You here on the hill and in the hill surrounds are interested to come out to hear about what scholarship has to tell us about the dynamics of change in American Families, change in americas socioeconomic class structure, what it all has to do with child well being and whether or not policy can leverage change to our good. Id like to thank the annie e. Casey foundation, particularly the director of policy reform for being such great partners to us and making this segment happen. Our sincere gratitude to senator casey and senator scott for their interest in these issues and for being gracious enough to sponsor us here today. As you probably discerned by now, we were in the middle of a little bit of an audiovisual challenge, so i had to show you a very gracious taped greeting from senator tim scott. I could play it from my laptop with the volume turned the whole way up facing you, but i think that would be foolish at this point, so i wont. But i will ask jared from senator caseys office to come up and say just a word or two to. Hell be briefer because i know you do not want to hear from me, and im a sorry replace9 for senator casey, but i want to pass along greetings and say thank you. I dont think the issue of family and child well being could be more paramount in the senators mindset. Is so i handle education policy for the senator and just wanted to say thank you all for coming and being here for this Important Panel and thank you all for making the trip down to washington and, hopefully, this will be worth your while. Thank you. [applause] thanks, jared. So the way this should have been running is more you to see a really quite compelling and beautiful set of slides projected behind me, but that, apparently, is not going to happen. So its pretty, and our speakers are going to be working from that, from this podium. What im encouraging you to do is if you want a copy of this slide deck is to email me or my colleague, jessica. Ive got lots of business cards, and we have Contact Information out there. So if you want any more information about whats going down here this morning, all you need to do is reach out, and i apologize for that. Now, i wont talk any more. On to our moderator, michael gerson, who probably needs little introduction to all of you because you know his work so well already. Ill keep it briefly telling you mike is a syndicated columnist whose insights on politics and society appear regularly in in e washington post. Hes also a former adviser and head peach writer to george wes. Bush and has played a public role in helping us make sense of ourselves through his deeply informed writing. Michael gerson, thanks very much for being here and agreeing to shepherd this panel. Thank you, sir. Appreciate that. Good morning. Thank you all for being here. Its fitting, even necessary, to start a discussion on family, marriage and children with a reference to senator Daniel Patrick moynihan. In 1965 in the moynihan report, he warned that a rising fraction of africanamerican children were growing up in households headed by unmarried mothers, and he worried that this form of disadvantage would compromise the ability of africanamericans to take advantage of new rights and opportunities, and he was rewarded with considerable controversy. From that time to this, in the 70s til today, we have seen a vast change in social norms and practice in families not limited to any race. Marriage rates are designed, nonmarital births have increased, cohabitation has increased, children see a greater variety of less Stable Family arrangements, and well hear about all of that. All of these change in numbers are actually a change in the way people express their love, define their deepest commitments and care for their young. These are the most important things about our own lives, so it is not surprising that they represent some of the most important issues in sociology and Public Policy. It would be hard to design a better panel to realize and discuss these issues. They have literally written the book on family analysis and policy, authored the studies, submitted the papers that define this academic field. If anything were to happen to this panel without being observed and categorized by this group, im not sure that people would even procreate and form families anymore. [laughter] thats a bit of an exaggeration but not much. And weve given them a particular disadvantage because all of them had powerpoint today, and you know the old saying that power corrupts and powerpoint corrupts absolutely. [laughter] so we will do without that. So ill make just a couple of short, unnecessary introductions. Andy cherlin is the griswold professor of sociology at Johns Hopkins university. Hes extensively studied marriage and divorce and the effects of welfare reform. Sawr rah mcland hand is a legend in this field, the william s. Todd professor of sociology and Public Affairs at princeton, Principal Investigator on Fragile Families and child well being study and editorinchief of the journal, the future of children. Bob putnam is the peter and Isabelle Malkin professor of Public Policy at harvard, the we were of countless psychological roarly a scholarly awards and honors and the mall content behind our kids, American Dream in crisis. Ron haskins, a renowned expert on preschool, foster care and poverty and an influential white house and congressional adviser. We will hear their presentations in that recorder, then i will have a few questions to start a discussion and then, hopefully, well have some questions given time from all of you. So be thinking in those terms. Andy, thank you for getting us started. Good morning. Thank you for giving me the prejudice of speaking to the privilege of peeking to you this morning. I want to talk about the american working class and family change, and im going to define the working class as people with a High School Degree but not a Fouryear College degree. I do it that way because those are the ones that have been most impacted by the changes in our economy over the last few decades. Its a very large group. Large group thats worthy of more attention than we have given it. If i gave this lecture 75 years ago and talked about marriage, i would say everyone is married. Poor people are married, working class people are married, middle class people are married. That was true in the mid 20th century. But today theres a huge gap in marriage according to ones education or social class position. If you look, for example, at the percentage of americans in their late 40s, early 50s who are currently married, you find twice as many are currently married among College Grads as among people without a high school education. And people in the middle, the High School Grads, are much less likely to be married than they were in the past. Marriage much less dominant especially among people without a College Degree. And so let me talk with you a bit about whats happened as marriage has. Com play a smaller role in the lives of many of the working class adults and children were concerned about. You probably know that a large proportion of all births are to unmarried mothers. Around 40 of all births are to unmarried mothers. But this word unmarried, turns out it has a kind of special meaning that people dont recognize unless theyre government statisticians. Im married to the Census Bureau or the National Center for Health Statistics can mean two things; either youre single, that is unpartnerred living by yourself or your mom but not with the father of your child, or cohabitating with the father. Now, the first meaning, single, is the way weve always thought about births to unmarried parents. The image is of a young, unmarried woman living on her own or with mom. A teenager, perhaps. Thats been the stereotypical image of the unmarried mother. But theres another image, and that image is of a woman in her 20s with a High School Degree, living with but not married to the father of her children at the time of the birth. Almost all of the increase in births to unmarried mothers over last few decades has come because of births to cohabitating mothers. Theres very little change in the share of all births to unpartnerred single mothers. Very little change. Theres huge change in the births to the cohabiting mothers as i will call them. Thats what has been driving this increase since about 1980. Very surprising to us who followed this at first when we saw this rise. My first point to you is that, yes, theres been a sharp rise in unmarried mothers, but when we think about it, we should think about the large group of people in their 20s with a moderate amount of education living together who seem to be driving these changes. So where has all this cohabiting mother births, cohabiting partner births come from . It turns out that the biggest increase in births to cohabiting couples, lets say, have come among the moderately educated folks who im calling this morning the working class. That is people with a High School Degree, maybe some college, might even have an aa degree but not a fouryear degree. If you look at the stats for the births they have, in 980 it was 1980 it was very unusual for any of those people to have a birth while cohabiting but not married. Just didnt happen very much. Today its 2530 of all births to people with a moderate amount of education are to people who are cohabiting. And overall its the case that upwards of 25 of all american births now are to cohabiting couples. No one tends to pay much attention to that, but its important fact. And it suggests that if we want a typical picture in our head, the typical picture is now somebody whos not a teenager, but a 20something and whos not single, but living with, living together at the time of the birth. So thats what i want to tell you. And i want to talk a bit more about the collegeeducated people, the people with a Fouryear College degree. Theres been very little change among them. People with a College Degree who ill call today the collegeeducated middle class still, they postpone marriage a lot, but they still marry in large numbers. And crucially, they dont have kids until after they marry. 90 of all children to College Grads occur within marriage. And their marriages are more stable than they used to be. The divorce rate has actually been going down for collegeeducated couples but not going down or not for everybody else. So if there was a social class divide in this country, if there is a boundary aligned between the classes, with respect to families that line is between people with a Fouryear College degree and everyone else. Certainly in terms of family life, a striking difference in the kinds of almost neotraditional families that College Grads are living with now that are still marriagebased and people with less education than that. Even people who have a couple of years of college but not a degree. So huge differences now between whats happening to the collegeweeducated middle class and whats happening to the people below them who im calling the working class. So why has this occurred . Why have we had an increase in births to cohabiting mothers thats been concentrated among the High School Grads or people with a little bit of college . Be from my point, a very Constructive Development thats happened politically over the last couple of years is that both conservatives and liberals or at least many people from both political persuasions will acknowledge that there are both cultural and economic roots to these changes. Cultural change, the cultural change, to me, thats the most important. Its the greatest receive dance now acceptance now of having a child outside of marriage. It just wasnt done 50 years ago except among the very poor. Now its relatively common and accepted. But theres a very large economic component to this also. I have been studying a survey of about 9,000 young adults followed nationally for over a decade. Ive been watching them as theyve gone through their 20s. And with the data on them having passed through most of their 20s, identify looked at the labor markets that theyre in. And in an article ill publish later this year, ive looked at their labor markets to see how many of those labor markets have a large number of jobs that are accessible to somebody with a High School Degree and that pay above poverty wages. Lets call them good jobs just for the sake of argument, okay . And what i find is that if you are living in an area with more good jobs and you just have a High School Degree or less, youre more likely to marry before you have your first kid than are people who live in areas with less good jobs. Why is that . I believe its because we still have a strong norm that men must have good, steady earnings in order to be good marriage prospects. Its good if the woman does too, but men must. And when they dont, when they dont have job prospects, its the case that if they dont have job prospects, theyre just not seen as good marriage material. Even to themselves. Instead, they start cohabiting relationships, which as youll hear from sarah, are brit and short term with brittle and short term with kids in these relationships. So what is this doing to the psyche of the average working class person . Im sure youve seen the news reports over the last couple of months of rising death rates among middleaged whites due to alcohol or drug abuse. Heres what i think is maybe going on there. When people think about how well their doing theyre doing, they think about relative to what their parents did. When the White Working Class looks back a generation, they find theyre earning less than their parents, and they have less job tons and less privilege really than did whites back then. And over the 2000s, the percentage of white respondents who told the general special survey that theyre doing better than their parents is going down and down and down and down. Whereas the percentage of africanamericans and his hispanics has stayed same or even risen because they look back at a time when things werent so great. Weve seen a huge Economic Transformation due to the movement of jobs overseas and computization thats affected family lives of people in the middle, moved them away from marriage and toward a kind of family which is shorter term, less permanent, lots of kids, creating issues which ill turn to sarah mcland hand to talk about now. [applause] so good morning. Nice to be here. I have some beautiful slides for you, but im going to get to where at least i can see them. Okay. So the title of my talk is what do, what does family change mean for children. And im the director of manager called the Fragile Families study which has been following a cohort of children born between 1998 and 2000. And weve been we started at the hospital. We, when the mother had the baby, we went, we sampled rooms and went to the room and said will you be in our survey . The mother said yes, the father said yes, and then we followed these mothers and fathers and their children, and were actually just finishing collecting data right now, the children have turned age 15. When we started the study, we did it because we had a lot of questions about these, this large increase in nonmarital childbearing, and we wanted the know whats going on. What kind of relationships do these parents have . Are they casual . Are they committed . You know, what does it mean . Do the fathers stay around . Do they end up getting married . So the real purpose of the Fragile Families study was to answer some of the questions that we are dealing with today. So im going to make the following argument, and then im going to give you some data to sort of back up this argument. So the first is that the children born to unmarried parents oh, and i should mention that when we did the study, we way oversampled for births to unmarried parents so wed have a very large sample of those births. So compared to children born to married parents, children born to unmarried parents experience much higher rates of union dissolution, a higher prevalence of new partners coming into and out of the home and a higher prevalence of families complexity which means siblings in the household that have different fathers. And im going to argue that these experiences in themselves lead to more maternal stress. Its harder to run one of these households. If youre trying to collect Child Support from one man and arrange visitation with one man, thats not easy. But try doing it with three different fathers and try scheduling visitation with three different fathers. You can just imagine its a fulltime job. So this leads to a lot more ma american stress, this kind of complex, unStable Family life. It leads to less commitment from the biological fathers because when they move out, theyre less likely to contribute to the child. Theyre not quite sure how the mothers going to spend the money that they send. And then if another man is in the household and if theres another mans child in the household, that biological father is even more concerned about how his moneys going to be spent, is so he contributes less. Theres also less commitment to the children from these new partners because theyre not the biological child of that man. In fact, that man may have a biological child in another household with a woman that he wants to go and visit, and hes contributing Child Support to that child. So he just doesnt feel the same about biological child that was worn born to the mother in our study. This stress and this lack of commitment and this instability, i argue, leads to lower quality parenting and lower quality pregnantal investment. And parental inves