Marriage wanes for N.C. working class?

Here's an intriguing report. A new study by the National Marriage Project finds 44 percent of those with high school diplomas but no college degrees now have children without being married. That's more than triple what it was in the 1970s. And it's not mostly teen mothers; half of those nonmarital births were to couples living together.

It's also not mostly people living in big northern cities. According to the report, it's the same among communities that make up the bedrock of the American middle class — small-town Maine, the working-class suburbs of southern Ohio, the farmlands of rural Arkansas, and the factory towns of North Carolina. Data reveal a consistent story: Divorce is high, nonmarital childbearing is spreading, and marital bliss is in increasingly short supply.

The 2010 issue of The State of Our Unions, "When Marriage Disappears: The Retreat from Marriage in Middle America," concludes that in Middle America, marriage is in trouble.
Data indicate that trends in nonmarital childbearing, divorce, and marital quality in Middle America increasingly resemble those of the poor, where marriage is fragile and weak.

However, among the highly educated and affluent, marriage is stable and appears to be getting even stronger. In the early 1980s, only 2 percent of babies born to highly educated mothers were born outside of marriage, compared to 13 percent of babies born to moderately educated mothers and 33 percent of babies born to mothers who were the least educated. In the late 2000s, only 6 percent of babies born to highly educated mothers were born outside of marriage, compared to 44 percent of babies born to moderately educated mothers and 54 percent of babies born to the least-educated mothers.

"When Marriage Disappears" finds that shifts in marriage attitudes, increases in unemployment, and declines in religious attendance are among the trends driving the retreat from marriage in Middle America. These findings were released this week by the National Marriage Project at the University of Virginia and the Center for Marriage and Families at the Institute for American Values.