Early Living Together, Marriage and Parenting Benefits some Young Adults

Young people are always encouraged to complete their education and postpone marriage and children to achieve more rewarding lifestyles. However, a Penn State study found that for some young adults, getting married or living together and having children have provided positive benefits.

"In industrial countries, young people age 18 to 25 are expected to explore their identity, work and love by delaying marriage and parenthood," says lead author Alan Booth, distinguished professor of sociology, human development and demography. "It is believed that those individuals who fail to postpone these family transitions miss out on better career opportunities, make poor choices on partners, and may experience problems.

"However, our research has shown that early family choices may be a productive option for many young adults, especially those who are disadvantaged with respect to family income, parental education and structure, mother-child relationship, verbal ability, school attachment and delinquent behavior," he notes.

Booth, Elisa Rustenbach, graduate student in sociology, and Susan McHale, professor of human development and family studies, examined the family and personal characteristics of more than 8,000 young adults who participated in the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (Add Health). Half of the sample made an early family transition and half did not over a five-year period.

The researchers compared the depressive symptoms of those who made a transition with those who did not, and found very few differences in depressive symptoms between the two groups.

"The only exception was women who experienced a breakup of their live-in relationship. They were more likely to see an increase in depression compared to women who did not break up with the live-in partner or did not make a transition," Booth notes. Only 14 percent of those who made a transition were in this category.

The researchers selected depressive symptoms as a measure of wellbeing because they are associated with many types of adversity such as poor physical health, unemployment and harsh family relationships, and apply to males and females and people of all ages.

"The findings are even more remarkable when we take into account that young adults who transitioned into early families were more likely to come from low-income families, had parents with lower levels of education and likely lived in a household with one or no biological parents," Booth says.

In low-income families, teens may experience a divisive home environment and parents with poor parenting skills. Leaving to live together, marry or have children may provide an opportunity to escape from an unloving home and create a more positive family, according to the study.

The difference between men and women on early family transitions and protective family factors requires more study, however, he adds.

"Most research on emerging adulthood has been on college students," Booth notes. "Our study highlights the importance of study early family transitions in context, in light of the range of opportunities open to a person. Post-high school experiences of young adults are more diverse than popular belief, and early co-habitation or marriage and parenting may be productive for many young people, at least over the short haul."

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Even Today, Couples Put More Emphasis on Husband's Career

Sociological research has shown that when couples move, the husband's career gets a boost, while the wife's career suffers. A University of Iowa professor investigated the reason behind the phenomenon and discovered that couples tend to put more emphasis on the man's career, even if the wife works full-time and is college-educated.

"This is bad news for people who are interested in men and women having equal success in the labor force," says Mary Noonan, associate professor of sociology in the UI College of Liberal Arts and Sciences. "Even for highly educated married women with prestigious occupations, employment still suffers when they move, while the husbands' careers benefit. These women likely share the role of breadwinner, earning a significant part of the family income, but their career is still seen as secondary within the dynamic of the couple."

Kimberlee Shauman, associate professor of sociology at the University of California at Davis, and Noonan reported the findings on their study on family migration in a recent issue of the journal Social Forces. Using data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, an annual survey that tracks families over a 30-year period, they examined the experiences of 5,072 working men and 4,120 working women between ages 25 and 59, all of whom were married. They compared the employment status and salaries of those who moved from one metropolitan area to another (655 men, 371 women) to those who stayed put.

They found that a year after the move, nearly all of the men remained employed, but the women who moved were 22 percentage points less likely to remain employed compared to women who didn't move. The men who moved boosted their salary by an average of $3,000 that year, compared to an average increase of only $700 for men who stayed put. But women who moved reported average salary increases of $750 less than women who stayed put.

"Our results support the notion that families migrate to enhance husbands' careers," Noonan says. "Women are very unlikely to initiate the move. They're more likely to be the 'trailing spouse,' following their husbands in a move for his promotion, raise, or better opportunities down the road."

Sociologists have speculated that the type of jobs men and women choose could be the reason moving can help husband's careers but hurt wives' careers, Noonan said. Perhaps men are more likely to choose more specialized or in-demand positions, jobs for which they might be recruited and that have a steeper salary ladder. On the flip side, it's possible that women more often choose fields like teaching, secretarial work, or nursing, positions for which more workers are qualified and that typically involve a more gradual salary increase.

To test that theory, Shauman and Noonan developed a way to control for the characteristics of the occupation. They found that even when the playing field was leveled in regard to the type of job, moving still hurt women's careers.

"Whether you're a female nurse or secretary or a female CEO, you're facing the same negative consequences after the move," Noonan says. "Even today, when women are earning more money and are more likely to put an emphasis on their career, when it comes to marriage, gender roles are very entrenched. People still buy into the stereotypes of what it means to be a good wife. It means that caring for your children and supporting your husband's career is viewed as a wife's main priority. Working is fine, but that's not really a wife's primary role."

In future research, Noonan would like to design a qualitative study to find out how couples weigh decisions on whose career matters more.

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Poll: N.J. Prefers Gay Marriage

As New Jersey marks the six-month anniversary of the civil unions law this Sunday, a new statewide Zogby Poll shows majorities of voters favoring changing the law to full marriage equality for same-sex couples. The poll of 803 New Jersey voters was taken from August 8 through 10, with a margin of error of plus or minus 3.5 percent. Though Garden State Equality commissioned the poll, Zogby collected the data independently.

As of today, 1,514 couples have gotten civil-unioned in New Jersey. Garden State Equality alone has heard from 242 civil-unioned couples reporting that their employers are not recognizing their civil unions. The poll asked:

"If public officials in New Jersey come to the conclusion that civil unions for gay couples have not worked to provide equality under the law, and that the way to fix the law is to give gay couples the same right to marry as heterosexual couples, would you be fine with that or would you be upset by that?" 63% responded "fine with that," while only 31% responded "upset by that."

The poll also provides key political information to legislators for when they consider changing civil unions to marriage equality. The poll asked:

"Which of the following do you think is most likely to happen to legislators if they were to allow gay couples to marry? Those legislators would not be reelected, or nothing because people care about other issues more." 72% said nothing would happen to legislators, while only 21% said legislators would not be reelected.

In response to the question, "Regardless of where you stand on the issue of allowing gay couples to marry, do you agree or disagree that gay couples will be allowed to get married in New Jersey in a couple of years anyway?", 61% agreed, while only 29% disagreed.

The poll also asked the baseline question testing support for marriage equality versus civil unions in two different ways. When voters were asked: "New Jersey allows gay couples to enter into civil unions but not marry. Do you agree or disagree that New Jersey should give gay couples the same freedom to marry as heterosexual couples?" Some 48% supported marriage equality, while 45% opposed it.

But when voters were asked: "Which of the following comes closest to your own point of view: (A) If gay couples want to marry, let them. It will ensure equality and will not affect marriages of heterosexual couples anyway. (B) Allow gay couples to enter into civil unions, but not marriage. Allowing gay couples to marry will hurt the institution of marriage. (C) Do not allow gay couples to marry or enter into civil unions," 48% of voters supported marriage equality, 30% supported civil unions but no more, and 20% supported neither marriage nor civil unions for same-sex couples.

The difference between the two questions may have been the concept of marriage for gay couples hurting the institution of marriage, the primary argument of marriage-equality opponents that New Jersey voters clearly reject.

"Regardless of whether any public official supports marriage equality or wants to maintain the state's failed civil unions law," says Steven Goldstein, chair of Garden State Equality, "no official in New Jersey can credibly say that marriage for gay couples is a divisive issue in the state. Even voters who oppose marriage equality are ready to accept an upgrade of the state's civil unions law to real marriage equality."

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By This Anniversary Year, U.S. Becomes Much More Accepting of Interracial Marriage

This year marks the 40th anniversary of Loving v. Virginia, the Supreme Court case that declared states could not prohibit interracial marriage. A measure of how far U.S. attitudes have come is that when U.S. Sen. Barack Obama's interracial parents married in 1960, their marriage would have been illegal -- and he would have been considered illegitimate -- in half of all the states in America.

Prior to 1970, the overwhelming majority of all couples were same-race married couples. Couples who lived together outside of marriage, whether heterosexual or same-sex, were practically invisible. Inter-racial marriages were extremely rare. In fact, until 1967, many states in the US had laws against interracial marriage. In Virginia, for example, all nonwhite groups, including blacks, native Americans, and Asians, were prohibited from marrying whites. Even in states that never had laws against racial intermarriage, such as Illinois and New York, racial intermarriage was rare before the end of the 1960s.

Since 1970 there has been a steady increase in all types of nontraditional romantic unions. The number of same-sex couples livingtogether openly has climbed significantly, while the number of heterosexual unmarried cohabiting couples has soared, from 3.1 million in 1990 to 4.6million in 2000 to 5.2 million in 2005.

State laws prohibiting interracial marriages were finally struck down in the Supreme Court's Loving decision. Yet such marriages continued to be very uncommon well into the 1970s. In 1970, less than 2% ofmarried couples in the US were interracial. By 2005, the number of such marriages had risen almost fourfold, with interracial couples representing 7.5 percent of all married couples. Although this percentage may seem small, it is a dramatic increase over several decades, and many signs pointto it accelerating in the future, says Michael Rosenfeld of Stanford University.

Some of the rise in racial intermarriage since 1970 is due to immigration, which has increased the racial diversity of the US since 1965. Hispanics and Asians are the predominant groups among the new immigrants, and because neither Asians nor Hispanics are residentially segregated tothe extent that blacks in the US historically have been, Asians and Hispanics have substantial opportunity to socialize with members of other racial groups, says Rosenfeld, of Stanford's sociology department.

The increased numbers of these immigrants have contributed to the rise in intermarriage between Hispanics and non-Hispanic whites, and the rise in intermarriage between Asians and whites, Rosenfeld says.

The rise in black-white marriages cannot be due to immigration. One cause is improvement in race relations. Despite enduring prejudices, the post-Civil Rights era has led to more socialization between blacks and whites, and to more intermarriage. Polls show that the percentage of Americans who want interracial marriage to be illegal has declined precipitously since the early 1970s, and thereis much higher acceptance of inter-racial unions than at any time in the past 200 years.

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