A Common Destiny Blacks and American Society (1989) / Chapter Skim
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Children and Families
Children and Families
Pages 509-558
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lo CHILDREN AND FAMILIES 509
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/ William H Johnson P~.~round Scene (ca.
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In this chapter, our primary objectives are to describe those trends, discuss various explanations for them, and to consider the implications of them for the current well-being of children and the status of future generations of adults. CHANGING FAMILY PATTERNS OVE RVI EW Since 1960 the trends in marital status, fertility, marital stability, and child rearing for both blacks and whites have been similar.
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· It is estimated that 86 percent of black children and 42 percent of white children will spend some time in a mother-only or other single-parent household (Bumpass, 1984:Table 2~. · The rate at which unmarried black women bear children has declined in recent years; this rate has continued to increase among white women.
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These changes include a rise in the age at first marriage as educational attainment has risen; a growing proportion of both black and white women in the labor force; and an increasing proportion of divorce among married women. Fertility rates have not declined monotonically throughout the years since 1939, however.
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Black OWhite _ 1940 1 950 1960 1970 1980 1984 YEAR about 3 percent from one generation to the next, while the white population will decline by about 17 percent. Despite numerous studies, it is still not fully understood why fertility rates rose to post-Civil War peaks in the late 1950s and then fell to extremely low levels (Easterlin, 1962, 1980; Westoff, 1978~.
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Among married women-indeed, among all women aged 25 and over-there was no longer a black-white difference in fertility rates. Childbearing among younger and unmarried women gives a different picture.
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300 z 250 111 ~ 200 to to to 150 at I 1 00 m 50 300 z 250 o ~ 200 to to to - 150 T I_ 100 ~n 50 o 516 10 15 20 25 30 AGE 1: (a) White Women l / /' I \ \ 1 959 ',1984 `~ \ ~\'N ~1 ._ _ 10 15 20 25 30 35 40 45 50 AGE (b)
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_ ,.,, :: :.: :.~::~:::s _ 1960 1965 1970 1975 1980 1985 YEAR Note: Marital fertility is the: estimated number of children ever born to women who marry at age 20, remain married to age 45, and briar children according to the marital fertility rates of 1960 to 1985. Sources: Data from decennial censuses and Current Population Surveys.
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Second, there has been a much greater decline in the fertility rates of married women than in those of unmarried women, a change that produces an increase in the percentage of total births to unmarried women. In sum, the rapidly rising proportion of babies-both black and white-born to unmarried women has resulted from a major shift in the marital status of mothers, not from a higher birthrate among unmarried women.
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Never-married white women rarely head families; only 5 percent did so in 1984. This was true also of black never-married women in 1960, when 6 percent did so; but by 1984, almost 25 percent of such black women headed families.
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goes through the five marital statuses since some people never marry or, if married, never divorce or separate. The shift toward much earlier marriage among blacks and whites can be seen in the decline, between 1940 and 1960, in the percentage of time that 520
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CHILDREN AND FAMlilES FIGURE 10-5 (Continued)
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Given the delay in first marriage and the decreasing length of the typical marriage, it is not surprising that a sharply rising proportion of births are delivered to unmarried women, a trend that is illustrated in the second panel of Table 10-1. The fact that young women are delaying their marriages much more than their childbearing and that women are separating but not remarrying so rapidly is reflected in two other important indicators shown in the bottom two panels of Table 10-1: the percentage of families with children headed by a woman and the percentage of all children living in female-headed families.
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Furthermore, these percentages, based on cross-sectional data, underestimate the proportion of children who spend some time in a single-parent family. Combining estimates of the proportion of children born to unmarried women (such children usually begin life in a mother-only family)
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white children under age 18, 1960-1985. Black Children 90 80 70 Z 60 CC LL CL 50 40 30 20 10 o Both Parents 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1960 1965 1970 1975 YEAR 1980 1984 (b)
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For white families, these differentials were far less: overall, 52 percent of black families headed by a woman were in poverty compared with 27 percent of the white female-headed families. The effects of mother-only families on the subsequent education, occupation, income, and marital status of children as they grow up have been extensively studied.
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The differences in educational performance and attainment of children in female-headed and two-parent families are reduced when the socioeconomic status of the family is controlled, but daughters of single mothers are themselves especially likely to become unmarried mothers. Whether or not a mother in a single-parent family works outside the home seems to have few clear measured effects on young children; the sheer fact of employment status, if any, is overshadowed by the economic and marital status of the mother (see Garfinkel and McLanahan, 1986:26-37; Hayes, 198~.
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is long. The most salient proposed explanations include differences in social class and economic position; family assistance benefits; changes in men's and women's economic status; scarcity of men; and a culture of poverty.
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A case in point is the muchdiscussed matter of births to unmarried women. High rates of such births are regularly associated with the following conditions (Goode et al., 1971: 301-305~: low socioeconomic status, urban residence, little education, times of economic depression, prior prevalence of divorce and separation, home background of unwed parenthood, weak parental controls over children, 528
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And it is known that desertion, births to unmarried women, and female-headed families are more common among the poor than the well-to-do. Thus, a prominent hypothesis is that black-white differences in family structure can be explained by black-white differences in social class or economic status.
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be more like that of white men. However, this analysis does not fully test the hypothesis that differences in family and marital status are due to class or economic differences because it does not compare marital status between blacks and whites of identical socioeconomic status.
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And the number of black children living in female-headed households rose sharply during the 1970s while the number of such households receiving AFDC declined. Other studies have tried to measure the impact of family assistance benefits on specific family structure events, such as divorce or unmarried childbearing.
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There is little or no relationship between aggregate benefit levels and rates of illegitimacy (Cutright, 1970; Ellwood and Bane, 1985; Moore and Caldwell, 1976~. A major review of research concluded that family assistance has little systematic impact on family structure (Duncan et al., 1988:468~; for example, AFDC payments have no measurable effects on births to unmarried women, although they may affect household living arrangements.
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throughout the period in our history when family structures changed the most. If increased family assistance benefits caused more single-parent families to form, it is hard to explain why the trend continued when benefits were effectively cut back sharply (see also Garfinkel and McLanahan, 1986:5556)
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There is significant research documenting at least some association between male joblessness and family stress (Garfinkel and McLanahan, 1986~. Careful empirical work examining the links between the economic fortunes of black men and the family structure in the black community is only recently reemerging after a long period of dormancy.
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Thus, the high rates of joblessness among black men may reduce the incentives of unmarried women to marry or of formerly married women to remarry. Have black women, in some sense, become economically independent at a faster rate than white women?
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Source: Data Tom Current Population Surveys. 36 42 41 38 47 52 52 62 54 55 49 49 46v 45 45 51 64 61 59 58 57 59 61 45 38 31 31 32 35 36 42 shows that the median earnings of black women rose faster than those of black men.
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The ratios of unmarried men aged 20-26 to unmarried women aged 1824 between 1940 and 1985 are shown in Figure 10-7. The unmarried category includes all single, widowed, divorced, and currently separated persons (including married people whose spouse is absent)
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On the basis of these corrected data, it may be conduded that black women face a somewhat tighter marriage market than white women. For both races, however' the problem of a shortage of "appropriately" aged men was most acute 538
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Ratios of unmarried men to unmarried women are very crude indicators of the composition of a marriage market, however. Women may exclude from their marriage considerations not only unmarried men they consider too old or too young, but also those who are incarcerated, who have educational attainment deemed too little or too much, and who have low income.
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We note that the availability ratios have increased since 1970, indicating that the "marriage squeeze" associated with the baby-boom cohorts has diminished. Accordingly, women reaching the ages of highest marriage rates in the late 1980s can select from a larger pool of men than those who reached marriageable ages 15 or 20 years ago.
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The latter, analytically considered, refers to shared norms and values-to positive preferences as to how one should behave (see Simpson and Yinger, 1985:117~. Cultural patterns emerge over - ~^ ~ the oh ^~ ~1- T`+h^~^ -~e '~^ the ed experiences of people.
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concluded that children raised in families receiving family assistance are not fated to an adulthood of poverty because of deficient values. Research of the past decade or so has noted that highly motivated youths are a frequent output of black family socialization processes (Allen, 1978; Rosenberg and Simmons, 1971; Scanzoni, 1971~.
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Each of the proposed explanations of changing black family structure we are reviewing is one among several that may have causal weight. It appears likely, for example, that the effects of differences in family structures depend heavily on the social settings in which families function.
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Black and white children are increasingly different with regard to their living arrangements. A majority of black children live in families that include 544
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The most powerful hypothesis is that the economic situation in the black community together with residential segregation not only affect the immediate living conditions of blacks, but also strongly influence family structures and thereby alter the social and economic prospects for the next generation. The influence of family assistance benefits seems to have been seriously 545
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But when these factors are controlled in a multivariate analysis, the disadvantage of black children relative to that of white children is due almost entirely to the low income of black family heads (Kraly and Hirschman, 1987:19~. Approximately one-half of black children have the additional burden of living in mother-only families.
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Yet the special needs of black children large proportions of whom arguably receive the worst quality educations in the nation, in both urban and rural settings have been largely neglected by this reform movement. Calls for reform have frequently been for higher standards, rather than for higher standards with increased compensatory education programs for disadvantaged students.
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and Tom Census Bureau projections (for 2000 and 2020~. TABLE 10-5 Persons Aged 0-14 or 65 and Over per 100 Persons Aged 25-54 Blacks Whites Aged Aged Aged Aged Aged Aged Year 0-14 25-54 65 and Over 0-14 25-54 65 and Over 1940 75 100 12 58 100 17 1960 108 100 18 80 100 25 1980 83 100 23 56 100 32 2000 62 100 20 45 100 32 2020 58 100 29 47 100 49 Sources: Data Tom decennial censuses (for 1940-1980)
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New York: Russell Sage Foundation. Billingsley, Andrew 1968 Black Families in White Amenca.
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Cox, Oliver 1940 Sex ratio and marital status among Negroes. American Sociological Rechew 5 (6)
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Pp. 106-126 in Harnette Pipes McAdoo, ea., Black Families.
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Hill, Robert B 1971 The Strength of Black Families.
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1985 Family structure and the reproduction of poverty. Amman jroumal of Sociology 90(4)
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Washington, D.C.: American Sociological Association.
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Scott-Jones, Diane 1987 Black Families and the Education of Black Children: Current Issues. Paper commissioned by the Committee on the Status of Black Americans, National Research Council, Washington, D.C.
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Wilson, William Julius, and Kathryn M Neckerman 1986 Poverty and family structure: the widening gap between evidence and public policy issues.
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