Stephen Crowley/The New York Times
But a friendship that
evokes parity by day becomes a study of inequality at night and a testament to
the way family structure deepens class divides. Ms. Faulkner is married and
living on two paychecks, while Ms. Schairer is raising her children by herself.
That gives the Faulkner family a profound advantage in income and nurturing
time, and makes their children statistically more likely to finish college,
find good jobs and form stable marriages.
Ms. Faulkner goes home to a
trim subdivision and weekends crowded with children’s events. Ms. Schairer’s
rent consumes more than half her income, and she scrapes by on food stamps.
“I see Chris’s kids —
they’re in swimming and karate and baseball and Boy Scouts, and it seems like
it’s always her or her husband who’s able to make it there,” Ms. Schairer said.
“That’s something I wish I could do for my kids. But number one, that stuff
costs a lot of money and, two, I just don’t have the time.”
The economic storms of
recent years have raised concerns about growing inequality and questions about
a core national faith, that even Americans of humble backgrounds have a good
chance of getting ahead. Most of the discussion has focused on labor market
forces like falling blue-collar wages and lavish Wall Street pay.
But striking changes in
family structure have also broadened income gaps and posed new barriers to
upward mobility. College-educated Americans like the Faulkners are increasingly
likely to marry one another, compounding their growing advantages in pay.
Less-educated women like Ms. Schairer, who left college without finishing her
degree, are growing less likely to marry at all, raising children on pinched
paychecks that come in ones, not twos.
Estimates vary widely, but
scholars have said that changes in marriage patterns — as opposed to changes in
individual earnings — may account for as much as 40 percent of the growth in
certain measures of inequality. Long a nation of economic extremes, the United
States is also becoming a society of family haves and family have-nots, with
marriage and its rewards evermore confined to the fortunate classes.
“It is the privileged
Americans who are marrying, and marrying helps them stay privileged,” said Andrew Cherlin, a
sociologist at Johns Hopkins University.
About 41 percent of births
in the United States occur outside marriage, up sharply from 17 percent three
decades ago. But equally sharp are the educational divides, according to an
analysis by Child Trends, a
Washington research group. Less than 10 percent of the births to
college-educated women occur outside marriage, while for women with high school
degrees or less the figure is nearly 60 percent.
Long concentrated among
minorities, motherhood outside marriage now varies by class about as much as it
does by race. It is growing fastest in the lower reaches of the white middle
class — among women like Ms. Schairer who have some postsecondary schooling but
no four-year degree.
While many children of
single mothers flourish (two of the last three presidents had mothers who were
single during part of their childhood), a large body of research shows that they
are more likely than similar children with married parents to experience
childhood poverty, act up in class, become teenage parents and drop out of
school.
Sara
McLanahan, a Princeton sociologist, warns that family structure increasingly
consigns children to “diverging destinies.”
Married couples are having
children later than they used to, divorcing less and investing heavily in
parenting time. By contrast, a growing share of single mothers have never
married, and many have children with more than one man.
“The people with more
education tend to have stable family structures with committed, involved
fathers,” Ms. McLanahan said. “The people with less education are more likely
to have complex, unstable situations involving men who come and go.”
She said, “I think this
process is creating greater gaps in these children’s life chances.”
Ms. Schairer’s life offers
a vivid example of how rapidly norms have changed. She grew up in a small town
outside Ann Arbor, where her life revolved around church and school and
everyone she knew was married.
“I thought, ‘I’ll meet
someone, and we’ll marry and have kids and the house and the white picket
fence,’ ” she said. “That’s what I wanted. That’s what I still want.”
She got pregnant during her
first year of college, left school and stayed in a troubled relationship that
left her with three children when it finally collapsed six years ago. She has
had little contact with the children’s father and receives no child support.
With an annual income of just under $25,000, Ms. Schairer barely lifts her
children out of poverty, but she is not one to complain. “I’m in this position
because of decisions I made,” she said.
She buys generic cereal at
about half the brand-name price, takes the children to church every week and
posts their happy moments on her Facebook page. Inequality is a word she rarely
uses, though her family life is a showcase of its broadening reach.
“Two incomes would
certainly help with the bills,” she said. “But it’s parenting, too. I wish I
could say, ‘Call your dad.’ ”
Path to Single Motherhood
The van with the cracked
windshield arrived on a recent day at 7:30 a.m., and three people emerged, the
smallest stifling yawns. Several days a week, Ms. Schairer opens the child care
center 45 minutes before she can send her two youngest children to school.
Bored children in work spaces make mornings tense.
Savannah, 7, crossed the
play area on stilts. Steavon, 10, threw a ball. As parents with infants and
toddlers hurried past, Ms. Schairer chided the two to stay out of the way.
“They’re really not supposed to be here,” she said.
Steavon has Asperger
syndrome, a mild form of autism that can lead to sharp mood swings. He slumped
on her desk, wanting $2 to buy a bagel at school. Ms. Schairer does not carry
cash — one way not to spend it — and handed him pretzels from home. “I don’t
like those!” he said, shoving them away.
Ms. Schairer is known for a
spotless desk. Steavon found a leaky pen.
“I’m ready for you to go,”
she said.
Time away is money lost —
Ms. Schairer punched a clock by the door — so she hurried the children to
school and returned with a look of relief. A stop in Ms. Faulkner’s office
brought a bit of rejuvenating gossip: two teachers were having a tiff. Adult
diversions are absent at home.
“I talk to myself a lot,”
Ms. Schairer said.
Although she grew up in the
1990s, Ms. Schairer’s small-town childhood had a 1950s feel. Her father drove a
beer truck, her mother served as church trustee and her grandparents lived next
door. She knew no one rich, no one poor and no one raising children outside of
marriage. “It was just the way it was,” she said.
William Penn University,
eight hours away in Iowa, offered a taste of independence and a spot on the
basketball team. Her first thought when she got pregnant was “My mother’s going
to kill me.” Abortion crossed her mind, but her boyfriend, an African-American
student from Arkansas, said they should start a family. They agreed that
marriage should wait until they could afford a big reception and a long gown.
Their odds were not
particularly good: nearly half the unmarried parents living together at a
child’s birth split up within five years, according to Child Trends.
Ms. Schairer has trouble
explaining, even to herself, why she stayed so long with a man who she said
earned little, berated her often and did no parenting. They lived with family
(his and hers) and worked off and on while she hoped things would change. “I
wanted him to love me,” she said. She was 25 when the breakup made it official:
she was raising three children on her own.
She had just answered an ad
from a child care center that needed a teacher’s assistant. Ms. Faulkner hired
her and promoted her twice, most recently to assistant director.
“She was always stepping
out of the classroom and helping,” Ms. Faulkner said. “She just had that drive,
that leader in her. I trust her completely.”
Ms. Schairer took night
classes and earned a degree from Washtenaw Community College. A supervisor from
the corporate office wrote, “We are so lucky to have you.” Still, after nearly
six years, she remains an hourly employee making $12.35 an hour, simultaneously
in management and on food stamps.
After Ms. Schairer had an
operation for cervical cancer last summer, the surgeon told her to take six
weeks off. She went back to work five weeks early, with a rare flash of class
anger. “It’s easy when you make $500 an hour to stand there and tell me to take
six weeks off,” she said. “I can’t have six weeks with no pay.”
A Broadening Gap
Despite the egalitarian
trappings of her youth, Ms. Schairer was born (in 1981) as a tidal surge of
inequality was remaking American life. Incomes at the top soared, progress in
the middle stalled and the paychecks of the poor fell sharply.
Four decades ago,
households with children at the 90th percentile of incomes received five times
as much as those at the 10th percentile, according to Bruce Western and
Tracey Shollenberger of the Harvard sociology department. Now they have 10
times as much. The gaps have widened even more higher up the income scale.
The reasons are manifold:
the growing premium a college education commands, technological change that
favors mind over muscle, the growth of the financial sector, the loss of
manufacturing jobs to automation and foreign competitors, and the decline of
labor unions.
But marriage also shapes
the story in complex ways. Economic woes speed marital decline, as women see
fewer “marriageable men.” The opposite also holds true: marital decline
compounds economic woes, since it leaves the needy to struggle alone.
“The people who need to
stick together for economic reasons don’t,” said Christopher Jencks, a Harvard sociologist. “And the people who least need to
stick together do.”
Changes in family structure
do not explain the gains of the very rich — the much-discussed “1 percent” and
the richest among them. That story largely spills from Wall Street trading
floors and corporate boardrooms.
But for inequality more
broadly, Mr. Western found that the growth in single parenthood in recent
decades accounted for 15 percent to 25 percent of the widening income gaps.
(Estimates depend on the time period, the income tiers and the definition of
inequality.) Gary Burtless of the Brookings Institution found it to account for
21 percent. Robert Lerman of the
Urban Institute, comparing lower-middle- and upper-middle-income families,
found that single parenthood explained about 40 percent of inequality’s growth.
“That’s not peanuts,” he said.
Across Middle America,
single motherhood has moved from an anomaly to a norm with head-turning speed.
(That change received a burst of attention this year with the publication of
Charles Murray’s new book, “Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010,” which attributed
the decline of marriage to the erosion of values, rather than the decline of
economic opportunity.)
As recently as 1990, just
10 percent of the births to women like Ms. Schairer (white women with some
postsecondary schooling but not a full college degree) occurred outside
marriage, according to Child Trends. Now it has tripled to 30 percent, compared
with just 8 percent for women of all races with college degrees.
Less-educated women are
also more likely to have children with more than one man. Analyzing nearly
2,000 mothers in their mid- to late 20s, Child Trends found that a third of
those with high school degrees or less already had children with multiple men.
So did 12 percent of mothers with some post-high-school training. But none of the
women in the study who had finished college before giving birth had children
with multiple men.
“That’s a dramatic
difference, and it varies by education more than by race,” said Mindy Scott, a
Child Trends demographer. “It tells you these families are on different
trajectories. Having men in the house for a short time with ambiguous parenting
roles can be really disruptive for children.”
Ms. Schairer did not have a
child with another man, but she did find a new boyfriend, who she thought would
help with the children and the bills. They dated for a year before he moved in.
Kirsten, 11, and Savannah liked him fine, but Steavon adored him.
“I’m not the only boy
anymore; we’re going to do boy stuff!” Ms. Schairer recounts him saying.
“What’s boy stuff?” she
asked.
“We’re going to play video
games and shoot Nerf guns and play Legos,” he said.
“We do that now,” she said.
“Yeah, but you’re not a
boy,” he said.
The details of what
followed are less important than the disappointment the boyfriend left behind.
No Legos got built during his six-month stay, and it took a call to the police
to get him to go. The children asked about him a few days later but have not
mentioned him since.
Whether measured by Legos
or marriage rates, the pattern is similar: the middle is shifting toward the
bottom.
Forty years ago, the top
and middle income thirds had virtually identical family patterns: more than 95
percent of households with children in either tier had two parents in the home.
Since then the groups have diverged, according to Mr. Western and Ms.
Shollenberger: 88 percent at the top have two parents, but just 71 percent do
in the middle.
“Things remained extremely
stable in the top third,” Mr. Western said. “The middle is increasingly
suffering some of the same disadvantages as the bottom.”
That is the essence of the
story of Ms. Faulkner and Ms. Schairer. What most separates them is not the
impact of globalization on their wages but a 6-foot-8-inch man named Kevin.
School Trips and Scouting
Kevin Faulkner works the
sunrise shift twice a week, leaving home at 5:30 a.m. for a computer
programming job so he can leave work in time to take his sons to afternoon swim
practice. Jeremy, 12, is serious and quiet. Justin, 10, is less driven but more
openly affectionate. They arrived home recently to a note from Ms. Faulkner
about the next day’s Boy Scout trip.
Thursday night:
Pack
Kevin — Pay Home Depot
Chris — Sort clothes
The couple’s life together
has unfolded in to-do-list style. They did not inherit wealth or connections or
rise on rare talent. They just did standard things in standard order: high
school, college, job, marriage and children. “I don’t think I could have done
it any more by the books,” Ms. Faulkner said.
The result is a
three-bedroom house, two busy boys and an annual Disney cruise.
The secret to their success
resides in part in old-fashioned math: strength in numbers. Together, the
Faulkners earn nearly three times as much as what Ms. Faulkner earns alone.
Their high five-figure income ranks them near the 75th percentile — hardly
rich, but better off than nearly three of four families with children.
For Ms. Schairer, the logic
works in reverse. Her individual income of $24,500 puts her at the 49th
percentile among parents: smack in the middle. But with only one paycheck, her
family income falls to the 19th percentile, lagging more than four out of five.
The Faulkners built a house
in Livingston County because of the good schools. Ms. Schairer cares about
education, too. But with Ann Arbor rents wreaking havoc on her budget, she is
considering a move to a neighboring town where the school system lags. She
shops at discount grocery stores and tells Savannah to keep away a friend who
raids the cabinets.
“I feel bad, like maybe
she’s not getting enough to eat,” Ms. Schairer said. “But sometimes I don’t
know what I’m going to feed my own kids, never mind another.”
Jeremy Faulkner plays
tennis and takes karate. Justin plays soccer and baseball. They both swim and
participate in Boy Scouts, including a weeklong summer camp that brings the
annual activities bill to about $3,500.
Boy Scouts has been
especially important, offering the boys leadership opportunities and time with
their father, who helps manage the troop and rarely misses a weekly meeting or
monthly camping trip. Jeremy started as a shy boy terrified of public speaking.
Now he leads the singalong and is racing to make Eagle Scout.
“He’s just blossomed
through Boy Scouts,” Ms. Faulkner said. “I could do the scouting with them,
because we have single moms who play that role. But they have different
experiences with their dad. Kevin makes good money, but he’s an awesome dad.”
Ms. Schairer tells an
opposite story: constraints in time and money limit her children to one sports
season a year. That compounds Steavon’s isolation, she said, and reduces her
chances to network on his behalf. When she invited his classmates to a park on
his birthday a few months ago, no one came.
“He cried and cried and
cried,” she said. “I tried the parents I had numbers for, but they didn’t
respond.”
Researchers have found that
extracurricular activities can enhance academic performance, and scholars cite
a growing activities gap to help explain why affluent children tend to do so
much better than others in school.
Four decades ago, families
in the top income fifth spent about four times as much as those at the bottom
fifth on things like sports, music and private schools, according to research
by Greg J. Duncan of the University of California, Irvine, and Richard J. Murnane of Harvard. Now affluent families spend seven times as
much.
Two parents also bring two
parenting perspectives. Ms. Faulkner does bedtime talks. Mr. Faulkner does
math. When Ms. Faulkner’s coaxing failed to persuade Jeremy to try hamburgers,
Mr. Faulkner offered to jump in a pool fully clothed if he took a bite — an
offer Jeremy found too tempting to refuse.
While many studies have
found that children of single parents are more likely to grow up poor, less is
known about their chances of advancement as adults. But there are suggestions
that the absence of a father in the house makes it harder for children to climb
the economic ladder.
Scott
Winship of the Brookings Institution examined the class trajectories of
2,400 Americans now in their mid-20s. Among those raised in the poorest third
as teenagers, 58 percent living with two parents moved up to a higher level as
adults, compared with just 44 percent of those with an absent parent.
A parallel story played out
at the top: just 15 percent of teenagers living with two parents fell to the
bottom third, compared with 27 percent of teenagers without both parents.
“You’re more likely to rise
out of the bottom if you live with two parents, and you’re less likely to fall
out of the top,” Mr. Winship said.
Mr. Winship interprets his
own results cautiously, warning that other differences (like race, education or
parenting styles) may also separate the two groups. And even if marriage helped
the people who got married, he warns, it might hurt other families if it tied
them to troubled men.
“You get back to the
question of how many marriageable men there are,” he said.
At the same time, scholars
have found that marriage itself can have a motivating effect, pushing men to
earn more than unmarried peers. Marriage, that is, can help make men
marriageable.
As Mr. Faulkner tells it,
something like that happened to him — he returned to college after an aimless
hiatus because he wanted to marry Ms. Faulkner. “I knew I had to get serious
about my life,” he said.
His experiences as a father
so far suggest just how much there is to be said for simply showing up.
“Thank you for coming,
Dad,” Justin wrote after a school trip. “I like it when you’re with me at every
event and watching me do every activity.”
He added 16 exclamation
points.
End of the Day
Left to do the showing up
alone, Ms. Schairer makes big efforts. She rarely misses a weekend of church
with the children, and she sacrificed a day’s pay this spring to chaperon field
day at Steavon and Savannah’s school. “They were both saying, ‘This is my mom,
my mom is here!’ ” she said.
In February, she received
$7,000 of refundable tax credits, the low-wage worker’s annual bonus. She
prepaid her rent for six months and bought plane tickets to Orlando, Fla. After
years of seeing pictures of Ms. Faulkner’s vacations, she wanted to give her
children one of their own.
“Do you think we’ll see
Jesus?” Savannah asked on the flight. “I hope the plane doesn’t run him over.”
They stayed with Ms.
Schairer’s brother, visited SeaWorld and Gatorland, and brought back happy
memories. But the trip soon began to seem long ago, more a break from their
life than an embodiment of it.
Ms. Schairer sank into the
couch on a recent Friday night, looking weary, and half-watched a rerun of “Friends.”
Steavon retreated to his room to watch “Superman” alone, and Savannah went out
to play with the girl who always seems hungry. Kirsten was in her pajamas at 7
o’clock. They had few weekend plans.
Thirty miles away, Troop
395 was pitching tents beside a rural airstrip, where the next day the boys
would take glider rides and earn aviation badges. The fields and barns looked
as tidy as cartoons, and an extravagant sunset painted them pomegranate.
The clipboard in Justin
Faulkner’s hands called for an early reveille. “I’m the patrol leader,” he
said, beaming.
Thirty minutes later, a
rope appeared. Boys started to boast. Mr. Faulkner snapped on his tug of war
gloves, only to discover that Justin had disappeared. He found him sitting in
the grass nearby, fighting back tears. “I want to go home,” Justin said.
Mr. Faulkner did not say
much. Jeremy used to get homesick, too. Now he is halfway to Eagle Scout. After
a while Mr. Faulkner asked, “Are you sure you don’t want to do a tug of war
against me?”
Justin watched the other
boys tumble. “When?” he said.
“We can do it right now,”
Mr. Faulkner said.
It was not much of a
contest for a man who outweighs his two sons combined by more than 100 pounds.
Justin fell face first and bumped through the cool grass — a laughing
tenderfoot pulled along by his dad
Pasted from <http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/15/us/two-classes-in-america-divided-by-i-do.html?pagewanted=6&hp&pagewanted=all>
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