Family Breakdown at the Heart of Global Aging Crisis

May 03, 2012
By Susan Yoshihara, Ph.D.

(C-FAM) Is family breakdown the cause or the cure for the global crisis of population decline? Two new articles in top foreign policy journals raise the question.

"As the flight from marriage and the normalization of divorce has recast living arrangements in Japan, the cohort of married fertile adults has plummeted in size," Nicholas Eberstadt says. "And marriage is the only real path to parenthood. Unwed motherhood remains, so to speak, inconceivable because of the enduring disgrace conferred by out-of-wedlock births. In effect, the Japanese have embraced voluntary mass childlessness." Eberstadt is a demographer and political economist with the American Enterprise Institute. His essay appeared in the latest volume of the Wilson Quarterly.

The answer to population decline according to another expert is gender equality, managed immigration, and "the acceptance of non-traditional family structures, such as unmarried cohabitation. After all," Steven Philip Kramer noted in the New York Times, "the countries most committed to the traditional family, such as Germany, Italy and Japan, have the lowest birthrates. Countries with high birthrates, in contrast, usually also have large numbers of children born out of wedlock." Kramer teaches at the National Defense University in Washington, DC and his views were also published in the latest issue of Foreign Affairs.

While Kramer's recommendations for non-traditional families focus on the number of children born, other experts warn that children's quality of life suffers, as does the national economy. "In Sweden, where cohabitation enjoys widespread acceptance and legal support, cohabiting families are less stable than married families," a report from the Social Trends Institute says. Children born to cohabiting couples were 75% more likely than children born to married couples to see their parents break up by the age of 15, even while the percentage of single-parent households in Sweden nearly doubled from 11% in 1985 to 19% in 2008. Out-of-wedlock births are the "new normal" in much of the world where 40% of all children are born without married parents.
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"Men who get and stay married work harder, smarter, and longer hours, and they earn between 10 and 24 percent more money," the report says. "Children in the United States who are raised outside of an intact, married home are two to three times more likely to suffer from social and psychological problems, such as delinquency, depression, and dropping out of high school."