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Andrew J. Cherlin

Spring 2024

Cherlin has been closely following, and writing about, American family life throughout his career. He last wrote an overview in 2009, when he published The Marriage-Go-Round: The State of Marriage and Family in America Today (Cherlin, 2009). He will work on a new overview while at RSF. After a fierce storm of more than a half-century, the pace of change in American family life has slowed. The divorce rate, which doubled in the 1960s and 1970s, has declined substantially among the college educated and modestly among the less educated (McErlean, 2021). Married women’s labor force participation, which grew spectacularly after 1950, has not increased in the past 20 years (U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2022). The college wage premium (the gap between the average wage that a college graduate earns and the average wage that a high school graduate earns), which fueled the divergence in family patterns by education in the 1980s and 1990s, rose by only a modest amount between 2000 and 2010 and has been essentially flat since then (Valletta, 2019). The adolescent birth rate is at an all-time low (U.S. National Center for Health Statistics, 2022). The percentage of people under age 45 who have ever cohabited has, after decades of increases, stabilized (Manning, 2020). It is likely that we are merely in the eye of the hurricane, awaiting the return of high winds that will bring further change. But the present situation provides an opportune moment to take stock of what has happened, what is still happening, and what may yet occur.

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