Cohabitation, unwed motherhood soaring in younger generation

USA Today: Cohabitation, unwed motherhood soaring in younger generation

Younger adults tend to worry less about the stigma attached to having a child or living together without being married, finds new research that shows a generation gap in behaviors related to marriage, divorce, parenthood and cohabitation.

A Pew Research Center survey released today, says these younger adults are driving higher rates of out-of-wedlock births and living together without marriage.

Using U.S. Census data and the responses from a telephone survey of 2,020 adults conducted last spring, Feb. 16-March 14 Pew reports show that the rate of non-marital childbearing has ballooned to 36.8% of all births in 2005, from 5.3% in 1960. As recently as the early 1990s, only about a third of these non-marital births were to cohabiting women; now it's about half of all out-of-wedlock births. Nearly half of adults (47%) in their 30s and 40s have lived in a cohabiting relationship; among those ages 30-49, about one-third have.

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"Birthrates for unmarried women have been going up for people in their 30s and probably in their 40s as well, while they've been going down for teenagers. This phenomenon has really shifted on us and many people don't realize it," says Andrew Cherlin, a sociologist at Johns Hopkins University who was not involved in Pew's research.