Oh Great, Millennials Are Killing Divorce Rates Now
Millennials are better than Baby Boomers at staying married. This ought to even the score after all that crap Millennials got about saving money to buy avocado toast instead of houses, or whatever.
Divorce is becoming less common in the United States. New analysis by University of Maryland sociology professor Philip Cohen, who studied divorce rates among women between 2008 and 2016, shows that the overall rate of divorce has decreased by 18 percent in that time. And we can't simply credit the massive Baby Boomer generation for getting old and less inclined to divorce. When Cohen controlled for factors like age, the divorce rate still showed a decline of 8 percent, indicating there's more to the decline than one generation simply ageing out.
The big takeaway is this: Today's young women are more likely to stay married than Boomer women, largely because they are entering marriages much differently. Today's women have higher levels of education. They're less likely to be under the age of 25, or have children from previous marriages. And all of these factors all lead to longer marriages.
"It seems likely these women, who will reach longer marital durations, and who are less likely to be divorced and therefore remarried later in life, will have lower divorce rates than today’s older women," Cohen writes in his paper, which will be submitted to the 2019 Population Association of America meeting and has not been peer-reviewed.
The bad news is that marriage is getting exclusive. “Marriage is more and more an achievement of status, rather than something that people do regardless of how they’re doing," Cohen said. That means poorer, less educated Americans are choosing to remain unmarried.
The good news, however, is that divorce rates could fall even further thanks to young people. "The characteristics of young married couples today signal a sustained decline [in divorce rates] in the coming years," Susan Brown, a sociology professor at Bowling Green State University, told Bloomberg after seeing Cohen’s results.
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