A Nine-Group Typology of Early Millennial Women’s Relationships and Childbearing, part 2
More on the different levels, sequences, and mixes of hook ups, marriage, education, children, etc.
In my last post, I introduced the nine typology groups for early Millennial U.S. women’s sexual, relationship, economic, and childbearing patterns, based on a cluster analysis of data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1997 (NLSY97).
The chart below gives a quick overview of how the typology groups fit together. I think a good way to initially process the diverse patterns in these data is in terms of high vs. low socioeconomic status (“SES”) on one axis and Freewheeler vs. Ring-Bearer on the other – where “Freewheelers” are people who have more sex partners, less-committed relationships, fewer kids, and so on, while “Ring-Bearers” are the don’t-fool-around-much, get-and-stay-married, have-lots-of-kids types. I’m using the term “Mixers” to describe typology groups where women tend to combine shorter-term and longer-term relationships over their lives – e.g., when we look at High-SES Mixers below, you’ll see a familiar pattern of women who partied like Freewheelers through college but transitioned to marriage and children in their late 20s.
In the chart, the colors of the boxes represent number of children by age 39, with darker blues indicating the highest averages (for Low-SES Mixers and Low-SES Single Moms) and the grey boxes representing minimal childbearing (for High-SES Freewheelers and Sideliners).
My prior post gave details about High-SES Freewheelers and Higher Ring-Bearers. Today, I’ll provide details on High-SES Mixers, Mid-SES Mixers, and Mid-SES Freewheelers.
High-SES Mixers:
These are women who, on the whole, did not have children in their teens and early 20s, did really very well in school, became sexually active and started partying in late high school, headed straight to college, didn’t go to church much, settled down in their mid-to-late 20s into stable marriages that often began with unmarried cohabitation, had children in their late 20s and 30s (usually ending up with 1 or 2 by age 39), and throughout that time maintained really high family incomes compared with other women at their ages.
In my prior post, we looked at High-SES Freewheelers and Higher Ringbearers. The Freewheelers generally had multiple shorter-term relationships without transitioning to stable marriages and had no children or one child by age 39. The Ring-Bearers, on the other hand, typically never had many or any shorter-term relationships, transitioned to stable marriages soon after college, and ended up with 2 or 3 children by age 39.
These High-SES Mixers, well, they mix together the two other patterns. They generally started out looking very much like High-SES Freewheelers in their teens and early 20s, then they transitioned to marriage and children, typically starting to have children around age 30. Most ended up with 1 or 2 kids by age 39, right in between the Freewheelers and the Ring-Bearers.
Given their extended educations, given the fact that they waited so long to start having kids, and given that, when they started having kids, they likely did so in married households with similarly educated, older husbands who likely themselves had very high personal incomes on average, these High-SES Mixers maintained really high income-based standards of living, having incomes averaging above 600% of the poverty line throughout their 30s.
Mid-SES Mixers:
As we move from the High-SES Mixers to Mid-SES Mixers, the essential story is that lots of the same things happen, but at younger ages. While High-SES Mixers typically became sexually active in their late teens, it’s mid-teens for Mid-SES Mixers. While High-SES Mixers stop going to school typically in their early 20s, Mid-SES Mixers typically stop in their late teens. While most High-SES Mixers are not living with a partner before age 24, over half of Mid-SES Mixers are living with a partner at age 21. While High-SES Mixers have a first child on average around age 30, for Mid-SES Mixers, it’s around age 25.
These divergent timelines begin with substantially different performance in middle and high school. High-SES Mixers generally were excellent students, getting very high grades and doing very well on standardized tests. Mid-SES Mixers were about average on the whole. The High-SES Mixers had increased abilities and incentives to keep their educations going longer than Mid-SES Mixers even if it delayed future family plans, leading on average to a trade-off between higher incomes and having more children.
Mid-SES Freewheelers:
Mid-SES Freewheelers had largely the same education levels on average as Mid-SES Mixers (on usually having some college attendance but not 4-year degrees). But unlike Mid-SES Mixers, and similar to High-SES Freewheelers, these Mid-SES Freewheelers never stopped partying and hooking up in favor of longer-term relationships.
Indeed, the essential core of the Mid-SES Freewheeler typology group is that the women were partying and hooking up at the highest levels in the sample on average the entire way from ages 15 through 33 (I can’t tell you about after age 33, because the NLSY97 stopped asking the women about these topics in later years of the study). They typically had at least a couple of non-marital cohabitations over those years, but not many stable marriages.
And, as you might expect, Mid-SES Freewheelers ended up with numbers of children by age 39 in between Mid-SES Mixers and High-SES Freewheelers. They typically had either no children, one child, or two children, and an average of 1.4 at age 39.
Given that they were more likely to be single moms than Mid-SES Mixers were, Mid-SES Freewheelers ended up with lower incomes despite equivalent educations. While Mid-SES Mixers averaged incomes around 360% of the poverty line in their 30s, Mid-SES Freewheelers averaged only around 250%.
We’ve looked at five of the nine groups at this point:
Higher Ring-Bearers: more education, less partying/hooking up, stable marriage, 2.6 kids.
High-SES Mixers: more education, partying/hooking up followed by stable marriage, 1.7 kids.
High-SES Freewheelers: more education, consistent partying/hooking up with few longer-term relationships, 0.5 kids.
Mid-SES Mixers: middle education, mix of partying/hooking up and longer-term relationships, 2.0 kids.
Mid-SES Freewheelers: middle education, consistent partying/hooking up with few longer-term relationships, 1.4 kids.
If you’ve studied behavioral ecology or evolutionary psychology, you might see some themes pop out. There’s the standard fast/slow life-history theme – where you see patterns of lower levels of embodied capital investment (here, represented by length of formal education) coupled with earlier and more reproduction (here, coming from the timing and number of children) on the “fast” side and the opposite patterns on the “slow” side, which leads to a trade-off between offspring quantity (i.e., number of children) and offspring quality (e.g., income-based standard of living). This is essentially my high-to-low SES axis in my chart up top.
Another theme is the old sexual strategies trade-off for women between “cads” providing the kinds of genes that lead to healthier, sexier, more clever offspring, on the one hand, and “dads” providing increased material resources and hands-on assistance in raising children. Positions on this trade-off are closely related to sociosexual orientation. This is essentially my Freewheeler to Ring-Bearer axis in my chart up top.
Layer these two trade-offs on top of each other and you get a kind of three-way trade-off where women generally have to choose among maximizing (a) having more children, (b) sleeping with the most desirable men, and (c) having more resources for each child – resources that come from having fewer children, from delaying having children to invest in one’s own education and career, and from having long-term relationships with nice-stable-dad types.
Call it the Rich-Sexy-Lots trade-off.
What we’ve seen so far with early Millennial U.S. women’s relationship and childbearing patterns seems to reflect this three-way trade-off. High-SES Freewheelers pursue Sexy and Rich, trading away Lots. Higher Ring-Bearers pursue Lots and Rich (or, at least, not-poor), trading away Sexy. High-SES Mixers pursue Rich, trading away a portion of Sexy and a portion of Lots. Mid-SES Freewheelers pursue Sexy, trading away a portion of Rich and a portion of Lots. Mid-SES Mixers sort of balance the trade-offs, not maximizing or minimizing any of the three dimensions in particular.
And then there are decisional constraints. Most young women in the U.S. can adopt Freewheeler patterns basically at will – not all can get the exact men they want when they want them, but the large majority would be able to have numerous short-term partners if they wanted. Contrast that with higher education. It’s simply not at all the case that the large majority of people are situated to succeed at 4-year colleges (especially ones where the benefits would outweigh the costs). So while it’s true that most people would rather be richer than poorer, and college education is a big factor in determining future wealth, nonetheless it’s simply a harder path for some than others. That puts an important constraint on those who don’t have the resources (mental, financial, etc.) to pursue higher education.
That’s enough for today. I’ll follow up with a post covering the remaining four typology groups. Things get more complicated there as additional constraints become apparent.