Trendspotting: Americans More Conservative on Motherhood and Marriage

NewsWire: 3/25/22

• A rising share of Americans consider single moms raising kids on their own to be “bad for society.” The same shift has occurred in opinions about unmarried partners living together. (Pew Research Center)
  
• NH: Americans are more likely than they were three years ago to say single women raising children on their own and couples living together without being married are “generally bad for society,” according to a new Pew survey.
• Fully 47% of U.S. adults say single women raising children on their own is bad for society. That’s compared to 40% in 2018. A smaller share (43%) says it doesn’t make a difference, and 10% of adults say it’s good for society.
• 24% of adults, meanwhile, think that couples living together without being married is bad for society, up +5 percentage points from three years ago. A smaller share says it is good for society (14%), while most Americans (62%) say it doesn’t make a difference.
• Views on single motherhood differ considerably by gender and (especially) partisanship. But interestingly, they do not differ as much by age. The age spread on whether single motherhood is a bad thing, for instance, is only 9 percentage points: 42% of 18- to 29-year-olds say this, compared to 51% of those 65 and older.

• The gap on whether cohabitation is bad is larger, with 22 percentage points between the youngest (13%) and oldest respondents (35%). Still, majorities of every age group say that it doesn’t make a difference.

• This attitude shift is unexpected. Over the last several decades, Americans’ opinions on social issues like these have become steadily more liberal over time. The public has become increasingly accepting of nontraditional living arrangements and lifestyles. Unfortunately, Pew does not have cross-tabs on how these views have changed by age. So we can’t be sure which groups have driven the declines--or the most recent uptick. But we can make an educated guess based on other trends we’ve observed.
• Here’s my take. Since the 1980s, the overall trend toward greater acceptance of nontraditional lifestyles was driven by more culturally progressive Boomers and Gen Xers aging into older age brackets that the Silent and GIs once occupied. That shift, by now, is pretty much running out of steam. The oldest Boomers, after all, are in their late 70s. What’s driving the more recent turn towards conservatism may be younger people who are moving in the other direction.
• Several recent studies have highlighted a disconnect between Millennials’ attitudes towards gender equality at work and at home. While Millennials are the most supportive of all generations of egalitarianism at work, they are, in some cases, even more traditionalist than their counterparts in the mid-1990s when it comes to family roles. Other studies have found that the turn towards traditionalism has been mainly driven by young men.
• Indeed, the increase in the share of Americans saying that single motherhood and unmarried cohabitation are bad for society has been higher among men than women. Still, it’s risen among both groups, suggesting a broad sense of discontent. While Millennials are known for their progressive politics, that mainly describes their views on global and economic issues. In the realm of family life, they're much less transgressive than young Boomers once were (see "Sally Rooney's Take on Millennials")--and this case, they may well be leading the pushback.