Marriagephobic Millennials
Written by Galia Myron Tuesday, 22 March 2011 12:08
While Millennials value parenthood, they are more likely to shun marriage.
Modern 18 to 29 year-olds value parenthood above marriage, says a Pew Research survey examining generational attitudes towards marriage and family. While more than half of Millennials (52 percent) say that being a good parent “is one of the most important things in life,” less than a third (30 percent) say the same about having a successful marriage. This indicates, Pew says, a 22-point gap between the two items.
When compared with 18 to 29 year-olds polled in 1997—members of Generation X—results indicate that young people today may place a lower priority on marriage, while placing a higher premium on parenthood, than did their predecessors. Poll results from 1997 indicate that less than half (42 percent) of members of Generation X said that one of the most important things in life is being a good parent, while more than a third (35 percent) said the same about being successfully married, demonstrating a seven-point gap.
Why does there seem to a reversal in attitudes? Generation X seemed to value parenthood less than a successful marriage, while Generation Y puts less value on marriage than on parenthood.
Psychotherapist Tina B. Tessina, Ph.D., author of Money, Sex and Kids: Stop Fighting about the Three Things That Can Ruin Your Marriage, says that Millennials have few models of good marriages to follow or admire.
“Many Millennials have grown up in divorced or single parent households, so they have little experience of what good marriages look like,” she explains. “Even if their own parents' marriage is intact, they're surrounded by peers whose parents—and they themselves—are having relationship disasters.”
Combine personal experiences with what Millennials see happening in society at large, and it seems as if a happy marriage is difficult to successfully sustain.
“The media has a lot of focus on celebrities whose relationships are dysfunctional, and reality TV thrives on bad relationships featuring emotionally immature and dysfunctional people,” Tessina maintains.
All of these poor examples have made this group “gun-shy,” she contends.
“Where will they get their images of what functional relationships and healthy marriages look like? They will have to learn as they go, which means having a number of bad relationships before they figure out how to create a good one, and how to choose a good partner,” Tessina says.
Web communications expert, Rodney Echols is a thirty two year-old married father of a two year-old boy.
“I have friends on both ends and I really witnessed the changing of the generational perspectives,” he says. “I went to a small private school, but I still witnessed the pattern of younger and younger kids experiencing sex earlier and more single mothers raising kids on their own. In my twenties, as a dating adult in a major US metropolitan environment, it was rare to meet a single available woman who had reached her mid-twenties who did not have some kind of baby-mama drama going on.”
Like Tessina, Echols partly holds the media responsible for changing attitudes. He claims popular talk shows make marriage seem unrelated to having children.
”It seemed as though the Ricki Lake and Jerry Springer media impressions of single-parent homes had all desensitized a whole generation to the challenges of starting a family out of wedlock,” he says.
Mike Hais, PhD, co-author with Morley Winograd of the forthcoming Millennial Momentum: How a New Generation is Remaking America, says that general theorists label Millennials as a “civic generation,” thus influencing their attitudes towards family structure.
“The last previous American civic generation was the GI or Greatest Generation,” Hais explains. “Historically, civic generations are slow to marry and to have children, something that is clearly reflected in the Pew research. This slowness to marry and have children was as true for the GI Generation in the 1930s and 1940s as it is for Millennials now.”
Civic generations come of age during times of national crisis, he notes, and they tend “to be careful, outwardly focused and conventional during their youth.” As they age, Hais suggests, Millennials attitudes may change.
“Once they are in position to focus on both marriage and child rearing they will do so just as the GI Generation did during the 1950s and 1960s,” he concludes. “Remember that the parents of the Baby Boomer Generation, the largest American generation before the Millennials, were primarily from the GI Generation.”
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