Inheriting the City: The Children of Immigrants Come of Age

7. Forming New Families

The timing of marriage and childbearing in the United States and the relations between men and women have changed a great deal since the 1960s. Scholars agree that the transition to adulthood has become an increasingly complex and messy affair (Furstenberg et al. 2005). Many young people spend a period of time living alone or with other young adults or cohabit for periods before marriage. At the same time, the high cost of postsecondary education means that many remain dependent on their families well into their twenties (Schoeni and Ross 2005). While pursuing education leads many people to postpone marriage and children, many are not marrying or becoming parents at all. At the same time, single parenthood has become more common, further weakening the relationship between marriage and childbearing. Divorce, separation, and the formation of second and blended families have all become much more common (Goldscheider and Waite 1991). A number of factors contribute to these processes: rising female labor force participation; declining employment opportunities for men with low levels of education; changes in public assistance; greater acceptance of premarital sex, cohabitation, and unmarried parenthood; the availability of contraception and abortion; and more liberal divorce laws (Ellwood and Jencks 2001). In a broader sense the women’s rights movement led to greater autonomy for women, opening up opportunities for education and professional work, and giving women more power in the household. At the same time, these changes lessened the traditional obligation (and ability) of men to provide sole support for families and have forced both women and men to make difficult choices about the balance between work and family (Gerson 1985, 1993). Because the second generation is only now reaching young adulthood, relatively little has been written about their patterns of family formation, Forming New Families I feel in the future, soon enough, we’re all gonna, you know, get together and have great and massive sex and we’re all going to blend into one race. chinese man, aged 22 7 205 childbearing, and views on gender relations. Many of our respondents were leaving their families of origin and establishing their own households when we interviewed them in their mid-twenties, giving us the opportunity to follow them through these decisions. Just as they grew up in many different kinds of households, our respondents live in a great variety of arrangements as they leave their parents’ homes, find their own places, make new bonds with romantic partners, and have children. These decisions have been shaped by structural factors, such as the high cost of housing in the city and the often scant financial resources available to young people and their families. They have also been influenced by cultural norms and values about independent living and the right time for marriage and parenting. Although individuals do not always follow their immigrant parents’ expectations, the second and 1.5 generations must contend with their expectations. These differ considerably across the groups and are often different from the expectations of the respondents’ American peers. Norms about the timing of marriage vary considerably across the countries from which our respondents came. The median age at marriage in 1984–1994 was only 19 in the Dominican Republic and 21 in Colombia and Peru (Singh and Samara 1996). By contrast, the later-longer-fewer (wan-xi-shao) policy in the People’s Republic of China promoting late marriage and childbearing means it is rare for Chinese young people to marry before their mid-twenties (Hannum and Liu 2006). Fertility patterns also differ considerably. Although family size in Latin American and Caribbean countries has decreased from around six children in the 1960s to an average of 3.5 in the late 1980s (Wulf and Singh 1991), it is still much higher than in China, where as a consequence of the one-child policy it is only 1.7. Out-of-wedlock fertility is more common and more socially acceptable in the West Indies than in the other home countries in the study, although there, too, family size has fallen in recent decades. In addition to age at marriage, fertility rates reflect different attitudes toward contraception, which is widely available in China and Russia, and quite common in Colombia, but seems to be less accepted in the Dominican Republic (Fennelly, Cornwell, and Casper 1992). Similarly, abortion is illegal in most South American and Caribbean countries but is widely available and commonly used in China and Russia. In general teenage parenthood is much more common in Latin America...