Background

Throughout much of North America, well-educated and more affluent families tend to be headed by stably partnered parents who enjoy comparatively high levels of relationship quality. Working-class and poor families face higher levels of family instability and single parenthood, and lower levels of relationship quality. Moreover, trends in fertility, frequency of assortative mating (similarly educated individuals forming families with one another), and rates of education may contribute to larger variations in earnings between household types. Across a wide variety of countries, the number of household types at higher poverty risk (such as single-parent families) is projected to increase (OECD 2011a). The consequences of the rise in “at risk” families are still unknown, however, as living arrangements may have less of a connection to inequality in Europe than in North America (European Commission 2013).

Family has become more central to the discourse about inequality in the United States than elsewhere, largely owing to Sara McLanahan’s work on “diverging destinies” (McLanahan Reference McLanahan2004). She argued that some trends in modern family life increase children’s resources while others decrease them, but that the net change is by no means equally distributed across social class. But the United States remains an outlier among advanced economies with its low levels of public support for families, high rates of income and wealth inequality (Table 2, http://inequality.stanford.edu/sites/default/files/Pathways-SOTU-2016.pdf), and its high rates of union disruption (both divorce and the dissolution of cohabiting unions), so a comparative approach provides critical perspectives. Accordingly, this book puts family change at the center of the conversation about growing economic inequality across Europe and the Americas. Using evidence from countries that vary in both culture and public policy context, we gain more insight into how family inequality is entwined with inequalities of class.

We speak of family inequality rather than family diversity. Diversity simply means variety, and if a growing variety of family trajectories were unrelated to inequality, there would be no need for this book. Instead, our collection serves to highlight the similarities and differences in the relationship between family instability and economic inequality across contexts.

The Social Trends Institute invited professors and scholars of law, sociology, economics, public policy, demography, and political economy to an experts meeting in Rome (February 16–18, 2017) to present new research on family inequality from a comparative perspective. The invited authors not only represented various academic disciplines but also contributed diverse perspectives to the debate surrounding issues of family inequality. There was broad agreement that class inequality affects patterns of partnership and childbearing and, in turn, family change feeds economic inequality. Nonetheless, this volume, resulting from that meeting, also reflects pronounced differences in what various scholars conceived to be of prime importance with respect to growing inequality, and differences in how each might approach turning the vicious cycles into virtuous ones. All agreed that combatting growing economic inequality requires understanding what conditions this complex relationship as well as what mediates it. Cross-national comparisons are crucial for gaining this kind of understanding.

The Parts in this book bring together economics and the family, and they are organized as follows: Part I describes the unequal character of family life in Europe and the Americas, Part II explores its causes, Part III describes various consequences of diverging family structures, and Part IV presents potential solutions for bridging the growing family divide (or minimizing its consequences). The final Part provides commentary and concluding reflections on the overall questions explored throughout this volume.

Detailing the Increasingly Unequal Socioeconomic Character of Family Life

Two chapters describe family inequality: Marcia Carlson’s on Europe and the United States, and Albert Esteve and Elizabeth Florez-Paredes’ on Latin America and the Caribbean. Both chapters start with a description of change over time in family life. Carlson accomplishes this using indicators commonly associated with the “second demographic transition,” a label commonly used to refer to the transition to below replacement fertility, but that is better understood as family patterns resulting when individuals have a great deal of autonomy in how they progress through the stages of their lives (Lesthaeghe Reference Lesthaeghe2010). The second demographic transition is typically characterized by less marriage, more cohabitation, more divorce, and more nonmarital childbearing; Carlson compares trends in these indicators between the United States and European countries as well as among European countries. She also makes cross-national comparisons with respect to multipartnered fertility and children’s experience of family instability. Instead of using these indicators that have emerged from studies of northern fertility regimes, Esteve and Florez-Paredes start with an exploratory factor analysis to determine the dimensions that structure families in Latin America. They then organize the rest of their chapter around union and childbearing calendars, household complexity, married and unmarried cohabitation, and the nature of female household headship.

Both of these chapters in the “descriptive” Part of our volume lay the foundation for a discussion of how family change influences socioeconomic inequality. Before we can know whether the destinies of children are diverging with changing family patterns, we have to know what the trajectories of family change are. Both chapters contribute this, and they also document diversity within regions.

Additionally, both chapters take the crucial next step in exploring the extent to which family patterns have been unfolding differently along class lines. Carlson reviewed European evidence on educational differences in marriage, divorce, nonmarital fertility, multipartnered fertility, and children’s experience of family instability. Although the more educated are more likely to marry in the United States, this pattern is less consistent across European countries, and holds most strongly in countries where women commonly expect continued labor force participation after marrying (Kalmijn Reference Kalmijn2007, Reference Kalmijn2013). Alternately stated, education has its strongest positive relationship with marriage where marriage does not substantially increase the chance that women will drop out of the labor force. Educated women are more likely to eschew marriage where gender roles are more traditional, a pattern Göran Therborn (Reference Therborn, Treas, Scott and Richards2014) assumingly characterized as a “Lysistrate rebellion,” referring to the women in Aristophanes’ comedy who boycotted traditional marital expectations while waiting for men’s behavior to change.

Carlson further reviewed fairly mixed evidence from across Europe on the relationship between education and divorce that therefore indicated that the concentration of union instability at lower socioeconomic levels in the United States was far from universal. Similarly, repartnering and multipartner fertility did not have consistent socioeconomic patterns across different contexts. In contrast, the concentration of nonmarital childbearing at lower socioeconomic levels was far more consistent across countries (Perelli-Harris et al. Reference Perelli-Harris, Kreyenfeld and Kubisch2010).

Finally, with respect to family instability for children, the indicator most closely related to “diverging destinies,” the (rather thin) evidence Carlson reviewed indicated that class differences in instability might be growing in Europe, but remain small compared to the US. She also highlights the fact that class differences in instability matter less for overall inequality in Europe where fewer children experience instability (see also Chapter 7).

Esteve and Florez-Paredes’ chapter on families in Latin America addresses a context in which recent expansion in cohabitation has been concentrated among those with higher socioeconomic status (as proxied by educational attainment). In the United States and Europe where marriage increasingly occurs only after other achievements in adult life like college graduation and stable employment, those with less access to higher education and good jobs have become more likely to have children in cohabiting unions. In contrast, cohabitation and cohabiting childbearing have been long-standing lower class phenomena in Latin America and the Caribbean, with the more marginalized (especially the indigenous groups) opting for cohabitation, and the relatively elite choosing marriage (Esteve and Lesthaeghe Reference Esteve and Lesthaeghe2016). Work on the region even refers to a “dual nuptiality system” (e.g., Castro-Martín Reference Martín2002). Then some of the same forces that have affected family life in more developed countries – e.g., the rise of individualism, consumerism, and women’s economic independence – have had the greatest impact among those with high socioeconomic status in Latin America and the Caribbean. This led to increased nonmarital childbearing (both births to lone mothers and in cohabiting unions) among upper-class individuals within the region (Esteve, Lesthaeghe, and López-Gay Reference Esteve, Lesthaeghe and López-Gay2012). Historically, children born in cohabiting unions were concentrated at the bottom of the income distribution, but the socioeconomic gradient for cohabiting births has weakened in Latin America and the Caribbean.

Esteve and Florez-Paredes’ work is richly descriptive. They show that despite the better-educated starting to “catch up” to their more marginalized counterparts in terms of cohabitation rates, cohabitation remains more common among women with low education. Furthermore, early union formation, early childbearing, single motherhood, and union dissolution are all more concentrated at low socioeconomic levels. In short, disadvantageous family behaviors remain correlated with social class. In this respect, Latin America and the Caribbean resemble the United States. Nonetheless, they argue that with the historical legacy of high cohabitation rates among indigenous groups, modern family transitions have not created diverging destinies as “Destinies have been diverging for centuries” (Chapter 2). Latin America is the most unequal region in the world for reasons that include, but are by no means limited to, family forms. Indeed, there are many diverse and long-standing reasons for inequality that may be partly reflected in contemporary family patterns, but cannot be understood by a study of recent changes in family patterns by women’s education.

In addition, Esteve and Florez-Paredes emphasize a theme that also emerges in Brienna Perelli-Harris’ work (see Chapter 4): Context sometimes dwarfs overall patterns. What this means in Latin America and the Caribbean is that even though there is a fairly consistent overall relationship between family patterns and social disadvantage, “two individuals with similar profiles regarding education, ethnicity, and religion may show quite different family behaviour depending on the region where they live, proving that ‘individuals have histories but regions have much longer histories’” (Esteve and Lesthaeghe Reference Esteve and Lesthaeghe2016, p. 269). Historical differences among Latin American countries and between Latin America and Europe with respect to the evolution of and function of marriage still seem to condition individual marital choices, even though there are advantages associated with marriage across contexts.

Esteve’s previous research had shown that cohabitation patterns depended on geohistorical legacies, and the contribution in this volume extends that argument to other family patterns (especially single and cohabiting childbearing). Overall, he and Florez-Paredes show that context is a more important determinant of family behavior than class, but that the class patterns showing up in Latin American family change resemble those documented in the United States (and to a lesser extent Europe). Notably, the rise in upper-class cohabitation coincided with postponed childbearing, whereas low-educated cohabiting women have not been postponing childbearing within their unions. There is therefore potential for destinies to diverge even when cohabitation grows most among the elite.

Their chapter makes a further contribution to cross-country analysis when it highlights an aspect of family life in Latin America and the Caribbean that has, to date, been resistant to change: Women start childbearing relatively early in life. Age at first birth in the region has not increased appreciably – even with lower overall fertility, increases in women’s education, and increases in women’s labor force participation. Esteve and Florez-Paredes show that only university-educated women have come to postpone childbearing more over time. Among primary- and secondary-educated women, first births have remained early.

Exploring the Causes of Increasingly Unequal Family Life

Part II of the volume on causes of inequality in family life includes contributions from Andrew Cherlin, Nicholas Eberstadt, and Brienna Perelli-Harris. Each has a different emphasis. Cherlin draws the causal arrow from economic inequality to family formation and dissolution, arguing that when men’s job opportunities suffer, so does marriage. Eberstadt assigns more importance to policy and cultural causes of the retreat from marriage, while Perelli-Harris maintains that context matters more for class differences in family patterns than any universal explanations.

Cherlin argues that unequal labor market opportunities drive the retreat from marriage. He nonetheless fully concedes that economic forces only erode marriage after culture change has already opened up multiple possibilities for adult lives and childrearing – e.g., the Great Depression did not cause a surge in nonmarital births – but he holds that now that choices are available, the economically disadvantaged will have more nonmarital childrearing.

Cherlin’s “prima facie” case for the importance of the economy as a driver of change is that moderately educated Americans saw the most pronounced retreat from marriage during the same era (starting in the 1980s) that men’s labor market opportunities declined more dramatically for moderately educated Americans than for either the less or more educated. Men’s earning power remains an important component of their “marriageability”: It is required even in an egalitarian marital bargain where both partners share in paid and domestic work. Thus, socioeconomic inequality drives family inequality.

In contrast, Eberstadt documents that prime-age men have been progressively less likely to work in every birth cohort over the last fifty years in the United States. He emphasizes that the “flight from work” (see Chapter 5) has also in large part been a flight from marriage and parental involvement. In one of the exercises in his chapter, Eberstadt explores how the changing composition of the American population – in terms of race, education, nativity, education, and family structure – are related to men’s work rates. His findings are striking, for instance that the positive effect of half a century of improvements in educational attainment has been more than canceled out by changes in marriage patterns. He also includes engaging comparisons showing that marital status is more strongly associated with work than other factors associated with disadvantage, like race. Eberstadt readily acknowledges that these parts of his analysis leave causal questions completely open.

In fact, Eberstadt gives much credit to “demand side” hypotheses (see Chapter 5) like Cherlin’s – those that assert that marriage rates have fallen because changes in the economy make the kind of stable employment that contributes to marriage less likely. He nonetheless maintains that the decline in employment among prime-age men over the past two generations cannot be fully explained by the demand side. His evidence includes both that men’s inactivity at the national level has increased smoothly over time, despite demand-side “shocks” like the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) agreement that should arguably have had a more detectable effect on joblessness, as well as state-level employment patterns that are far more variable than demand-side theory would predict. Eberstadt adds the reverse causal arrow to demand-side theories, claiming that men oriented toward marriage and parenthood commit themselves to jobs. He bolsters this contention by showing nearly identical employment rates for married high school dropouts and unmarried college degree holders from 1994 to 2015. In other words, he discounts job prospects as the sole driver of family change by showing that marriage seems to enhance job prospects.

Perelli-Harris makes her case for the importance of context in addressing the relationship between family inequality and socioeconomic inequality in four distinct ways. First, she shows through the geographic concentration of nonmarital childbearing that evidence of history, religion, policy, and culture all appear in contemporary geographic variation in nonmarital childbearing. Next, she reviews how different European countries have extended (or not extended) rights to cohabitants and unmarried fathers, and discusses the potential implications of these variations for the class divide associated with cohabiting childbearing. Third, she presents focus group research that demonstrates just how different the meanings assigned to cohabitation are across countries. Fourth, she presents evidence from a study she led that systematically tackled some of the methodological obstacles to properly testing whether marriage per se (as opposed to simply being in a union) makes a difference for adult well-being.

One of the only commonalities across countries was that marriage was universally viewed as an expression of commitment. Importantly in the context of the current volume, none of the focus groups across eight European countries put an emphasis on the need for economic stability prior to marriage – a factor that is so much a part of the discourse on the class divide in marriage in the United States. Thus it is possible that selecting marriage on the basis of economic stability is less a part of the European family inequality story.

Her final discussion of adult outcomes (mental well-being, health, life satisfaction, and wage differentials) provides a nice segue to Part III of the book on consequences of growing family instability. The results fully supported Perelli-Harris’s major theme (see Chapter 4) that country context conditions the effects associated with cohabitation. She says: “Overall, the results suggest that taking into account the heterogeneity of cohabiting unions (as measured by union duration and shared children) as well as selection mechanisms from childhood can explain many of the marital benefits to well-being, but country context, such as welfare state regime and social norms, also matters.”

While most of Perelli-Harris’ chapter emphasizes diversity in timing and pace of family change, she did find more evidence of a class divide in nonmarital childbearing than other new family formation behaviors. “Across Europe, higher educated individuals are more likely to marry before a birth (Mikolai et al. 2016), and lower educated individuals are more likely to separate after a birth (Musick and Michelmore Reference Musick and Michelmore2015)” (Chapter 4). Thus while she rightfully calls for more research to understand the complex relationships between context, selection, socially constructed meanings of cohabitation and marriage, and changes over individual life courses, she does point to an important similarity between the United States and Europe: Childbearing within marriage occurs more often among the advantaged.

Consequences of Growing Family Instability

The fourth section of Perelli-Harris’ chapter (Chapter 4) examines how adult outcomes vary between cohabitants and married individuals, and Part III of our book supplements this concern for adult well-being with analysis of potential consequences of family inequality for the reproduction of inequality (Diederik Boertien, Fabrizio Bernardi, and Juho Härkönen, Chapter 7; Anna Garriga and Paolo Berta, Chapter 6), and for the growth of national economies (W. Bradford Wilcox and Joseph Price, Chapter 8).

Garriga and Berta address the question of whether children’s destinies are diverging across twenty-one Western countries, and they approach their comparative inquiry in an unusually thorough manner. First, they explore to what extent there is a general pattern in Western countries of single motherhood being more common among women with less education; there is. Despite substantial cross-national differences in the relationship between mothers’ education and single motherhood, they confirmed that a negative relationship between mother’s education and single motherhood holds in most Western countries.

Second, they use three outcome variables that, while all related to education, are nonetheless distinct: Standardized math test scores, grade repetition, and truancy. While most previous comparative work had used standardized test scores, grade repetition, and truancy are both strongly associated with labor market outcomes and risk behaviors, such as drug abuse or crime (Garry Reference Garry1996; Jones, Lovrich, and Lovrich Reference Jones, Lovrich and Lovrich2011; Range, Yonke, and Young Reference Range, Yonke and Young2011). In other words, these additional two outcomes tell us more about the likelihood that destinies will diverge than cognitive achievement alone does; they have strong behavioral components. Garriga and Berta found that children in single-mother families had lower math test scores in seventeen of the twenty-one countries, plus that they were more likely to repeat a grade or truant practically everywhere. Further, higher levels of maternal education seemed to compensate for the negative effect of single motherhood on test scores, but much less so for the other two risk-related outcomes.

Finally, Garriga and Berta consider the question of whether the effects of single motherhood are greater or lesser among children of more highly educated mothers. Destinies might actually converge if family structure had little effect at lower socioeconomic levels where many children have relatively poor educational outcomes, compared to higher socioeconomic levels where a second parent in the household might help prevent subpar outcomes. Their findings here were quite mixed: For some outcomes and in some countries, children of less-educated mothers experienced greater consequences associated with single motherhood, while for other outcomes and/or other countries, it was children of more-educated mothers whose outcomes were most strongly related to family structure. This means that the general tendency for single motherhood to be more common at lower socioeconomic levels would sometimes result in diverging destinies: Where educated mothers compensate for the disadvantages their children would otherwise experience with single motherhood or the consequences are the same regardless of maternal education, but that sometimes high prevalence of single motherhood is coupled with low associated costs, thus limiting the extent to which destinies would diverge.

Boertien, Bernardi, and Härkönen’s chapter (Chapter 7) on whether family inequality contributes to national-level increases in socioeconomic inequality is like Garriga and Berta’s chapter in that they focus individually on each of several conditions that would together make diverging destinies likely. They briefly discuss critical reviews of how much difference family dynamics really matter for child outcomes, with a focus on both the magnitude of the association and how much of it is properly interpreted as being causal. Next, they examine the extent to which lower income children are overrepresented among those experiencing disadvantageous family dynamics. Third, they engage with the question of how the “penalty” associated with disadvantageous family dynamics varies by socioeconomic background: The same question Garriga and Berta take up in their third and final section (see Chapter 6).

In their own final section, Boertien and his colleagues (see Chapter 7) discuss recent evidence from the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany, and Italy that quantified the overall contribution of family structure to inequality of opportunity at the societal level. “Overall” includes the size of the effects, the distribution of the affected population by socioeconomic status, and the variability in the size of effects by socioeconomic status. They conclude that even though family structure is an important factor determining life chances at the individual level, family inequality does not explain growing socioeconomic inequality within societies. In the United States and the United Kingdom, nonintact families were concentrated among the disadvantaged, but the consequences were smaller among the disadvantaged – thus explaining the small net impact at the societal level. In Germany, children whose mothers had intermediate levels of education were the most likely to have nonintact families, while in Italy, very few children were disadvantaged by family inequality in any socioeconomic group. Thus for different reasons in disparate contexts, family inequality did not have sizable effects on the distribution of educational attainment (attending tertiary institutions). They leave open the question of whether children’s destinies diverge with respect to other outcomes.

While the first two chapters in Part III focus on inequality, Wilcox and Price (see Chapter 8) investigate the association between prevalent family structures and rates of economic growth. They show that countries where two-parent families are more common, as well as those with higher marriage rates, enjoy higher rates of economic growth (using data from 2001 to 2014 and controlling for individual country fixed effects).

While emphasizing that these correlations may not be causal, Wilcox and Price nonetheless describe potential causal pathways and provide cross-country evidence testing various mechanisms. Specifically, they show that countries with higher proportions of children living with both biological parents have: (1) higher savings rates and (2) lower homicide rates. Labor force statistics, however, did not support their argument, as intact families did not predict higher men’s labor force participation rates, and were associated with lower women’s labor force participation rates. Their evidence nonetheless opens the door for further investigation of the idea that intact married families do not just confer benefits on their members but that they may also help nations prosper by promoting savings and public safety (as well as other potential mechanisms like supporting educational attainment).

Bridging the Growing Family Divide for Children

Part IV of our volume addresses how the impact of family inequality on children can be reduced. Both chapters are essentially optimistic. Frances Kobrin Goldscheider and Sharon Sassler (see Chapter 9) explain why it is reasonable to expect that the more equal gender bargain that characterizes marriage among those with more education, will also become characteristic of unions regardless of the socioeconomic position of the couples. They believe that cultural diffusion will lessen family inequality (with or without strong state support for families). Richard V. Reeves’ (see Chapter 10) optimism comes from accepting that new family forms present policy challenges, and also believing that policy levers to effect change are available and reasonable.

Goldscheider and Sassler frame their chapter around the question of whether the gender revolution will characterize only those with higher education unless governments provide structures that support gender equality (e.g., individual taxation, generous family benefits). Gender equality is of central concern in a chapter about reducing inequality for children because of the assumption that when men are more involved in domestic life, families are stronger and more stable. While the rise in women’s labor force participation – the first half of the gender revolution – has come to affect family life in all socioeconomic strata, the rise in men’s domestic work participation – the second half of the gender revolution – is concentrated among the more educated. Countries with the most generous policies for reducing work–family conflict provide the exception to this rule: There is less of a class divide in men’s domestic work participation in northern European countries. Hence their central question is whether either the lack of social equality or the lack of strong state support for families will stall the gender revolution, leaving families without the benefits of the no longer realistic male breadwinner system nor men’s enhanced involvement at home.

Goldscheider and Sassler begin by emphasizing that the relationship between female labor force participation rates and fertility at the national level has changed: It used to be that countries with more traditional gender roles had higher fertility, but now, among advanced countries, it is those with relatively egalitarian gender roles that have higher fertility. It thus appears that even if the educated led the “Lysistrate rebellion” against traditional gender roles, the results are profound enough to show up in national-level statistics: The traditional gender bargain is not supporting childbearing. Nonetheless, Goldscheider and Sassler recognize that it is the same countries that have both the most egalitarian gender roles and the most generous policies for reducing work–family conflict.

In direct response to the contention that the second half of the gender revolution cannot take hold without strong state support, they refer to work showing that the levels and trends in men’s share of housework and child-care time are very similar in the United States and Scandinavia (Stanfors and Goldscheider Reference Stanfors and Goldscheider2017). They even argue that the lack of state support for families in the United States may have increased the need for men’s involvement in child-rearing since, for example, publicly funded universal preschool is not available.

Their paradigm for overcoming class barriers is one of diffusion. The more educated often lead many types of social change “so that differences by education widen early in the change process and then attenuate as the new behavior diffuses more generally” (Chapter 9). From this perspective, family inequality may be a transient problem that subsides when the less educated adopt more egalitarian gender roles. The chapter reviews both quantitative and qualitative evidence, suggesting that less-educated men are becoming increasingly invested in directly caring for their children. They further suggest that although couples with egalitarian orientations used to select cohabitation, egalitarianism is beginning to promote marriage. The diffusion of egalitarian attitudes could then contribute to stability in children’s lives both directly through men’s involvement and indirectly through marriage.

The social diffusion arguments that Goldsheider and Sassler make by no means render policy unimportant. For example, they applaud maternity leave benefits that are tied to the level of prebirth earnings because this creates an incentive to avoid teen childbearing that, of course, contributes to family inequality. They also note that family-friendly policies have been diffusing even within the United States. Provided that the Trump administration does not derail this process, more parents will have support for combining work and child care. Consistent with their gender revolution approach, the policies that they identify as being the most pro-family (in terms of encouraging more childbearing) are those that encourage men to share more of the family leave. They also recommend an income “floor” to support men’s financial contributions to their families. In other words, supporting men and women as earners and nurturers is key to promoting strong families.

Reeves acknowledges a literature that points to parental union transitions as problematic for children across a broad range of outcomes. Of particular significance for combatting “diverging destinies,” children reared in stable married parent families have the best chance of upward intergenerational mobility (Reeves and Venator Reference Reeves and Venator2015), plus children in communities with more single mothers are less mobile (Chetty et al. Reference Chetty, Hendren, Kline and Saez2014a). Reeves assumes parental union transitions will happen, but he wants to see fewer of them, and lower costs for the children involved. He thus advocates for strategies that both prevent family instability and mitigate its consequences.

Because Reeves agrees with his colleague Isabel Sawhill (Reference Sawhill2014) that “family formation is a new fault line in the American class structure”: Preventing family instability must include reducing unintended pregnancy rates. Neither shotgun marriages nor shotgun cohabitations provide the kind of stability for children that unions formed before conceptions do (Lichter et al. Reference Lichter, Michelmore, Turner and Sassler2016). Reeves highlights the rapid liberalization of social norms regarding sex across all socioeconomic groups, but uptake of effective contraception (especially long-acting reversible contraceptives like intrauterine devices and injectables) primarily among the most educated. Ensuring access to affordable, effective contraception is therefore not just “the most powerful pro-family policy available” (Chapter 10) but also a means of combatting family inequality. He also argues for affordable, effective contraception as key to promoting a social norm of responsible parenthood.

The other policy recommendations on Reeves’ “prevention” list is to enhance the stability of families that already have children. To enable better earning power among the less educated, he would like to see more vocational apprenticeships and strengthening of community college capacity/effectiveness. In addition, he recommends two policies that make the work–family balance more practical: Enhancing the predictability of work schedules and providing paid leave. Goldscheider and Sassler would add that some of the paid leave should not be transferable between parents as employers seem to respect men’s right to use use-it-or-lose-it leave.

Reeves’ “mitigating” list includes increasing material resources to unmarried parents; improving parenting skills, especially among the less educated; and enhancing children’s learning opportunities outside the home. In all cases, the fundamental idea is that parental union instability costs, that it costs the already disadvantaged more (something that Garriga and Berta as well as Boertien, Bernardi, and Härkönen question – at least for some children’s outcomes), and that therefore interventions that disproportionately help the disadvantaged will help mitigate the impact of family inequality. The only interventions that made his list were those patterned after programs that had actually been shown to work (those with an evidence base).

Bringing it All Together? Commentary on Themes

In Chapter 11, Lynn Prince Cooke focuses on gender and cross-cultural issues. She emphasizes that the magnitude of the family changes, and especially their negative outcomes, varies across cultural, economic, and political contexts. She argues that the patterns of cross-contextual variation are critical to understanding the differences in life chances across family types, and that these differences are minimized where institutional arrangements, unlike in the United States, support greater gender along with class equality. It is, she suggests, a pathology of patriarchy (not of matriarchy) that disproportionately hurts the life chances of boys and men.

The chapter then highlights how structural changes over the past half-century make patriarchal assumptions untenable for a growing proportion of men. Cooke concludes by arguing that only fully institutionalizing gender equality will minimize negative outcomes associated with family change. She observes that gender equality ensures children will have access to the economic and emotional resources that are critical to their development, regardless of family form, and that it encourages development of new normative masculinities that support greater family stability.

In their commentary and concluding thoughts in Chapter 13, June Carbone and Naomi R. Cahn analyze the differing approaches to the relationship between economic inequality and family structure that are apparent throughout the contributions to this volume. One approach suggests that family change – particularly class-based increases in relationship instability, nonmarital cohabitation, and single-parent births – makes an independent contribution to societal inequality beyond that which is explained by economic change. Another approach sees economic change as the source of both greater inequality and family transformation, and favors solutions that provide greater support to those left behind – both for poverty alleviation and to enhance relationship stability. Carbone and Cahn point out that both groups agree that a new information-based society has witnessed a series of overlapping changes: Greater demand for women’s market labor, an elite shift to later marriage and relatively more egalitarian relationships, declining wages for unskilled men, greater tolerance for nonmarital sexuality, and lower overall fertility. While the approaches overlap, they differ in their identification of causation, preferred family strategies, and proposed government interventions.

Their commentary highlights where grounds emerge for at least tentative agreement, the issues likely to remain subjects of intense disagreement, and the areas that have yet to be fully explored.  Their goal is to move the focus from the areas of disagreement toward positive policies with proven impact. Ultimately, Carbone and Cahn believe that economic inequality and cultural values interact with each other in an iterative fashion. In short, they require a dynamic systems analysis, not just the isolation of individual causal agents.

Wilcox’s concluding reflections in Part V, Chapter 12 encourage scholars and policymakers to think about how the global retreat from marriage is connected to greater family instability and, in some places, more family inequality in Europe and the Americas. In particular, Wilcox contends that the retreat from marriage and the rise of cohabitation throughout Europe and the Americas has led to more family instability and single parenthood in many countries across these three continents, in countries as diverse as the United States, France, and the Dominican Republic. Wilcox believes that cohabitation, insofar as it less institutionalized than marriage, is generally less stable than marriage for children; this is why the rise of cohabitation may be fueling growing family instability in parts of Europe and the Americas. Moreover, in some of these countries, such as the United Kingdom and Sweden, family instability has grown most among less-educated and lower income families. Even though in some contexts family instability does not contribute as much to disadvantage among those that are already of lower socioeconomic status (Boertien, Bernardi, and Härkönen, Chapter 7), Wilcox argues scholars concerned with growing family inequality in family stability need to pay closer attention to the ways in which the retreat from marriage may be contributing to inequality and the stability and structure of family life.

Answered and Unanswered Questions about Family Inequality

Together, the contributions in this book highlight some useful themes for understanding the patterns, causes, consequences, and potential remedies for family inequality. We have, of course, not solved the complex puzzle nor identified everything that contributes to diversity of outcomes across contexts. We nonetheless came away from our meeting in Rome knowing more, and knowing more about what we do not know.

What we know:

1. (1) Socioeconomic inequality predated “new family forms” and will survive regardless of future family trajectories. The questions for the present moment are whether new family forms are making it more difficult to combat socioeconomic inequality and, if so, what can/should be done about it.

2. (2) The emergence of postindustrial economies and globalization have changed job markets in ways that can have profound effects on socioeconomic inequality and family inequality: One of the reasons the two have grown at the same time is that they have common causes.

3. (3) Recent and current changes in job markets are far from gender-neutral. Thus, the implications of economic change for family stability are importantly conditioned by the gender norms prevailing in the most affected subpopulations. Reorganization in the public sphere is going to prompt reorganization in the private sphere, but whether that is going to result in couples that are highly interdependent in ways very different from Beckerian specialization (especially with both partners invested in child care) or increasingly fragile families is likely to be context-dependent.

4. (4) Different aspects of family change affect various classes differently. Some indicators associated with “the second demographic transition” (e.g., repartnering, multipartner fertility) show inconsistent relationships with social class. Class patterns of marriage and divorce also vary in both magnitude and direction across countries, but within countries, divorce tends to become concentrated at the lower end of the socioeconomic spectrum over time. Nonmarital childbearing is universally more common among women with less education, as is lone child-rearing. Children with less-educated mothers are also more likely to experience union instability.

5. (5) Levels of union instability condition the potential social consequences of new family forms. Thus policy that strengthens unions or keeps children from being born to unstable unions can be helpful, whether or not family inequality is an important cause of socioeconomic inequality. Similarly, delayed childbearing is a feature of the second demographic transition that could combat inequality if it could be successfully promoted among the disadvantaged.

What we do not know:

1. (1) Does the lack of emphasis on a need for economic stability prior to marriage in European discourse on cohabitation (Perelli-Harris, Chapter 4) help explain why the United States has the sharpest class gradient in cohabitation? Would it be useful to try to “export” an ethos that makes marriage more about commitment and less dependent on financial success?

2. (2) Given that welfare state regimes and social norms condition how similar outcomes for children with various family histories are, which gaps can be closed by policy? More specifically, can state policy help narrow behavioral differences associated with family structure (such as truancy) as well as cognitive ones (like test scores)? More generally, what can we learn from which outcomes are most universally related to family inequality versus which ones seem to respond well to policy?

3. (3) Is family inequality a transient problem that will subside when some of its causes like the decline of the male breadwinner system are relics of a distant past, or will the rise in individualism associated with postmodern societies make family instability and thus family inequality an ongoing issue? If it is an ongoing issue, will family formation continue to be a “fault line” in class structure? Where?

4. (4) How is race part of the family inequality story? Various chapters allude to the importance of race, but, given that the meaning of race depends on context, we did not even try to draw any meaningful conclusions across Europe and the Americas. This volume focused on class, and in so doing it left many unanswered questions about the importance of race in family inequality, the intersection of race and class in conditioning family inequality, and how historical legacies with respect to race play out in different countries.

5. (5) To what extent is economic instability a cause of family inequality? There are several important issues buried in this question. First, good jobs that do not last do not provide the same kind of foundation for marriage and child-rearing as do more secure jobs. In the face of perpetual uncertainty, choices like delaying childbearing make less sense than under conditions where there are known benefits associated with waiting. Yet most of our evidence on family/economy connections focuses on employment rates, and not employment stability. How would what we know change if we knew more about instability? Second, are labor regulations that make employment more stable in many European countries part of the reason that the families are less unequal in Europe than the United States?

6. (6) What other contextual factors are we missing? While we are happy to have put together a volume that highlights political history, religion, family policy, gender roles, and labor policy as factors conditioning both the causes and consequences of family inequality, we suspect that future research will identify more important aspects of context that contribute to the great diversity across time, space, and various children’s outcomes.

   With all of these explored and unexplored questions, this volume contributes to an improved understanding of the core issues involved in the relationship between family and economic inequality.