In the past decades, the marriage institution has transformed due to the social, economic and technological changes that have resulted to major changes; in population of the married people and their ages, the number of children in a family, the number of the unmarried adults, division of responsibility in household especially the role played by the mother and the divorce rate.
The marriage age is one of the major changes that have been noticed. There has been high rise of late marriages in America as majority of Americans have preferred marrying when they have achieved some level of social, economic and technological status. Things like good education and acquisition of stable job have been given first priority than marriage. Ladies have preferred to be marrying at age above 26 in contrast to age 21 in 1972 (Andréa & Deidre, 2001).
The social changes have given room to courtship, the individual have been given authority over their choice to the partner they would like to stay together with in their life. The changes have given rise to interracial marriage as compared to before when white could only marry their fellow whites and blacks their fellow black. Currently the there has been about 37% of interracial marriage in USA (Andréa & Deidre, 2001).
Though there is freedom about which person to marry, there has been major decline on the marriage. The institution of marriage has not been accorded that respect as before. Doing the comparison with statistics that was done in 1983 when the women married was about 62% ,the percentage have declined to 53% which shows clearly that this institution is being neglected (Rose & Jason, 2002).
Economic empowerment of women has also had negative effect on this fundamental institution as this is seen clearly by the rise of single household (Andréa & Deidre, 2001). American women especially black women who are economically empowered have preferred to be single rather being married as this gives them independence and full control of their lives without the boundaries usually set in marriage.
The responsibilities of the husbands and wives have also taken a major twist. Before, men were seen as breadwinners whereby they were to supply to the needs of the family while women were mainly housewives. Today’s statistics shows that this scenario has drastically changed and anybody can take this responsibility of meeting the family’s needs. In about 3.3 million families in America, the wives have taken the responsibility of breadwinning (Rose & Jason, 2002).
There has been a high rise of single parenting, especially; single mothers which has been as result birth out of wedlock or due to divorce. The number of women who have decided to remain single mothers stands at about 39 %, especially with the black women (Rose & Jason, 2002).Since before, most of black women engaged in marriage a source of financial security. Social economical and technological developments have empowerment them making them loose importance of marriage.
Children bearing have been given much consideration attaching the social and economic involvement in bearing and upbringing of children. The past two decades, the average number of children in any American family was about seven. Actual, such kind of number is currently viewed as burden. The current average number of children in many households stands at two kinds.
References
Andréa, F & Deidre V, D. (2001). Journey of American Women. Time magazine article 31,1-67.
Rose M. K & Jason M. F. (2002). Number, timing and duration of marriages and divorces; 1996. US census bureau current population reports, 1-37.