co-habiting parents who later marry will see their parents split up by the time they are ten. Those born within wedlock face only half that risk.
Whereas most Italians say the main purpose of marriage is to have children, 70% of Americans expect their spouse to make them happy.