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Textbooks on human development are supposed to be about the broad expanse of our lives. That makes them different from the earlier developmental psychology texts that stopped at adulthood. So at a time when close to half of all Americans are not married, what are college students learning about single life from these books? It is likely that even the least popular lifespan development textbooks reach thousands of students; the most popular are probably studied by tens of thousands.
I thought that researching this would be a fairly straightforward task. I'd look up human development textbooks at Amazon, and use the "search inside" feature to find the goods. In some instances, though, the texts were not searchable, or the relevant pages were not among those that could be searched, or only an earlier edition was searchable.
I'll show you an example of the coverage of single life in a 2005 edition (the most recent searchable one) of a lifespan human development text. The text was 504 pages. There is one section titled "The Unmarried Individual." It is two paragraphs long.
The first paragraph begins with some statistics, then ends with a statement that a segment of the always-single demographic is very highly educated. Specifically, it says this:
"...13 percent of middle-aged women with 17 or more years of education have never been married."
The author wonders why and offers some speculations. Perhaps you would like to answer the question for yourself before reading any further. Below the image you will find the author's thoughts on the matter and some of my own ideas.
Here's what the textbook author says about why some women who have always been single are so highly educated:
"A number of possible explanations could account for this. These women may choose higher education and a career over marriage. They may believe marriage will hold them back. A cultural factor may be at work, because some men feel threatened by women with more education than they have. Perhaps women who delay marriage to pursue an education end up having a smaller pool of available men to choose from, because men die, on the average, at an earlier age. Finally, the number of persons who live together without marrying is rapidly increasing."
You have to love some of these ideas. For your paraphrasing entertainment:
- While single women were pursuing their educations, the men died.
- They wanted to marry but couldn't do that and study and have a career, so they gave up the marriage option.
- They wanted to get married but found that men are afraid of women who use multi-syllable words.
- They are not really single - they are cohabiting.
Did you notice the option that was missing? Maybe these women didn't want to get married. Maybe they love their single lives. Maybe they are single at heart. They live in contemporary American society. They no longer have to marry to have financial security (remember, these particular women are highly educated), or, if they want to -- to have sex, to have children, to buy a home, to travel, or to pursue their passions. Notice also that in this version of 21st century human development, the only kind of person a single woman is assumed to be interested in marrying is a man.
If you are taking a human development course or if you have access to a human development textbook, check out matters such as the following:
- Is there a separate section on people who are single (and not just on divorced people or single parents)? How long is it, relative to the length of the book?
- How enlightened is the author's discussion of singles and single life?
- Look at the examples and the exercises: Do they assume that all adults are married and have children? That all couples consist of one man and one woman?
- A big topic is many of these textbooks is "social development" or "social relationships." What is included in those sections? Are the discussions all about romantic-couple relationships or is there an acknowledgement of the importance of other kinds of people such as friends, family (and not just nuclear family), mentors, coworkers, and neighbors?
- What do the authors seem to showcase as the significant components of adult life? Is all of the attention devoted to marriage and parenting and work? Or is there also an acknowledgement of the potential significance of, for example, pursuing our passions that are not work-related? Developing our talents? Finding time for solitude as well as sociability?
I'd love to hear what you find.
[For an op-ed I wrote with Rachel Moran and Kay Trimberger, "Make room for singles in teaching and research," check out the last chapter in Single with Attitude.]
