Can Marriage Be Saved?

...Many in this second camp take seriously the concerns of the "alarmists" that children's welfare may be at risk if the current family regime continues...

...high fertility...

...The most obvious of these is that such findings rule out social selection...

...If divorce is a likely outcome, it is not clear whether children are better off if their parents marry and divorce than remain unmarried, knowing as we do that family conflict and flux have adverse effects on children's welfare...

...and (2) those who remain skeptical and critical of those sounding the alarm, a position held by the majority of social scientists...

...Marriage and Public Policy The logic of the Bush administration's approach to welfare is that by promoting and strengthening marriage, children's well-being, particularly in lower-income families will be enhanced...

...Because the possession of such psychological, human, and material capital is highly related to marital stability, it is easy to confuse the effects of stable marriage with the effects of competent parenting...

...I am not claiming that nonmarital childbearing is necessarily desirable as a social arrangement for propping up fertility, but it is a plausible POLITICS OF THE FAMILY hypothesis that nonmarital childbearing helps to keep the birth rate up in countries that would otherwise be experiencing a dangerously low level of reproduction...

...unprecedented rates of marriage...

...Consider first the historical data showing that children who grew up in the 1950s (baby boomers) were not notably free of problem behavior...

...Since colonial times, the family has been changing and provoking public reaction from moralists, scientists, and, of course, public authorities...

...and the flow of federal funding for education, housing, and jobs distinguished the 1950s and early 1960s as a particular historical moment different from any previous period and certainly different from the decades after the Vietnam War era...

...The standard method for doing so is by statistically controlling for prior differences, but this method is inadequate for ruling out differences because it leaves so many sources of selection unmeasured, such as sexual compatibility, substance abuse, and so on...

...So it comes down to a choice in strategy: invest in strengthening marriage and hope that children will benefit or invest in children and hope that marriages will benefit...

...There are several reasons to be skeptical of this policy direction...

...To answer this question, I want to begin with the trends that Americans, including many social scientists, have found so alarming and then turn to the question of how much public policy and what kinds of policies could help to strengthen marriage...

...Andrew Cherlin, a leading sociologist of the family, speaks of "the de-institutionalization of marriage," conceding a point to conservative commentators who have argued that marriage and the family have been in a state of free-fall since the 1960s...

...Finally, it is important to recognize that family change in the United States (and in most Western countries, it appears) has not occurred evenly among all educational groups...

...Yet, it is not clear at this point that even comprehensive programs with sustained DISSENT / Summer 2005 a 79 POLITICS OF THE FAMILY services will be effective in increasing partner collaboration and reducing union instability...

...Do their policies make sense and do they have a reasonable prospect of success...

...If we use the middle of the twentieth century as a comparison point, it might appear that we have been witnessing a deconstruction of the two-parent biological family en masse...

...In this country, marriage, divorce, and nonmarital childbearing have jumped since the 1960s among the bottom two-thirds of the educational distribution but have not changed much at all among the top third, consisting, today, of college graduates and postgraduates...

...Western Europe has experienced many of the same trends—declining rates of marriage, widespread cohabitation, and rising levels of nonmarital childbearing—but has largely shrugged them off...

...But such a view is historically shortsighted and simplistic...

...From 1955 to 1975, indicators of social problems among children (test scores, suicide, homicide, controlledsubstance use, crime) that can be tracked by vital statistics all rose...

...AGROWING NUMBER Of social scientists fear that marriage may be on the rocks and few doubt that matrimony, as we have known it, has undergone a wrenching period of change in the past several decades...

...Even those who argued against this proposition could not agree whether this family form was desirable ("functional" in the language of the day) or contained fatal flaws that would be its undoing...

...And, by increasing services, work support, and especially tuition aid for adolescents and young adults to attend higher education, Americans may be able to protect children from the limitations imposed by low parental resources...

...8o n DISSENT / Summer 2005...

...What about offering help to such couples before or after they enter marriage...

...The federal government has funded several large-scale experiments combining into a single program marital education or counseling and social services including job training or placement...

...This is a good idea, but don't expect any miracles from the current policies...

...Indeed, sociologists at that time fiercely dePOLITICS OF THE FAMILY bated whether this family model represented a decline from the "traditional" extended family...

...On the left side of the political spectrum, observers believe that the institutional breakdown of marriage has its roots in economic and social changes brought about by shifts in homebased production, structural changes in the economy, and the breakdown of the genderbased division of labor—trends unlikely to be reversed...

...Typically, these changes create tensions and often ignite public concern...

...Another useful approach is to examine macro-level differences at the state or national level that would be less correlated with social selection and hence more revealing of the impact of marriage arrangements on children's well-being...

...an economy that permitted a single wage earner to support a family reasonably well...

...SOME PORTION of those skeptics are not so alarmed by changes in the family, believing that children's circumstances have not been seriously compromised by family change...

...We might also gain some purchase on this issue by comparing the success of children under different family regimes...

...Still, this question deserves more attention than it has received...

...Although it was widely known that the family had undergone considerable changes from ancient times and during the industrial revolution, that family systems varied across culture, and that social-class differences created varied forms of the family within the same society, it was not until the 1960s, when historians began to use computers to analyze census data, that the extent of this variation came into clearer focus...

...There is another approach that I believe has a better prospect of improving both children's chances and probably at least an equal chance of increasing the viability of marriages or marriagelike arrangements...

...Marriage and Good Outcomes for Children A huge number of studies have shown that children fare better in two-biological-parent families than they do in single-biological-parent families, leading most family researchers to conclude that the nuclear family is a more effective unit for reproduction and socialization...

...Most of these couples have little or no access to professional counseling...

...Wouldn't it be reasonable to help the less educated enjoy the benefits of the nuclear family...

...The nuclear family, though long the bourgeois ideal, had never been universally practiced, at least as it was in the middle of the last century...

...From this evidence, students of the family can assert three points...

...What ails marriage and what, if anything, can be done to restore this time-honored social arrangement to its former status as a cultural invention for assigning the rights and responsibilities of reproduction, including sponsorship and inheritance...

...We don't know the answer to this question, but we do know that various indicators of child wellbeing— health, mental health, educational attainment— do show higher scores in Northern than in Southern Europe...

...Conversely, there is no evidence that the cohort of children who came of age in the 1990s and early part of this century is doing worse than previous cohorts because these children are more likely to have grown up in single-parent families...

...After all, they were the cohort who raised such hell in the 1960s and 1970s...

...Though marriage comes later to this group, they are barely more likely to have children out of wedlock, have high levels of marriage, and, if anything, lower levels of divorce than were experienced several decades ago...

...I place my bet on the second approach...

...The Bush administration is trying to put into place a set of policies aimed at reversing 76 n DISSENT / Summer 2005 the symptoms of retreat from marriage: high rates of premarital sex, nonmarital childbearing, cohabitation, and divorce...

...The growing inequality in the United States may provide some clues for why the family, and marriage in particular, is not faring well and what to do about it...

...Divorce rates were extremely high during this era, and many of these families dissolved their unions when they had an opportunity to divorce because of chronic problems of conflict, disenchantment, and scarcity...

...FRANK FURSTENBERG, Zellerbach Family Professor of Sociology at the University of Pennsylvania, has written extensively on children, families, and public policy...

...Many scholars weighed in on these questions...

...His most recent book is On the Frontier of Adulthood (co-edited with Rick Settersten and Ruban Rumbaut), University of Chicago Press, 2005...

...They appear to be linked to the level of investment in children, not the family form (which is certainly more intact in Southern Europe...

...Among the most socially disadvantaged and most marginalized segments of American society, marriage has become imperiled and family conditions have generally deteriorated, resulting in extremely high rates of union instability...

...We have known about this problem for decades, but researchers have not been equipped adequately to rule out selection...

...Does this mean that we are seeing a continuation of what has always been or something different than has ever occurred in human history— the withering of kinship as an organizing feature of human society...

...Finally, I believe that the best way to foster marriage stability is to support children with an array of services that assist parents and children, regardless of the family form in which they reside...

...Instead, many couples need repeated bouts of help both before and during marriage when they run into difficult straits...

...By contrast, concern about the state of marriage in the United States has touched a raw, political nerve...

...Of course, compensatory public policies or other demographic changes such as small family size, higher parental education, or lower rates of poverty may have offset the deleterious effects of family form, but such an explanation concedes that family form is not as potent a source of children's well-being as many observers seem to believe...

...These experiments, being conducted by the Manpower Research Demonstration Corporation, will use random assignment and have the best hope of producing some demonstrable outcomes...

...The other position, championed by most conservatives, is that people have lost faith in marriage because of changes in cultural values that could be reversed or restored through shifts in the law, changes in administrative policies and practices, and public rhetoric to alter beliefs and expectations...

...Certainly, encouraging marriage among young couples facing a choice of nonmarital childbearing or wedlock is not an easy choice when we know the outcome of the union is so precarious...

...By directing more resources to low-income children regardless of the family form they live in, through such mechanisms as access to quality child care, health care, schooling, and income in the form of tax credits, it may be possible to increase the level of human, social, and psychological capital that children receive...

...Demographic Changes and Political Interpretations When compared to the 1950s, the institution of marriage seems to be profoundly changed, but is the middle of the twentieth century an appropriate point of comparison...

...First, we have the experience of the 1950s, when marriages did occur in abundance among low-income families...

...In my own study of marriages of teen parents in the 1960s, I discovered that four out of every five women who married the father of their children got divorced before the child reached age eighteen...

...the rate of marital instability among those who married a stepfather was even higher...

...When we invest in children, we are not only likely to reap the direct benefits of increasing human capital but also the indirect benefits that will help preserve union stability in the next generation...

...Second, change is endemic to all family systems, and at least in the West, where we have the best evidence to date, family systems have always been in flux...

...Economies of scale are produced when two adults live together...

...Significantly, many of the countries that continue to adhere to the nuclear model have some of the world's lowest rates of fertility—a problem that seems worse in countries with very low rates of nonmarital childbearing...

...Conservative constituencies largely believe that education, especially under the aegis of religious or quasi-religious sponsorship is the best prescription for shoring up marriage...

...If I am correct, it probably follows that direct investment in children and youth has a better prospect of strengthening marriage and marriage-like relationships in the next generation by improving the skills and providing the resources to make parental relationships more rewarding and enduring...

...Yet this literature reveals some troubling features that have not been adequately examined by social scientists...

...To date, there is little evidence sup78 n DISSENT / Summer 2005 porting a correlation between family form and children's welfare at the national level...

...Finally, family systems do not evolve in a linear fashion but become more or less complex and more elemental in different eras or among different strata of society depending on the economic and social conditions to which families must adapt...

...First, no universal form of the family constitutes the appropriate or normative arrangement for reproduction, nurturance, socialization, and economic support...

...In other words, almost all the change has occurred among the segment of the population that has either not gained economically or has lost ground over the past several decades...

...Moreover, parents with limited cultural and material resources are unDISSENT / Summer 2005 n 77 POLITICS OF THE FAMILY likely to remain together in a stable marriage...

...Lending this type of assistance means that young adults are more likely to move into higher paying jobs and acquire through education the kinds of communication and problemsolving skills that are so useful to making marriage-like relationships last...

...They contend that children's well-being has less to do with the family form in which they reside than the resources possessed to form viable family arrangements...

...These indicators accompanied, and in some cases preceded rather than followed, change in the rates of divorce, the decline of marriage, and the rise of nonmarital childbearing during this period...

...Lacking these resources (material and cultural), it matters little whether the children are born into a marriage, cohabitation, or a single-parent household, because they are likely not to fare as well as those whose parents possess the capacity to realize their goals...

...Both across and within societies, family forms, patterns, and practices vary enormously...

...Yet, the evidence overwhelmingly shows that shortterm programs that are largely didactic will not be effective in preserving marriages...

...Two parents create healthy redundancies and perhaps help build social capital both within the household and by creating more connections to the community...

...If parents with limited resources and low skills are less likely to enter marriage with a biological parent and remain wed when they do (which we know to be true), then it follows that children will do worse in such single-parent households than in stable marriages...

...Do the countries with high rates of cohabitation, low marriage, high divorce, and high nonmarital fertility have the worst outcomes for children...

...The prevalence of marriage and marital stability is substantially higher among well-educated and more stably employed individuals than among those with less than a college education and lower incomes...

...I place myself in this latter group...

...For the first time, family scholars from several disciplines could see the broad outlines of a new picture of how family forms and functions are intimately related to the social, cultural, and perhaps especially the economic contexts in which household and kinship systems are embedded...

...In short, the nuclear family was cross-culturally and historically not "the natural unit," that many wrongly presume today...

...This approach is more likely to increase the odds of success for children when they grow up...

...It is fair to say that there are two main camps: (1) those who have decided that the family is imperiled as a result of changes in the marriage system, a position held by such respectable social scientists as Linda Waite, Norvel Glenn, and Judith Wallerstein...

...At first blush, this approach seems to make good sense...

...It has been widely known since the baby boom era that the period after the Second World War was unusual demographically: the very early onset of adult transitions...

...During the 1960s and 1970s, anthropological evidence indicated that family diversity is universal, and findings from the new field of historical demography revealed that families in both the East and the West had always been changing in response to economic, political, demographic, and social conditions...

...Nevertheless, it is theoretically possible to examine social experiments such as those being mounted in the marriage-promotion campaign and assess their long-term effects on children...

...For a brief time, the nuclear family in the United States and throughout much of Europe reigned supreme...

...Strong opposition exists to funding sustained and intensive premarital and postmarital counseling among many proponents of marriage-promotion programs...

...Newer statistical methods have been employed to correct for unmeasured differences, but strong evidence exists that none of these techniques is up to the challenge...

...Only in the 1950s—and then for a very brief time—did it become the gold standard for what constitutes a healthy family...

...Still, they doubt that the family can be coaxed back into its 1950s form and favor adaptations in government policy to assist new forms of the family— an approach followed by most European nations...

...The decline of marriage suggests to some that this round of change is unique in human history or that its consequences for children will be uniquely unsettling to society...

...Of course, children will fare better when they have two well-functioning, collaborative parents than one on average, but one well-functioning parent with resources is better than two married parents who lack the resources or skills to manage parenthood...