The Changing American Family

Sociological And Demographic Perspectives

Scott J South, Stewart Tolnay

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9780367290696
• eBook ISBN: 9781000315271
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

In this book, leading authorities on the family show how families, parents, and children have been affected by changing patterns of marriage and cohabitation. Taking a long historical perspective, some authors consider trends such as the decline of multigenerational families and group differences in the relationships between economic opportunity and the timing of marriage. But the focus is predominantly on questions of current interest: patterns of union formation, differences between marriage and cohabitation, contact between divorced fathers and their children, the division of household labor, and the transmission of attitudes and behavior across generations. Intended for scholars and advanced students, this book offers essential analysis of the changing dimensions of the American family.

1
Current Themes in the Social Demography of the American Family

Stewart E. Tolnay and Scott J. South

The chapters contained in this volume are drawn from a conference held in Albany, New York, on April 6 and 7, 1990, under the title, Demographic Perspectives on the American Family: Patterns and Prospects. The tenth in a series of conferences sponsored by the Department of Sociology at the State University of New York at Albany, the Albany Conference brought together some of the most prominent sociologists, demographers, and social-historians currently studying the complex issues surrounding the changing American family. The papers presented at the conference were uniformly excellent, often provoking thoughtful debates and unusually productive exchanges of ideas and data. A unique feature of the conference was the blending of historical and contemporary perspectives on family organization and change.

Collectively, the chapters in this volume tackle a wide range of issues central to the social demography of the family. Given the myriad manifestations of change in the American family, this inclusiveness is not merely desirable but necessary. The issues receiving attention include past and current racial differences in family and household structure; the rise in and consequences of nonmarital cohabitation; the role of divorced fathers in the financial and emotional well-being of their children; changing attitudes toward marriage and family life, and the frequently conflictive division of household labor. Although these chapters have not been drafted with the explicit intention of influencing public policy (cf. Cherlin 1988), with their focus on such crucial and enduring concerns they cannot help but inform civic debate.

Our original intent in gathering together the current chapters within a single edited volume was, quite simply, to provide a forum for some of the most insightful and knowledgeable social scientists currently working in the area of family research. Of course, given space limitations it would be foolish to claim that the work represented here is exhaustive of all excellent work in the field. Nevertheless, we believe that we have been successful in achieving our primary objective. In addition, however, this collection enjoys additional benefits of our decision to spotlight the work of this particular group of scholars. As the following chapters will clearly demonstrate, the work represented here is extremely innovative in the questions posed, the data exploited, and the techniques employed. Further, there is a strong multidisciplinary flavor to the volume, with perspectives ranging from strictly demographic to the primarily social-psychological. Finally, this collection of scholarship not only provides answers to many important questions within the field of family studies but also helps to identify potentially fruitful avenues for future research. We have no doubt that much family research conducted in coming years will pursue issues that have been raised by the chapters in this book.

Second, our own interest in the subject matter of this book, as well as our choice of these specific chapters, must also be considered the result of two palpable trends in family research during the past two decades. During that period, scholarly interest and productivity in family demography and family history have grown phenomenally.

The Growth of Family Demography

Recent shifts in the composition of session topics at the annual meetings of the Population Association of America (PAA) provide revealing evidence of the extent of growth of family demography in recent years. Between the late 1960s and the late 1980s, the number of paper and panel sessions at the PAA meetings grew from about 5 percent to about 15 percent of the total sessions (Presser 1991). By the late 1980s, more paper and panel sessions were devoted to family and household demography than to any other topic, and the total number of sessions on family demography (including roundtables and workshops) was second only to fertility.

What lies behind this rapid growth in social-demographic approaches to the family? Certainly changing demographic realities—the decline in marriage rates and the rise in divorce, the alarming expansion of female-headed households, important changes in household composition, the reallocation of tasks within households, among others—account for some of this recent curiosity. That these demographic shifts are linked so closely to issues of poverty, inequality, and well-being undoubtedly increases our motivation to know more about these changes.

But as Cherlin (1981) points out, demographic change has been a constant throughout this century, so these trends and their correlates can probably not account for all of the contemporary interest in family demography. Rather, we suspect that two other forces have played important roles in the growth of this field. The first of these is a greater willingness among demographers to look outside the demographic system, strictly defined, for explanations of demographic change. More purely demographic approaches to family issues are still taken (e.g., Bongaarts et al. 1987), but the general trend, we sense, is away from insular designs and toward multidisciplinary perspectives. Facilitating the mutual embrace of demography, sociology, and history illustrated in this collection of chapters is the growing number of researchers with expertise in two or more of these fields (Sweet 1977). As one example of this disciplinary catholicism we can point to the joint sponsorship of conference sessions by the Family and Population Sections of the American Sociological Association.

A second and, in our opinion, equally salutary development behind the growth of family demography is the availability of large-scale, nationally representative data sets with which to examine key issues. Given their penchant for accurate description, demographers have traditionally been loath to use small nonrandom samples of the population, although these have been a staple of more general family sociology. Consequently, most of the early work in the demography of the American family relied extensively on census and vital statistics data (Glick 1959). With the advent of large social surveys—including the National Longitudinal Surveys of Men, Women, and Youth, the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, the National Longitudinal Studies of the High School Classes of 1972 and 1980 (the latter more popularly referred to as High School and Beyond), the Survey of Income and Program Participation, and the National Survey of Families and Households, to name a few—demographers were free to engage issues that could not be treated with the customary data sources. Although these data were not always collected with the explicit purpose of monitoring and explaining demographic change, demographers have nevertheless put them to good use.

These twin developments in the study of family demography—the broadened scope and the use of social surveys—both find expression in the chapters in this volume. The chapters go well beyond a narrow concern with marriage and divorce rates, trends, and differentials to consider a wide range of family issues. Moreover, most of the studies rely on one of the large social surveys mentioned previously. Two of them make use of public-use samples from historical U.S. censuses. Perhaps most telling, none of the chapters relies solely on data from the 1980 census or from vital statistics. This is a far cry from Paul Glick's discussion of data sources in his contribution to Hauser and Duncan's classic The Study of Population (1959), which focused almost exclusively on census and vital statistics data.

The Growth of Family History

The past two decades have also witnessed explosive growth in the study of family history (see, e.g., Stone 1981), Originally, family historians seemed to have greater curiosity about the family in Western European societies, particularly England and France, than about the American family. Pathbreaking studies appeared that considered widely divergent issues pertaining to aspects of family organization and change. For instance, Laslett (1965) exploded the myth that extended families necessarily prevailed in preindustrial times. And Levine (1977) demonstrated how shifts in the organization of production in society could shape the timing of marriage and the pace of marital reproduction. An important impetus for these and other explorations into the Western European family was growing sophistication in the use of surviving documents such as household censuses and parish registries. Much like skilled detectives, family historians have been able to use techniques like family reconstitution to piece together important events in the life course of individual families including marriage, birth, death, and migration. As a result, a much clearer picture has emerged of the Western European family in the past.

Though of slightly more recent origin, studies of American family history have also grown markedly during the past several years. Although not a perfect milepost, the introduction of The Journal of Family History in 1976 by the National Council on Family Relations does symbolize the growing interest in the field during the past two decades. Although also publishing work on the European family, this journal has served as a major outlet for research on American family history. This rapidly expanding literature has examined a number of important issues concerning historical patterns and change in the American family including household structure, marriage, childbearing, and the family economy (see, e.g., Gordon 1973; Hareven and Vinovskis 1978; Ruggles 1987; Stern 1987).

Explorations into the American family of the past have benefited enormously from the availability of microfilmed copies of the original U.S. census enumerator's manuscripts. Especially useful have been the nationally representative public-use samples that were created from the 1900 and 1910 censuses. Researchers using these data sources have offered compelling accounts of how American families around the turn of the twentieth century were formed, how they worked, and how they differed by race, ethnicity, and social class. Soon a public-use sample will also be available for the 1880 census, and there are plans to create a public-use sample for the 1920 census as well. In addition to the rich information on families available in federal census data, other data sources of information have been explored by students of American family history—an excellent example being the work of the Mormon Historical Demography Project based on family genealogies maintained by the Mormon church (see, e.g., Bean et al. 1978).

Family scholars in general cannot help but be pleased by the increasing attention paid to family patterns and change in the past. As in other disciplines and specialties, there appears to be a growing awareness in the field of family studies that a comprehensive understanding of present conditions and problems really requires an appreciation of what transpired before.

As with the growth of family demography, the expansion of family history has been distinctly multidisciplinary in nature. Historians, sociologists, political scientists, and anthropologists have collaborated to produce important work (see, e.g., Kertzer and Hogan 1989) or have worked separately, contributing to an incremental growth of knowledge in the field. Seemingly impenetrable barriers that traditionally divided social scientists interested in the family have begun to disintegrate—much to the benefit of scholars from all disciplines and theoretical persuasions.

Interlocking Themes

The diversity of topics addressed in this collection implies that no single explanatory framework can encompass all of the chapters. As noted above, the chapters were selected more on the basis of their contribution to knowledge than their ability to form a coherent and unified whole. Still, although the strength of the collection rests primarily on the quality of the individual chapters, certain recurring themes can be discerned, and these are worth discussing here.

A central concern for many family scholars is racial and ethnic differences in family formation, composition, and cohesion. Recent research shows clearly that not all racial or ethnic groups behave identically as they form new households, or dissolve existing ones. Are such differences merely the result of group differences in access to society's social and economic rewards? Or is part of this racial and ethnic variation in family patterns due to persistent and substantial cultural differences among groups? As a vigorous debate over these questions rages in scholarly circles, policymakers also struggle with the practical implications of group differences in such arenas as teenage childbearing and female-headed households.

Several of the chapters in this volume tackle, in one fashion or another, the thorny issue of racial differences. Two chapters (Schoen and Owens, and Sweet and Bumpass) include race in their consideration of marriage and cohabitation in contemporary American society. Although racial differences are observed, they are not the focus of those chapters, and little interpretative effort is made. Racial differences and their etiology play a central role in the chapters by Ruggles and Goeken; Landale and Tolnay; South; and Bennett, Bloom, and Craig. Those authors infer strong effects of race at two distinct stages of the life course—the transition to marriage and living arrangements of the elderly.

Other focal concerns of several of these chapters are the behaviors and life circumstances of two actors not often considered in social-demographic research, namely, fathers and children. Two of the chapters (Furstenberg and Harris; Teachman) examine patterns of contact between divorced fathers and their children and the exchange of emotional affect and nonmonetary support between them. Another chapter (Waite and Goldscheider) looks at the contribution of husbands and children to household labor. In his chapter, Thornton gauges the degree to which familial attitudes are transmitted from parents to children. These chapters continue and extend prior efforts to bring these social actors into the social-demographic purview (e.g., Furstenberg 1988; Hernandez 1986; Preston 1984). The inclusion of fathers and children as participants (and perhaps targets) of demographic change does not, of course, deny the predominant roles played by wives and mothers; it does, however, expand the demographic framework to include individuals whose presence (or, in the case of divorced fathers, absence) is too often ignored. We view this as a welcome corrective to much prior research.

There is also a strong undercurrent of historical change in many of the chapters in this collection. This is quite obvious among the chapters in Part 1 (Family Patterns: The Historical Dimension), but also implicit in many of the chapters in the remainder of the volume. As with other social institutions, the American family must be somewhat malleable and able to evolve in response to other societal transformations. Although the connections are not always drawn explicitly, there can be little doubt that two central concerns of some of these chapters—the role of absent fathers (Furstenberg and Harris; Teachman) and the rise of nonmarital cohabitation (Rindfuss and VandenHeuvel; Schoen and Owens; Sweet and Bumpass) would not have been present if this collection had been published fifty years ago. Similarly, an examination of the division of household labor (Waite and Goldscheider) is made much more salient by the astounding rise of female labor-force participation during the past fifty years. One can only wonder how a collection of chapters on the changing American family published fifty years from now will differ from this volume.

One theme crosscutting several of the chapters is a recognition of the importance for demographic behavior of norms, attitudes, perceptions, and emotions, subjects that if not previously anathema to most demographers have not been accorded much prominence. Traditionally, social demographers have been more concerned with actual behavior than with the cultural supports and psychological predispositions that underlie that behavior. In contrast, these chapters examine such nonbehavioral matters as affective relations between divorced fathers and their children, attitudes toward sex roles and family life, and the perceptions of marriage and cohabitation.

This new emphasis on norms and attitudes has the potential to add significantly to our theoretical e...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Current Themes in the Social Demography of the American Family
• PART ONE FAMILY PATTERNS: THE HISTORICAL DIMENSION
• PART TWO MARRIAGE AND COHABITATION: CURRENT ISSUES
• PART THREE FAMILIES, PARENTS, AND CHILDREN
• About the Book
• About the Editors and Contributors