When I think about the kind of anchors of mainstream society that I saw in the cultural objects growing up, incorporation into mainstream society featured the combination of the following: [1] home ownership [2] marriage [3] full time household employment [4] family formation. “Leave it to Beaver” centered the US mainstream in this tradition, while radical 1990s shows like “Married with Children” and “The Simpsons” incorporated crassness, idiocy, and shock within this framework. Of course, this is a traditional and sometimes problematic combination of factors (e.g. many loving couples prior to the 2010s would have happily married and raised children in a thriving home life if legally allowed, many women were desperate to leave unhappy or abusive marriages, social and political interference for people of color in attaining the combination of these factors are numerous). At the same time, some of these factors can provide stability and predictability, and they can also shift focus to longer term issues. For example, I know that since having kids, I have been thinking a lot more concretely about the years 2030-2035. And who knows, maybe if you feel incorporated into mainstream society and that doing so isn’t akin to winning the lottery, you may feel an obligation to improve and expand that society!
In a few previous posts, I’ve shown that home ownership, one of the big anchors of this incorporation into a mainstream adulthood, has declined dramatically for young individuals. While race and ethnicity are massive stratifies of home ownership, younger generations across racial and ethnic groups have had declining home ownership rates.
But what about the combination of the factors above: who gets to live the mainstream, if mundane and problematic, life of Homer Simpson and the Beavers? Let’s start by looking at the factors individually. I’m using Census and American Community Survey data of white individuals aged 25-35 between years 1960 - 2018. I’m restricting focus to white individuals because of the massive and well documented discriminatory issues faced by people of color across all dimensions of access to mainstream society. I’ll look at trends among people of color in future posts. I’m restricting ages to 25-35 to try and capture the period of late early adulthood where many of these factors may get locked into place, and before children leave the home.
A few observations:
In 1960, between 60% and 80% of young adults owned a home, married, had kids in the household, and had someone employed full time in the household.
By 2018, everything declined substantially except full-time employment. Home ownership remained steady until the Great Recession, while marriage and children declined from about 80% to about 40%.
But what about the combination of these factors? I next looked at the rate of having these items in combination, from having none of them to having them all.
A few observations:
Through about 2000, the cultural notions of mainstream really were mainstream. In 1980, for example, about 60% of 25-35 year olds had all or all but one of these mainstream anchors. Through 1990, being “mainstream” really was normal and mainstream for young adults.
Through 2000, you see a simple ordering of these mainstream anchors: the most common was having it all, the next most common was all but one, then all but two, etc.
Things really seem to have changed in the last 1.5 decades. Now, having two or one mainstream anchors are the most common, while having all mainstream anchors has steadily declined in frequency from about 1/3 of young adults to 1/5 of young adults.
Although movement is not as noticeable, you see a slight increase in “has none” over time.
So what about the specific combinations? I looked at the five most common combinations in 1960 and in 2018 and plotted their trajectories over time:
There’s a lot going on. I’m just going to lift out a few key points.
Having it all was by far the most common until about 2005. It occurred 15-20 percentage points more frequently than the next most common combination.
We see high and steady growth in two non-family combinations: just employed and just employed / owns a home.
The second most common combination in 1960 — everything but owning a home — has declined steadily over time, and is now as common as “none”
It seems like in 1960, there were a bunch of combinations involving family formation that feel very alien to me. These have declined over time.
Today, we see an employment-based polarization of the most common young adult lives: there are those who have it all, there are those who have employment success (working and home ownership) and there are those that just work. A Simpsons style mainstream looks more like a lottery ticket today than in previous decades.
What are some overall conclusions? Depictions of mainstream society really did seem to reflect the typical life outcomes for young adults. But in the last 1.5 decades, the wheels of mainstream life attainment have really fallen off. The long-term drivers of change seem to be changes in family formation, with steady declines in marriage and parenthood. Following that, we see the stagnation and decline of home ownership.
So, is this good or bad? Well, it’s probably a weird mix of a bunch of positive and negative implications. On the one hand, the decline in marriage / parenthood probably reflect increasing educational attainment (good!) and expansion of women’s rights to delay marriage and leave unhappy/abusive marriages (good!). On the other hand, these declines may reflect increasing economic insecurity faced by young people (bad!) and declining relative wealth levels compared to similarly-aged previous generations (bad!). On yet another hand (foot?), perhaps these changes reflect increasing flexibility and optionality faced by young people: perhaps previous expectations of mainstream society were overly burdensome, and today’s young people are drinking deeply from the cup of life. On the last hand, you could argue that what has emerged is the kind of neoliberal dystopia described in more critical social science and humanities courses. The most common life outcome of young adults right now is…employment. With the general decline of employment conditions in the last several decades, this feels like it could be at least a bit problematic. And it seems like these trends have really accelerated in the last 1.5 decades. I’m impressed with the flexibility and creativity of the young people I meet. But it might be difficult to face a rapidly changing new mainstream when the old mainstream has just been lost. I’m really curious to look at these trends among racial and ethnic groups, as well as across educational and maybe even regional strata. I think that would help me make more sense of these longer term trends.