UK Household Formation
Nuclear fission?

There have been dramatic changes in patterns of marriage and childbearing behaviour in the United Kingdom in the past 15 years. Divorce rates have risen, the propensity of unmarried couples to 'cohabit' has increased, and the proportion of babies born outside marriage has risen, from 8% to 19%. Do these changes signal the 'fission' and imminent disappearance of the nuclear family? In a lunchtime talk on 24 November, Research Fellow Kathleen Kiernan argued that we are witnessing evolution rather than revolution in marriage and childbearing. Kiernan attributed many of these changes to unforeseen consequences of the 'sexual revolution' of the 1960s. Increased sexual activity outside marriage accelerated trends towards provision of contraception for the unmarried, ability to control fertility outcome through abortion, and reform of the divorce law. These changes were institutionalized in the years around 1970, but social behaviour is still responding to these new arrangements.

Kathleen Kiernan is Deputy Director of the Social Statistics Research Unit at The City University and a Research Fellow in CEPR's programme in Human Resources since 1900. She has written on a wide range of demographic issues, including marriage trends and family formation and dissolution. The talk at which she spoke was sponsored by the Department of Health and Social Security and was one of a series organized jointly with the British Society for Population Studies.

Kiernan described her research with Sandra Eldridge on patterns of marriage behaviour in postwar Britain, concentrating on detailed microdata on a sample of the 1946 cohort, drawn from the Medical Research Council's National Survey of Health and Development. She noticed that women born in the 1940s had the earliest recorded age pattern of marriage since the beginning of civil registration. The timing of marriage among this generation of women was narrowly bounded: over 60% of the 1946 cohort married between the ages of 19 and 23, and 80% had married by age 25. The survey data revealed that these narrow bounds were common to women from a variety of socioeconomic backgrounds. Kiernan described this as a 'lemming effect', which indicated that women were strongly influenced by societal norms to marry by a certain age.

These trends, of early marriage and early and concentrated childbearing, reached a turning point around 1970. Kiernan explained this change, from 'marriage boom' to 'marriage bust', by the combination of greater sexual activity and the ability to avoid unwanted births. Her research showed that, at least upto 1980, roughly 50% of the recent tendency to delay first marriage can be accounted for by cohabitation. The proportion of women who had had sex before marriage rose from 30% in the early 1960s to over 80% by the late 1970s. The contraceptive pill, which was not commonly used by unmarried women until the 1970s, reinforced and made safer an existing trend. These changes are also reflected in attitudes to pre-marital pregnancies, which tended to result in abortion rather than marriage after the 1967 Abortion Act became fully effective in 1970. Between the 1960s and 1970s the proportion of brides pregnant at the time of their marriage fell from about 20% to little over 10%. Economic forces, such as downturns in the economy and changes in the housing market, may also help explain the postponement of marriage, according to Kiernan.

Do these shifts in marriage behaviour represent postponement or complete rejection of marriage? Evidence from some other European societies indicates a more profound and lasting shift towards consensual unions. In Sweden and Denmark, for example, marriage and cohabitation have become virtually indistinguishable. These trends are far less developed in Britain, where only 6% of 20-24 year old women are cohabiting, compared with 44% and 41% in Sweden and Denmark respectively. And there is little evidence that Britain will follow Scandanavia, according to Kiernan: a study of the 1958 birth cohort showed that 90% of the men and women who were single at age 23 expected to marry at some time in the future.

Recent increases divorce rates may appear to threaten the institutions of marriage and the nuclear family. Kiernan reviewed findings from her study of the 1946 cohort sample on the socioeconomic variables associated with greater incidence of divorce. The marriages most at risk are those involving teenage brides, and these marriages are also strongly correlated with relatively deprived socioeconomic backgrounds. A high risk of divorce is associated with such factors as coming from a broken family, having a low income, rapid childbearing, and local authority tenancy. Kiernan had also identified personality, as measured by a level of neuroticism at age 16, as an important and independent correlate. These findings have considerable implications for demands on the social services, she noted. The social, economic and psychological vulnerability of these individuals, especially the women, suggests a continuing need for supportive welfare measures.

The proportion of births occurring outside legal marriage has also risen recently, from 9% in 1975 to 19% in 1984, although this ratio is over 40% in Sweden and Denmark. Kiernan attributed most of this increase in illegitimacy to the far greater numbers of unmarried women in their twenties and divorced women at higher ages. She also noted a very small rise in the relative propensity to have a birth outside marriage before age 25. Such dramatic increases in illegitimacy may contribute to changes in society's attitudes about reproductive behaviour, and this has important ramifications for welfare provision. For example, the UK government has announced an intention to remove all mention of 'illegitimacy' from legal documents and to remove any remaining legal distinctions between children born inside and outside marriage.

Informed social policy formulation requires careful analysis of the characteristics and changing circumstances of women who bear children outside marriage. Examination of illegitimate birth registrations in 1985 revealed that 35% of such registrations were made by the mother alone, 47% by both parents giving the same address, and 18% by both parents giving different permanent addresses. Evidence on childbearing outside marriage is scanty, however, and more 'longitudinal' information was needed on the changing living arrangements subsequent to, and perhaps precipitated by, an illegitimate birth, Kiernan observed.

She concluded her talk by suggesting that the changes taking place in marriage and childbearing had not yet run their full course. The shift towards consensual unions continues, and signs are emerging of greater acceptability of childbearing in such unions, but these trends are so recent that it is difficult to predict their outcome.

In the ensuing discussion, lack of data was often cited as an obstacle to further understanding of these issues. There is no information on the length and frequency of cohabitation prior to marriage or on the relationship, if any, between pre-marital cohabitation and subsequent marital breakdown. It is also unclear to what extent single mothers go on to further childbirths outside a stable union, and what proportion of such children continue to grow up outside marriage.

Members of the audience had differing views of the relationship between household formation and the housing and labour markets. Young single mothers are the population group most likely to be receiving Supplementary Benefit and are disproportionately likely to be living in rented accommodation. Another contributor noted that, compared to other European countries, the United Kingdom had relatively much higher rates of illegitimacy than of cohabitation; Kiernan pointed out that the higher incidence of cohabitation in Scandinavia was probably due to the greater availability of private rented housing for young people. It was also suggested that Supplementary Benefit policies represent a block on employment and labour mobility by encouraging single parenthood, and that the tax system may hinder family formation by providing an incentive for couples to live separately and operate independently in the labour market.