Survey Says: Kids come 8th

From the AP.

It seems that in the last 17 years attitudes towards marriage have shifted markedly. Once upon a time, 1990, children were perceived as one of the top attributes of a successful marriage. They're now 8th of 9 identified by the Pew Research Center. Things closer to the top of the list include such items as, equitable distribution of chores, good housing, and a healthy sex-life.

The survey also found that, by a margin of nearly 3-to-1, Americans say the main purpose of marriage is the "mutual happiness and fulfillment" of adults rather than the "bearing and raising of children."

Which is interesting in and of itself. This really shows how attitudes towards marriage have shifted since I was a wee one. It is no wonder that the current crop of people reaching marrying age is called, "the me generation."

Two weekends ago I was at a family vacation that we'd been doing for 25 years, and many people I grew up with were there as well. Of the three families with kids my age up there, we had seven of us. Ages ranged from 32 down to 23. Of the seven of us, four were married (none younger than 29) and none had any kids. At age 32 all of our parents had at least one child already. Of all the families that had even been somewhat regular to this annual vacation, the vast majority had started families by age 32. This is a demographic that can be described as 'white, well educated, middle class', which is one of the population segments with the LOWEST birthrates right now.

Marriage is focusing more and more on the relationship between the adults instead of the adults suitability to raise the next generation. An interesting quote:

The survey's findings buttress concerns expressed by numerous scholars and family-policy experts, among them Barbara Dafoe Whitehead of Rutgers University's National Marriage Project.

"The popular culture is increasingly oriented to fulfilling the X-rated fantasies and desires of adults," she wrote in a recent report. "Child-rearing values -- sacrifice, stability, dependability, maturity -- seem stale and musty by comparison."

As if having a healthy sex-live inside wedlock was a bad thing. When are we supposed to have it? Or are we not supposed to have it at all? Darned puritans.

Anyway, if your idea of good family values includes lots of children and raising them up healthy and intact, this report is bad news. At least if you're just looking at white middle-class america. Things get different when you delve into minority groups (who aren't going to be minority for long at this rate):

But the patterns in regard to race and ethnicity were more complex.

For example, census statistics show that blacks and Hispanic are more likely than whites to bear children out of wedlock. Yet according to the survey, these minority groups are more inclined than whites to place a high value on the importance of children to a successful marriage.

Placing cultural value on having children in marriage would seem to commute to having children at all, even out of wedlock. Minority groups are more likely to have this value than white america. I've also seen separate reports that immigrant groups tend to have much higher birthrates than people who were born here. At some point, and I think I'll live to see it, White America will merely be the largest group in a plurality and concepts of 'minority' will fade.

Another thing that I suspect is contributing to the diminution of child-raising as a golden goal of marriage is the realization of people my age and younger that raising kids is a LOT of work! And liability. Couple that with a growing cultural permissiveness of childless couples and you have a lot of couples taking the easy road and just not bothering to have kids. Awareness of just how much children cost is also taking hold. I covered some of this two years ago (Fertility and Parenthood), but in short the 'window' for having kids has moved from the early 20's to the early 30's and the resultant fertility problems that entails. College costing what it will doesn't help either, and college educations are now seen as 'standard' for a good life. And you want a good life for your children, right?

Lets try an example. I want to have kids. I want to have enough kids to:
1) Try and make up for those my married friends AREN'T having.
2) Have enough that at least one of 'em will give me grand-kids.

So lets call it 5 kids to be safe. That means probably 28 years of raising kids, and 33 years of paying for college in some form or another. The simple fact is that in that time 5 college educations are going to cost well over a million dollars (closer to $2M thanks to inflation in the overall market and the much higher college tuition inflation rate), a megabuck doesn't go nearly as far as it did 20 years ago, so my poor children are GOING to be saddled with .edu-debt. And that assumes an education at a public university. All this doesn't cover health insurance before they even get to college, I had better hope I get that covered through my employer.

That is a lot of work. We've done a good job of showing our children just how much responsibility having children is so they'll put it off to when they can afford it. Is it any surprise that we're having a big fall-off in families with children?

Back to the article:

Virginia Rutter, a sociology professor at Framingham (Mass.) State College and board member of the Council on Contemporary Families, said the shifting views may be linked in part to America's relative lack of family-friendly workplace policies such as paid leave and subsidized child care.

"If we value families ... we need to change the circumstances they live in," she said, citing the challenges faced by young, two-earner couples as they ponder having children.

In my opinion we're a bit too late for that for the current generation. The baby bust is firmly in place right now, and revising workplace attitudes (and laws) to be much more family friendly will take a decade or two to do any good for reversing that. This needs doing. America is currently maintaining its workforce through immigration rather than 'growing our own', so we're not in the same straits as our European brethren.

Increasingly, children are seen as optional. Something to be explicitly chosen, rather than opted out of. This is something that my feminist upbringing sees as a true and wonderful thing, though it does have some negative impacts to senior care when I get to be that age.

In the mean time, a happy marriage seems to be one in which both members perceive themselves to be equal partners, in both chores, bedroom activities, and providing for the household. That's a good thing right there.