The calculus of what makes for “happily ever after” has shifted.
Few generational stereotypes are more familiar to Americans than the overbearing mother needling her grown children to settle down and start a family. But it may be time to retire that cliché. A recent survey by Pew Research Center found that only 39 percent of registered U.S. voters say “society is better off if people make marriage and having children a priority,” and a majority say society is “just as well off if people have priorities other than marriage and children.” This followed earlier Pew research showing that most young adults feel little to no pressure from their parents to marry or have kids, and that most parents do not consider it “important” whether their kids do so.
Findings such as these—as well as a data point from Pew last year that 88 percent of parents consider it “extremely” or “very” important for their children to be financially independent and have jobs or careers they enjoy—have prompted some commentators to worry that Americans have their priorities out of line, placing money and career above relationships and family. But the real story of how parents’ attitudes toward these subjects have changed is more complicated than workism run amok.
In one sense, it’s true that parents’ relatively casual stance on marriage and child-rearing reflects a major departure from tradition; but in another sense, it reflects the stability of parental concern—about economic welfare. Whereas marriage and having kids were once the means by which individuals achieved financial stability, they are now largely inessential to that goal, if not entirely at odds with it, Stephanie Coontz, director of research and public education for the Council on Contemporary Families and the author of Marriage, a History: How Love Conquered Marriage, told me. Over time, Americans haven’t devalued family in favor of work so much as they’ve come to think of each in categorically different terms. Work—by which we really mean employment—remains something most of us will have to do regardless of what we want; marriage and child-rearing are something we do only if we want. Parents are recognizing that their grown kids don’t have to start families, and that they don’t get much say in the matter anyway.
Historically, it wasn’t just parents who meddled in their children’s marriages; all sorts of people felt entitled to a say in who paired up with whom. That’s why weddings weren’t private affairs, Coontz told me. They were “great, big raucous celebrations,” at the end of which the guests would escort the married couple to bed “to make sure that they consummate the darn thing.” But it would be wrong to interpret such enthusiasm for marriage as a triumph of family over finances. Family was a financial matter. And the centrality of family to economic and political life meant that parents and others had an enormous stake in whether and whom someone married.
[Read: Why does romance now feel like work?]
In early human societies, marriage was a means of building out networks of cooperative relations and circulating resources. Later, it became the primary means by which wealth and land exchanged hands. And before the relatively recent rise of the male-breadwinner family, getting married was fundamental to how a young man or a young woman established themselves. For people in the Middle Ages, marriage was “the most important ‘career’ decision they would ever make,” Coontz wrote in Marriage, a History. Children were likewise a highly valuable, if not essential, asset, working their parents’ land and caring for them in old age. Particularly for farmers—that is, most people before the Industrial Revolution—the need for children was sometimes so urgent that barren wives “often had to be put aside,” Coontz wrote, “regardless of how much affection might have developed within the couple.”
In the upper classes, marriage’s utility as a bargaining chip for forging political alliances and amassing property created pressure to marry someone who would add to the family’s fortune and status, Coontz said. Among the lower classes, where exchange was local and survival required collaboration, the pressure was to find a trustworthy spouse who would contribute to the community. Well into the mid-20th century, when marriage was still a woman’s best shot at financial independence, many parents were quite concerned that their daughters marry a man who could support her such that they wouldn’t have to.
In other words, modern parents’ preoccupation with financial stability is nothing new. What’s changed is the means of attaining it. Marriage offers some economic advantages, but it’s not the only way for men or women to comfortably survive. And having kids certainly won’t do your wallet any favors. In fact, the best economic case for marriage in America is that it mitigates the steep cost of raising kids—if you decide to have them.
That attitudes toward work and family have diverged was evident in the handful of conversations I recently had with parents from across the country. Pretty much every parent I consulted considered it vital that their children achieve financial independence and find a job or career they enjoy. Some wanted the work itself to be fulfilling; others simply hoped a job would allow their kids to have a fulfilling and enjoyable life, even if it meant they weren’t passionate about their work or tremendously wealthy. But everyone’s position seemed to be rooted less in notions about the empowering possibilities of work than in the reality that their kids would have to spend a huge portion of their lives working. “Our kids are not going to be independently wealthy; we don’t have a huge trust fund to give them,” Lucy Chapin, a midwife living in Vermont with her partner and two children, told me. “They will have to very likely work … And I really hope that they can find something they feel fulfilled doing day in and day out.”
This pragmatic resignation to the necessity of employment contrasted starkly with the way parents spoke about marriage and child-rearing, which most viewed not as bad or even trivial, but as optional. Several parents told me they didn’t consider it important that their kids marry, but the parents were hardly apathetic about their kids’ relationships. It was the legal union—the “piece of paper”—that most regarded as dispensable. “If they found a relationship and were content with never getting married, I would be happy with that,” Kelly Schneiderloch, a nurse based near Pittsburgh who has four children in their 20s, told me. It also seemed crucial to parents that the decision to pair up with someone be made free from economic pressure. That’s one reason Chapin hopes her children will be financially independent: She doesn’t want them to feel like they need to stay in an unhappy relationship for monetary reasons. If it’s economic security you’re after, better to be stuck in a bad job than a bad marriage.
Chapin’s logic points to a slightly different interpretation of the research on parents’ aspirations for their children. Coontz noted that the Pew survey from last year pitted a desire for one’s kids to be “financially independent” and “have jobs or careers they enjoy” against the hope that they would “get married” and “have children”—not exactly a fair comparison. Just as it’s possible to have an underpaid or unfulfilling job, it’s possible to have an unhappy marriage or raise children under intensely difficult circumstances. Coontz suspects that Pew’s results would have come out differently had it asked parents whether it was important to them that their kids have “a satisfying, fulfilling marriage relationship.”
She added that 50 or so years ago, most parents would have agreed it was important for their kids to marry, without reassurance of relationship quality. That so few would say as much now is not, in her mind, an indication that we’ve devalued marriage, but that our benchmark for what constitutes a good marriage has risen. Nick Miller, a lawn- and garden-equipment mechanic who lives in Holmes County, Ohio, with his wife and two children, said that he would love for his kids to find spouses, because marriage has been such a positive experience for him. But he added that he and his wife “agreed that it’s more important for them to have fulfilling lives and good relationships with friends, whether or not they’re married.”
Many parents I spoke with were similarly hesitant to say that having children should be a priority for their kids. Some cited the expense and challenge of parenting; others had more personal reasons. Jo-Ann Finkelstein, a clinical psychologist and the author of the forthcoming book Sexism & Sensibility: Raising Empowered, Resilient Girls in the Modern World, told me that she was shocked by the way having kids transformed what for her “had been a pretty equal relationship with a feminist-identifying man.” Their partnership “just became sort of this traditional cliché of me thinking of everything and worrying about everything,” she said, which has affected how she thinks about her own children and the families they might start. She does hope that her kids will want children of their own, she told me, but “I don’t want my daughter in the position I found myself in.”
More than anything, parents seemed to be weighing their hopes for grandchildren against a reluctance to goad their kids into bearing them. “You can’t just tell people to have children,” Kerry, a lawyer from Maryland with two kids in elementary school, told me. “It’s such an enormous decision.” Kerry had beautiful things to say about how parenting unlocked a new dimension of the human experience for her, and she considered it “very important” that her children have that experience one day. But she asked to be identified by only her first name to avoid putting undue pressure on her kids should they ever read this article. Her plan is to model a joyful family life such that raising children seems like an attractive option. “The best way to get people to want to do something,” she said, “is to just, like, make it look awesome.”
Discomfort with pushing kids to follow a particular life plan was a common thread in all of my conversations with parents. Many spoke about their role as being not to tell their kids how to lead a good life, but to help them figure out what sort of life they want and how to achieve it. This evolution of what it means to be a parent is generations in the making. “I try a lot harder than my parents did, and they tried a lot harder than their grandparents did, to let people live their own lives,” Coontz said. This retreat from parental authority isn’t wishy-washy indifference but a clear-eyed embrace of reality. After all, the same economic shifts that have made it easier for people to leave a marriage, or to forgo the whole institution, have made it easier for adult children to ignore their parents’ wishes, or to build a life without their parents in it. In that respect, people’s qualms about pestering their kids to expand their families may simply reflect parents’ desire to hang on to the family they’ve already got.
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