So, millennials are generally choosing to get married later in life, prioritizing financial security, career trajectory and home ownership before deciding to tie the knot — if they get married at all. The average age for marriage has increased to 27 for women and 29 for men (personally, both numbers seem low) — a six-year increase from 1963, when the average ages were 21 and 23, respectively.
But also, only two out of five millennials were married in 2015, whereas two in three adults were married in 1980. Culturally, marriage isn't the be-all end-all for adults anymore, and women in particular are increasingly untangling marriage from their own self-worth.
We are hearing scores of stories about how even two-parent households are forced to make challenging decisions about their family's future. Even if both parents want to work, child care can quickly outpace one earner's salary. Most single parents have even fewer options and generally have to rely on family members to pitch in.
While low-income families can sometimes get financial help, that's not something families can rely on now. "Spending on assistance through various federal programs is at a 12-year low. Today just 15 percent of eligible children are served by federal subsidies," Elle reported. "The Child Care and Development Block Grant, the main source of this kind of support, currently serves the smallest number of children since 1998; 364,000 were dropped from its register between 2006 and 2014. And subsidies fail to reach anyone living much above the poverty line."
The economics of having children can be daunting for all millennials, but especially for women, because of the implications for their personal financial security. There's been a lot of attention — though not action — paid to the gender pay gap, but recent data suggests that it's largely morphed into the motherhood pay gap. According to the New York Times, women who are unmarried and without children earn much closer to what men do. The Times pointed to many reasons for this, but it ultimately comes down to how unequal the division of labor is in many households, or at least that employers still assume that will be the case.
If we lived in an equal society, where good jobs, affordable housing, access to quality education, health care, child care were all seen as rights and not luxuries, it's not far-fetched to surmise that marriage and parenting statistics might shift. It's not a sure-fire fix, however; birth rates are down all over the world as people in general are choosing to have fewer children, waiting longer to do so, and many can't configure having a thriving career with fewer at all. Denmark, with its robust social welfare program, also has the greatest proportion of babies born through in vitro fertilization, indicating in part that women are able making active choices about their reproductive lives irrespective of age and life partner status. They're not being deterred by surging child care costs, either; couples spend less than 11 percent of their income on child care costs, and that drops to less than three percent for single parents. (Compare that to the U.S., where two-parent households pay around 25 percent of their income for childcare, and single parents 52 percent.)
Other factors make millennials feel a little more bleak about the prospects of bringing kids into a culture of violence and an economy that operates on a work-to-survive model for the majority, to say nothing of looming climate catastrophe. But if the U.S. actually cared about the family unit as much as Republicans claim to, perhaps they could start by enacting policies that prioritize the livelihoods of women and children. They certainly have a long way to go.
