ABSTRACT

Men and women have been marrying, bearing and rearing children, and dissolving dieir families for many millennia. What new light has this volume shed on this process? Among other things, it emphasizes how dynamic family formation is. Although men and women form intimate unions, bear and rear children, separate, and re-form unions, how this happens changes over time. Our measuring tools often lag substantially behind the phenomena that we would like to describe. The rise of cohabitation without a formal legal marital tie is one of those phenomena. Although cohabitation is not new, the rise in the proportion of marriages that are preceded by such unions—ranging from 50% to 60%—is new. The proportion of cohabiting unions in which children reside also is substantial—more than two out of five. The definition of out-of-wedlock childbearing is no longer meaningful, given that more than one half of children born out of wedlock are living with both biological parents.