Unmarried Couples with Children

6. Anatomy of the Breakup: How and Why Do Unmarried Couples with Children Break Up?

133 Chapter 6 Anatomy of the Breakup: How and Why Do Unmarried Couples with Children Break Up? JOANNA REED D ESPITE HIGH rates of unwed childbearing in the United States, most children born to unmarried parents are involved with both parents at birth. Eighty percent of unmarried parents are romantically involved when their child is born, and just under 50 percent are cohabiting (McLanahan et al. 2003). However, unwed parents often break up. In the United States, unmarried couples with and without children end their relationships more frequently than married couples do, and their relationships are of shorter duration (Graefe and Lichter 1999; Manning 2001; Wu 1995). This makes their children more likely to grow up without both parents, which is linked to a higher risk of poverty and other negative outcomes . In this paper, I explore how and why unmarried parents break up. I use four years of qualitative interviews from the Time, Love and Cash among Couples with Children study to investigate the reasons behind and the process of ending relationships for unmarried couples who have children together and are romantically involved when their baby is born. There is little research about the dissolution of unmarried relationships, especially those involving children, though there is a large literature on the causes and effects of divorce, and how divorce affects children. The divorce literature shows that children do better when they live with both biological parents, although questions remain about how much of this relationship is causal. As the link between marriage and parenthood continues to relax and more adults and children experience family life in unmarried relationships, we need to broaden our focus and learn more about what 134 Unmarried Couples with Children happens when unmarried parents break up, how these patterns are similar or different from divorce, and their effects on children. This paper explores these issues with an in-depth look at what happens when unmarried parents end their relationships, and why they choose to do so. Background Research on divorce and cohabitation shows that both economic factors and relationship quality are important in understanding breakups. The vast majority of studies pertain to married couples who divorce, few focus on unmarried couples. Researchers have argued that research about divorce should be pertinent to one type of unmarried couples— cohabitors (Wu 1995), who represent more than 80 percent of the TLC3 sample of unmarried couples at baseline. Several other studies show, however, that cohabiting and married couples differ in significant ways, which suggests that patterns common to divorcing couples may not apply to cohabitors. Most studies of divorce focus on economic factors and are based on theoretical models of rational choice such as specialization and bargaining theory. Although these models are a place to start an investigation of relationship dissolution among unmarried parents, other research about the nature of their relationships calls certain assumptions of the models into question. One of the most influential models for theorizing marriage and divorce is specialization (Becker 1991), which posits that a primary economic rationale for marriage is spouses specializing in different types of labor. Both spouses will benefit if one specializes in paid work outside the home and the other specializes in unpaid (house and childcare) work, together maximizing efficiency for the family. Dividing labor this way deters divorce, which is likely to increase when social conditions make specialization less likely. Specialization theory assumes that each spouse forgoes individual goals to pursue what is best for the family as a whole and that financial resources are shared. It is unclear whether these assumptions hold for unmarried couples with children. Most cohabitors with children have not made a definite commitment to each other (Reed 2006; Waite and Gallagher 2000), so it seems reasonable to doubt that they have abandoned individual self interest. In addition, there is a lot of variation in how cohabiting couples manage their financial resources (Waite and Gallagher 2000). Other scholars argue that not specializing encourages similar household and work roles that make couples more likely to stay together because they have more in common (England and Farkas 1986, Goldscheider and Waite 1991). Another approach to theorizing couple dynamics is exchange or bargaining models. External threat point models posit that power within marriage comes from an individual’s ability to control resources that are shared in a marriage, but revert to one spouse if the marriage ends (England and Farkas 1986, England and Kilbourne 1990, Lundberg and...