Divorce is no longer “cool.”
That’s the message of a New York Times article published today, “How Divorce Lost Its Groove.”
“The shift in attitudes and behavior is very real,” Andrew Cherlin, a sociology professor at Johns Hopkins University, told The Times. “Among upper-middle-class Americans, the divorce rate is going down, and they’re becoming more conservative toward divorce.”
Cherlin said it’s part of a generational shift — today’s parents have reflected on their parents’ divorces and said, “Not me.”
Writer Claire Dederer agreed.
In the 1970s, “the feminists, the hippies, the protesters, the cultural elite all said, It’s OK to drop out,” she writes. In contrast, “We made up our minds, my brother and I and so many of the grown children of the runaway moms, that we would put our families first and ourselves second. … We would stay married, no matter what.”
The Times cites the National Marriage Project at the University of Virginia, which has found that just 11 percent of college-educated Americans divorce within the first 10 years of marriage, compared with almost 37 percent for the rest of the population.
“There has been a striking shift in both beliefs and behavior toward marriage among educated and affluent Americans,” W. Bradford Wilcox, an associate professor of sociology at the University of Virginia and director of the National Marriage Project, told The Times. “There’s a tacit or explicit recognition among well-educated parents that their kids are less likely to thrive if Mom and Dad can’t be together.”
FOR MORE INFORMATION
Focus on the Family is working to strengthen marriages.
Learn more about the National Marriage Project’s 2010 study, “The State of Our Unions.”
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