Marriage Becoming An Act Of America's Wealthy and Educated - Blame The Economy

That news comes from the Washington Post , which states...

"Punctuating a fundamental change in American family life, married couples with children now occupy fewer than one in every four households -- a share that has been slashed in half since 1960 and is the lowest ever recorded by the census.

As marriage with children becomes an exception rather than the norm, social scientists say it is also becoming the self-selected province of the college-educated and the affluent. The working class and the poor, meanwhile, increasingly steer away from marriage, while living together and bearing children out of wedlock."

The article also points to the decline in economic prosperty since World War II. But the basic problem is the overall decline in manufacturing jobs, which have fallen from just over 20 million in 1979 to about 14 million in 2004. That's a loss of 6 million jobs. And many of those jobs were taken by people who didn't have masters degrees or college degrees for that matter, but they were good, well-paying gigs. It used to be that one person could make enough money to feed a family, but that's no longer true. It takes two. It's hard to have time to raise a family and work at the same time. Something's got to give.

Marriage, sadly.