State of Our Unions 2006/Society Switches/10 Things You NEED to Know About Marriage - 7/12/06

[Smartmarriages]

- STATE OF OUR UNIONS 2006: THE MARRIAGE GAP
- SOCIETY SWITCHES FOCUS AWAY FROM CHILDREN
- 10 THINGS YOU NEED TO KNOW ABOUT MARRIAGE

Cleary, our world is changing and we'd best realize it.  Here is the latest
analysis from David Popenoe and Barbara Dafoe Whitehead.  - diane

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- STATE OF OUR UNIONS 2006: THE MARRIAGE GAP
July 12, 2005
**FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE **

> A growing percentage of women today are not having any children. In
> 2004, almost one out of five women in their early forties was childless.
> In 1976, it was one out of ten.
> 
> ³Child rearing is no longer the defining experience of adult life,² says
> co-director and author of the report¹s essay, Barbara Dafoe Whitehead.
> ³Parents today feel out of synch with the larger adult world.²


Raising children has never been easy. For today¹s parents, however, it
has become a conspicuous source of anxiety and distress. A recent crop
of books and articles give voice to this complaint. In surveys, parents
report lower levels of marital happiness than nonparents.

Why is this happening? Are parents merely whining? Or is there an
objective reason for their distress?

As the lead essay in this year¹s State of Our Unions report by Rutgers¹
National Marriage Project discloses, there is an objective reason for
parental discontent: a dramatic, but until now largely unacknowledged,
change in the pattern of our adult lives.

Within living memory, the larger share of the adult lives of most
Americans consisted of years spent with minor children in the household.
Today, however, the larger share of the adult lives of most Americans
consists of the years before and after child rearing. This change is
particularly striking in the lives of women.

As a National Marriage Project analysis of Census Bureau data shows,
women are now entering their active child-rearing years at older ages
than in the past and ending child-rearing years at younger ages. In
1970, 73.6 percent of women, ages 25-29, had already entered their
child-rearing years and were living with at least one minor child of
their own. By 2000, the share had dropped to 48.7 percent. In 1970, 27.4
percent of women, ages 50-54, had at least one minor child of their own
in the household. By 2000, the share of such women had fallen to 15.4
percent.

A growing percentage of women today are not having any children. In
2004, almost one out of five women in their early forties was childless.
In 1976, it was one out of ten.

³Child rearing is no longer the defining experience of adult life,² says
co-director and author of the report¹s essay, Barbara Dafoe Whitehead.
³Parents today feel out of synch with the larger adult world.²

The 2006 report also includes good news and bad news on the marriage
front. The good news: for the college-educated minority of the American
population, marriage appears to have gotten stronger in recent years.
The bad news: For everyone else, marriage continues to get weaker. ³The
Œmarriage gap¹ is generating a society of greater inequality,² says
National Marriage Project founder and co-director, David Popenoe.
³America is becoming a nation divided not only by education and income
levels but by unequal family structures.²

The State of Our Unions: The Social Health of Marriage in America,
2006/, the eighth annual report released from the National Marriage
Project, will be released today.

DOWNLOAD: download a text version of the report at: :
http://marriage.rutgers.edu

Contact: Theresa Kirby, 732-445-7922, E-mail: tkirby at rci.rutgers.edu

################################

- SOCIETY SWITCHES FOCUS AWAY FROM CHILDREN
Not as much adult life spent with kids
By Sharon Jayson
USA TODAY
July 12, 2006  

The USA is becoming a much more adult-focused society after being
child-centered for decades, a report suggests.

Longer life expectancy, delayed marriage and childbearing, and increased
childlessness add up to a longer life without kids, says the analysis,
released today by the non-partisan National Marriage Project at Rutgers
University.

Child-rearing occupies a smaller share of a person's adult life because
there are longer periods before and after raising children compared with
previous generations, says Barbara Dafoe Whitehead, the project's
co-director and author of the study. It is based on U.S. Census data as well
as cultural and social research.

³It's almost as if raising children, which used to become the common lot of
most adults, now has become more of a niche in your life rather than one of
the main features of adult life,² she says.

In 1970, for example, 73.6% of women ages 25-29 had at least one minor child
at home; 30 years later, 48.7% did.

In 1990, the most common household type was married couples with children.
Now, single, childless households are the most prevalent.

And today, more women in their 40s are childless, the report says. One in 10
were childless in 1976; in 2004, it was about one of five.

Although Whitehead says Americans aren't ³anti-child,² she suggests that a
society indifferent to parenting will further aggravate current attitudes
and account for what Whitehead calls ³the cultural devaluation of
child-rearing.²

³People who are rearing children and have children in the household no
longer represent the dominant force in society or politics,² she says.

The shift also is evident on TV, says William Douglas, a professor of
communication at the University of Houston and author of Television
Families: Is Something Wrong in Suburbia? ³The plot more often than
previously focuses around parents. Children simply no longer hold this
elevated status where the plot is necessarily around them.²

Workplace policies also reflect the greater attention to adults, says Thomas
Coleman of Unmarried America, a Glendale, Calif., group, formerly the
American Association of Single People.

³The so-called family-friendly programs that emerged in the '80s and '90s
are being replaced with work-life programs,² he says. ³The terminology is
changing to be more generic.²

Isabel Sawhill of the Brookings Institution's Center on Children and
Families is not ready to sound any alarms yet about what this adult focus
suggests for child well-being.

Fewer children ³may make for a more adult-oriented society,² she says, ³but
it's not necessarily going to have bad consequences for children. Everything
depends on how much we're investing in those smaller numbers of children.²

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- 10 THINGS YOU NEED TO KNOW ABOUT MARRIAGE

Barbara Whitehead and David Popenoe summarized the report and analyzed what
it all means in their very highly rated and top selling, 2-hour workshop at
the Atlanta Smart Marriages Conference.  Order the session as an MP3
download or CD at 800-241-7785 or at http://www.iplaybacksmartmarriages.com
By the way, the Playback site is being completely rebuilt and they promise
it will be ready tomorrow - Thurs, the 13th.  - diane

756-203
10 Things You Need to Know About Marriage
Barbara Dafoe Whitehead, PhD, David Popenoe, PhD
Understand the latest ³State of Our Unions² research and trends including
lower divorce rates, best age to marry, effects of cohabitation and of
widespread divorce. What does it all really mean?


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