Punctuating a fundamental change in American family life, married couples with children now occupy fewer than one in every four households -- a share that has been slashed in half since 1960 and is the lowest ever recorded by the census.
As marriage with children becomes an exception rather than the norm, social scientists say it is also becoming the self-selected province of the college-educated and the affluent. The working class and the poor, meanwhile, increasingly steer away from marriage, while living together and bearing children out of wedlock.
"The culture is shifting, and marriage has almost become a luxury item, one that only the well educated and well paid are interested in," said Isabel V. Sawhill, an expert on marriage and a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution.
"We seem to be reverting to a much older pattern, when elites marry and a great many others live together and have kids," said Peter Francese, demographic trends analyst for Ogilvy & Mather, an advertising firm.
As far as marriage with children is concerned, the post-World War II version of normal began to fall apart around 1970.
"Before then, if you looked at families across the income spectrum, they all looked the same: a mother, father, kids and a dog named Spot," said Sawhill, of the Brookings Institution.
Around that time, rates of divorce and cohabitation were rising sharply -- and widely publicized.
"What I don't think the public knew then or knows now is that well-educated, upper-middle-class professionals did not engage in these activities nearly as much as less-advantaged families," Sawhill said.
Class, though, is a much better tool than race for predicting whether Americans will marry or cohabit, said Pamela Smock, co-author of the review and a University of Michigan sociology professor.
"The poor aren't entering into marriage very much at all," said Smock, who has interviewed more than 100 cohabitating couples. She said young people from these backgrounds often do not think they can afford marriage.
Arguments that marriage can mean stability do not seem to change their attitudes, Smock said, noting that many of them have parents with troubled marriages.
Victoria Miller and Cameron Roach, who have been living together for 18 months, are two such people, and they say they cannot imagine getting married.
She is 22 and manages a Burger King in Seattle. He is 24 and works part time testing software in the Seattle suburb of Redmond. Together, they earn less than $20,000 a year and are living with Roach's father. They cannot afford to live anywhere else.
"Marriage ruins life," Roach said. "I saw how much my parents fought. I saw how miserable they made each other."
Miller, who was pressured by her Mormon parents to marry when she was 17 and pregnant, said her short, failed marriage and her parents' long, failed marriage have convinced her that the institution is often bad for children. Shuttled between her mom and dad, she moved eight times before she was 16.
"With my parents, when their marriage started breaking down, my dad started to have trouble at work and we spent years on government assistance," Miller said.
Her two young sons live with their father.
"For most Americans, cohabitation will continue to increase over the coming decades, and the percentage of children born outside of marriage is also going to increase," Smock said.
For more years now advocates have been denouncing sub-prime loans and "exotic" mortgages - adjustable rate loans, "no doc" loans, interest only loans, etc. - as often abusive and predatory, and a leading contributor to mortgage defaults and financial instability among working and middle class people. Meanwhile sub-prime lenders have been losing profits, downsizing and going out of business because their loan porfolios are crumbling under the poor or non existent underwriting criteria.And an article in the Wall Street Journal yesterday reported how while prime borrowers seem to be paying back their loans, those who fall somewhere between "prime" and "sub-prime" are also defaulting at higher rates on their mortgages.
Almost as troubling and predictable as the rapid collapse of Bush's "Ownership Society" culture, which pushed homeownership at any price, literally (See my Op-Ed making this argument here), is the extent to which the press conflates sub-prime loans with bad credit risk borrowers. Research has already shown that people of color are receiving higher priced loans, period, even after credit scores are taken into account.
After a while it becomes absurdist, yet convenient, self-fulfilling prophecy. Make double-digit, interest only, loans to the people who can least afford them - or loans in which the rate suddenly shoots up, or loans in which the borrowers' income is not verified - and then sit back and marvel at how these borrowers are falling behind on their payments. It's like selling cars with faulty brakes to housewives and then announcing that women are bad drivers when they get into accidents.