Social Causes of the Decline in Marriage Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 2500 words

Social Causes of the Decline in Marriage - Essay Example Marriage is simply not respected as it once was. The expectation from marriage is eroded. The cult of personal autonomy and the rise of modern world and the views have only accelerated this process of ignoring marriages. Still, the decline of marriage as an institution is not uniform across the culture. Statistics show that marriage is losing ground among African Americans more quickly than within the society at large. The American family system has gone through a lot of changes in the past centuries-marriage and divorce rates, cohabitation, childbearing, sexual behavior, and women working outside the home (Cherlin, 2005). Though marriage generally remains the living arrangement for raising children, there are increasing number of poor and minority children growing up in single-parent families and experiencing family instability. Among the American racial groups since the 1960s, the decline of marriage as a social institution has been more evident with African Americans. According to Jones (2006), the African Americans have the lowest marriage rate among all racial groups in the United States. In 1963, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. stated that more than 70 percent of all the black families in the United States are headed by married couples (Kinnon, 2003). But in 2002, that number was 48 percent. Moreover, there is an alarming increase in number of black women and men who have never been wedded. The 2001 U. S. Census reveals that 43.3 percent of black men and 41.9 percent of black women in America in comparison to 27.4 percent white men and 20.7 percent white women had never been married (Jones, 2006; Mohler, 2006). There is a much worse case that concludes that African American women are the least likely in the society to marry and they are increasing in number. From 62 percent of black women who are married, the number declined to 31 percent in the period between 1950 and 2002. Jones (2006) states that the overall marriage rate in the United States, weakened by 17 percent, while for blacks, it declined by 34 percent. Section A: Literature Review The decline of marriage by African Americans has been questioned by a lot of researchers through the years. There is a sudden urge to know the reasons of the shift in African American customs, in the community, in the people's consciousness that has made marriage seem unnecessary or unattainable (Jones, 2006). . Today 63% of the families headed by African Americans are by single parent. The direct impact of this reversal in attitude towards marriage is that there have been dramatic demographic changes in the number of Black children being reared by a single parent over the last decade. Arguments and discussions about the "pathologies" of Black families have intensified. New questions are raised regarding the impact of having Black children reared by their mothers without their fathers along with this demographic shift. Much of the research on single-parent families has tended to focus on male children and adolescents. Female Headed Black Families Noted sociologist E. F. Frazier