The family unit today has changed dramatically in two important ways relevant to spousal and survivor benefit design. First, most married women have significant wage employment and earn Social Security benefits on their own earnings record. Second, many women have children but never marry, and divorce rates are high among those who do marry. This brief reviews studies by the Social Security Administration’s Retirement Research Consortium that assess the implications of these changing work and marriage patterns on Social Security’s effectiveness in providing families a basic old-age income.
The discussion proceeds as follows. The first section provides a primer on Social Security spousal and survivor benefits. The second section reviews the erosion of these benefits due to the increased employment of married women. The third section discusses how changing marital patterns have increased the share of families not covered by Social Security’s family benefits, potentially leaving them with insufficient incomes in retirement. The fourth section assesses two family benefit alternatives – earnings sharing and caregiving credits – that could boost retirement incomes for divorced and never-married mothers. The final section concludes that the structure of family benefits could be enhanced to improve the retirement security of today’s families.