Social Mobility in an Era of Family Instability and Complexity

Abstract

Families play a central role in the study of social mobility—they are units of analysis for measuring social class as well as settings that shape the intergenerational transmission of resources. The American family has undergone important changes since the mid-twentieth century. Divorce, nonmarital childbearing, and cohabitation increased dramatically. The rise in divorce and cohabitation made the family a less stable unit of socialization and led to a proliferation of step and blended family arrangements with complex configurations of residential and biological ties. As a result of these changes, less than half of children spend their entire childhood in an intact, two-biological parent household, and families are no longer defined solely by shared residence or biology. The instability and complexity of family life requires stratification scholars to rethink how they measure origin and destination class and to consider how parents in nontraditional families transmit class-specific resources to the next generation.