Marriage and Cohabitation (review)

American young people are increasingly delaying marriage, while a growing majority of their first marriages are preceded by cohabitation. In this book, social demographers Arland Thornton, William Axinn and Yu Xie ask a straightforward question: Why do young people marry when they do? And why do they often choose cohabitation over marriage? The authors – distinguished all – take a distinctively life-course perspective that links marriage and family patterns across parental and filial generations. Marriage and Cohabitation explores the myriad forces that shape the dating and mating patterns of young people – their family backgrounds, current economic circumstances (e.g., employment), and attitudes and belief systems about the meaning of courtship, marriage and childbearing. This book marries social demography with social psychology.

The authors draw on data from the Intergenerational Panel Study of Parents and Children. This longitudinal study began in 1962 with a sample of couples in the Detroit metropolitan area who had recently given birth to their first, second or fourth child. The mothers were interviewed several times thereafter until 1993, and their children were interviewed three times between 1980 and 1993, when they were ages 18 to 31 and making choices themselves about marriage and family. By linking the marital behavior of young adults to the social and economic circumstances experienced as children living with their parents, the authors can identify intergenerational effects, including the intergenerational transmission or reproduction of family patterns (e.g., early marriage). Indeed, Marriage and Cohabitation raises important questions about demographic momentum that is currently built into the American family system. Cohabitation, early marriage and unwed childbearing in one generation are seemingly passed along and amplified in the marital and family behaviors of the next generation.

Marriage and Cohabitation is organized into three parts. The first part focuses on historical and conceptual issues, including chapters on historical trends in the Western family system over the past 500 years and on recent patterns of marriage and cohabitation. The second part examines how family circumstances – measured at the time when children mature from infancy to adolescence – shape early adult patterns of courtship and marriage. The authors focus here on the influences of family organization, the immigrant and farm backgrounds of parents, socioeconomic status, religion, parental marital patterns (e.g., early marriage or cohabitation), and parental childbearing (e.g., non-marital childbearing and family size). The third section centers mostly on parental attitudes and values (including religious values and behavior) and children’s own social and behavioral characteristics (such as dating and courtship) on transitions to either marriage or cohabitation. The authors estimate “intergenerational causal pathways” that link early childhood and adolescent experiences to marital behaviors in early adulthood.

So what do we learn about marriage and cohabitation? What do we learn that is new? To be sure, each chapter is filled with interesting empirical insights that are broadly summarized in the concluding chapter along with some historical context. For example, we learn that mating behaviors are shaped in part by parents, that is, the experiences of young adults “can be traced backward for at least two generations.”(154) We learn that circumstances at birth (e.g., the presence of siblings or non-marital birth status) are correlated with marital behavior in early adulthood. We learn that more parental resources during childhood are related to delays in marriage. We learn that maternal divorce and remarriage are associated with elevated rates of cohabitation among their young adult offspring (i.e., the children of the mothers in the sample). We learn that maternal church attendance and traditional sex role orientations are associated with a greater likelihood that their adult children will enter marriage early rather than cohabit. We learn that adolescents who dated early or have sexual intercourse at an early age also married and cohabited earlier than other adolescents.

If readers have any problems with this volume – with the theoretical orientation and empirical approach – it will be in connecting the pieces and fully appreciating how these detailed data and analyses inform current debates about the “retreat from...