The changing family in international perspective; families are becoming smaller and less traditional as fertility rates fall and more persons live alone; Scandinavian countries are the pacesetters in developing nontraditional forms of family living, but the United States has the highest incidence of divorce and of single-parent households - The American Family During the 20th Century

Monthly Labor Review, March, 1990 by Constance Sorrentino

According to table 3, a trend toward fewer marriages is plain in all of the countries studied, although the timing of this decline differs from country to country. In Scandinavia and Germany, for example, the downward trend in the marriage rate was already evident in the 1960's; in the United States, Canada, Japan, France, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom, the decline began in the 1970's.

In Europe, the average age at marriage fell until the beginning of the 1970's, when a complete reversal occurred. Postponement of marriage by the young is now common throughout the continent. The generation born in the early 1950's initiated this new behavior, characterized by both later and less frequent marriage.(3) Average age at first marriage has also been rising in the United States since the mid-1950's, but Americans still tend to marry earlier than their European counterparts. For example, the average age at first marriage for American men and women in 1988 was 25.9 and 23.6, respectively. In Denmark, it was 29.2 for men and 26.5 for women.

The high U.S. marriage rate is, in part, related to the fact that the United States has maintained a fairly low level of nonmarital cohabitation. In Europe--particularly in Scandinavia, but also in France, the United Kingdom, and the Netherlands--there have been large increases in the incidence of unmarried couples living together. This situation is reflected in the lower marriage rates of these countries. Swedish data that include all cohabiting couples indicate that family formation rates have remained stable since 1960, even though marriage rates have dropped.

Divorce rates have shown a long-term increase in most industrial nations since around the turn of the century. After accelerating during the 1970's, the rates reached in the 1980's are probably the highest in the modern history of these nations. While a very large proportion of Americans marry, their marital breakup rate is by far the highest among the developed countries. (See table 3.) Based on recent divorce rates, the chances of a first American marriage ending in divorce are today about one in two; the corresponding ratio in Europe is about one in three to one in four.

Liberalization of divorce laws came to the United States well before it occurred in Europe, but such laws were loosened in most European countries beginning in the 1970's, with further liberalization taking place in the 1980's. Consequently, divorce rates are rising rapidly in many European countries. By 1986, the rate had quadrupled in the Netherlands and almost tripled in France over the levels recorded in 1960. The sharpest increase occurred in the United Kingdom, where the marital breakup rate increased sixfold. Although divorce rates continued to rise in Europe in the 1980's, the increase in the United States abated, and the rate in 1986 was slightly below that recorded in 1980. In Canada, although divorce rates remain considerably lower than in the United States, the magnitude of the increase since 1960 has been greater than that in the United Kingdom.