subject: The Marriage Problem - Spring 2003

from: Smart Marriages®

A special briefing paper by David Blankenhorn, president of the New York-based Institute for American Values, appears in the Spring issue of American Experiment Quarterly.  Below are excerpts from the memo, which was distributed to key players in the marriage movement when they recently met to discuss how to proceed in strengthening marriage as an essential institution in the U.S.  The complete piece can be found here.

The Marriage Problem

American Experiment Quarterly Volume 6 ~ No. 1 ~ Spring 2003
by David Blankenhorn


Over the course of three decades, from the mid-1960s through at least the mid-1990s, marriage as a social institution got steadily and dramatically weaker.  

During these years, American adults became significantly less likely to get married and stay married. The annual number of marriages per 1,000 unmarried women dropped substantially, as did the proportion of all American adults who were married. And if they were married, they were less likely to describe their marriage as "very happy."

During this period, very high rates of divorce and steadily increasing rates of unwed childbearing produced a steady decline of the married-couple, mother-father child-raising family, and a steadily decreasing proportion of American children under the age of eighteen living with their two biological, married parents.

Over these approximately three decades, according to many measurements, married-couple families became less able to carry out their basic social functions of:  

.  Maintaining the population level. The total fertility rate for American married couples is about 1.6. That's below the replacement level and about half of what it was in the late 1950s.

.  Regulating adult sexual behavior.

.  Socializing children and in other ways caring for family members.

During this period, familism as a societal value increasingly lost ground to other, and in some cases competing, social values, such as individualism and consumerism.  

This story line of the roughly thirty-year decline of marriage is well known among experts and in the society as a whole. Its basic dimensions are not in dispute.

Neither are the basic social consequences of this trend any longer in dispute. Increasingly, scholars and other leaders view the weakening of marriage as a genuine societal crisis. The respected scholar James Q. Wilson recently described the weakening of marriage as "the most important domestic problem in the country." It drives or sustains a diversity of social problems such as child poverty, weapons-related violence, educational failure, teen suicide, child and adolescent mental health problems, teen pregnancy, and many others.

Here's one example: one of every three divorces in the United States resulting in the physical separation of a father from his children plunges the mother and children into poverty. Father absence due to marital failure is a primary cause of child poverty in the United States.

These trends, while probably most advanced in the United States and in the other English-speaking countries, are to some degree global in nature, leading some scholars to speculate about a "world trend" toward the "post-nuclear family"--societies in which the married-couple, mother-father child-raising unit is no longer normative for the society as a whole, but instead is viewed merely as one of many ethically and socially acceptable personal life style options.

The Marriage Movement

In the 1990s, first a grassroots fatherhood movement, and then a marriage movement, emerged in the United States seeking to improve child well-being by strengthening fatherhood, improving the quality and stability of marriage as a social institution, and reducing unwed childbearing and unnecessary divorce. As a result, since the early 1990s, impressive progress has been made in changing U.S. elite and public opinion, as well as in stimulating political and grassroots action, on the social importance of marriage.

How much progress? "On the heels of a fatherhood movement," Alex Kotlowitz recently wrote in the New York Times, more and more young couples in inner cities "are considering marriage." Kotlowitz's Frontline television documentary, Let's Get Married, which aired in November 2002 on PBS, focuses on what the documentary calls the "burgeoning marriage movement." At least at the level of the public debate, there has been much recent progress in making the case for marriage and in putting the marriage problem on the national agenda. As Kotlowitz reports: "Now, everyone from the government to intellectuals are pushing marriage."

How much progress have we made? As the syndicated columnist Jane Eisner recently put it, there is a "growing consensus" that the question of renewing marriage--How do we strengthen marriage as the primary social institution to rear children?--is now "the central question of American life."  

Reflecting on the year 2002, she continues: "Liberals, in particular, heard the wake-up call this year. No longer confined to the outer reaches of the Religious Right, the 'marriage movement' is moving center stage, as those on the political left are belatedly adding their voices to this necessary debate."

In The Nation, Judith Stacey, a strong critic of the marriage movement, recently complained angrily "the marriage movement is busting out all over, a harbinger of 'faith-based' approaches to social reform." The Observer of London reported "the pro-marriage movement is gaining strength on both sides of the Atlantic." Last August, the Orange County Register reported on the "growing marriage movement meant to slow the divorce rate."

In the elite media, an important intellectual and political corner was turned in mid-2001, when the New York Times, after years of journalistic equivocation and entrenched skepticism, finally reported in a front-page story that:  

... a powerful consensus has emerged in recent years among social scientists, as well as state and federal policy makers. It sees single-parent families as the dismal foundries that produced decades of child poverty, delinquency, and crime. And it views the rise of such families, which began in the early 1960s and continued until about five years ago, as a singularly important indicator of child pathology.

And:  

 

>From a child's point of view, according to a growing body of social research, the most supportive household is one with two biological parents in a low-conflict marriage.

Not only newly marriage-friendly sensibilities in the media and elsewhere, but also new pro-marriage public and private sector policy initiatives, are beginning to emerge.

In the early 1990s, for example, few scholars, and even fewer academic professional associations, dared even to address the topic of marriage, much less suggest that marriage might be a beneficial institution worthy of societal support. In fact, two of the most relevant professional associations, the National Council on Family Relations and the American Association of Marriage and Family Therapy, consistently refused to address this subject. (Yes, it's actually true that an organization with the word marriage in its name had by the mid-1990s long since abandoned any commitment to, or even interest in, marriage.) That refusal led Diane Sollee, a marriage therapist and a member of both organizations, to start a new group, the Coalition for Marriage, Family, and Couples Education, now popularly called Smart Marriages. In 1997, Sollee's first Smart Marriages conference drew 400 participants. The 2002 Smart Marriages conference drew about 1,700 participants.

*   *   * An Intellectual Strategic Plan

Major Goals

In light of the marriage movement's current strengths and weaknesses, especially the movement's current intellectual status and needs, what should be our movement's primary intellectual goals for the coming months? Considering the movement as a whole, let me suggest these major intellectual goals for 2003:

1.   To convene influential marriage scholars and leaders to commission and discuss papers, deliberate, and produce a joint statement describing the status and proposing the future direction of the marriage movement, including its major social and policy objectives for the coming decade.

2.   To collect and disseminate credible data showing which marriage programs are succeeding in strengthening marriage and reducing divorce and unwed childbearing.

3.   To draft and urge passage of a U.S. congressional resolution on the benefits and importance of healthy marriages.

4.   To respond intellectually to the new critics of "the case for marriage," whose emerging argument appears to be that, while happy marriages are beneficial, troubled or unhappy marriages are not, especially for women. This argument seeks to revive the long influential but recently discredited Jesse Bernard thesis of "his marriage/her marriage." It also seeks to shift from a sociological and anthropological discussion of marriage as an institution to a therapeutic discussion of individual (good and bad) marriages, which ignores and indirectly undermines the possibility of evaluating a collective interest in marriage. This naturally leads to evaluating society's legal and other interests in marriage.

5.   To change scholarly and public understanding of the consequence of divorce for children by building on Judith Wallerstein's insight that the effects are best measured not by examining "symptom lists," but instead by looking at the inner lives--emotional, moral, spiritual--of the children of divorce, particularly as those children enter young adulthood.

6.   To document the continuing shift in the academic treatment of marriage by quantifying the main trends in U.S. academic research and scholarly writing on marriage since 1977.

7.   To collect and publish information on recent U.S. trends in marriage and family formation, especially regarding the proportion of U.S. children living with their two, biological, married parents. This information will largely be drawn from census data.

8.   To seek improvements in how the U.S. Census Bureau and the National Center for Health Statistics collect and publish data regarding the state of marriage.  

9.   To evaluate and report on recent scholarship on marriage among African Americans, paying particular attention to evaluating critically those studies suggesting that marriage is less beneficial to African Americans than to others.  

10.  To measure and report the economic consequences of divorce, including both private and public-sector costs and transfers, at both state-by-state and national levels.

11.  To jump-start a focus on marriage law reform by examining and critiquing currently influential family law scholarship and proposing alternative directions; examining empirically the relationship between state-level divorce laws and marriage and divorce rates; considering a range of possible state-level divorce law reforms; and making recommendations for pro-marriage legal reforms to state policy makers and marriage leaders.

Achieving these goals will be difficult, but we can do it. In only a few years, the marriage movement has made much progress. We helped to put an important issue on the national agenda. Amazingly, the "m-word" is almost mainstream these days in policy, academic, and media circles. Ten years ago, who would have predicted it? More importantly, we have been a part of bringing to a virtual standstill, at least for now, the most harmful demographic trend of our generation. Again, who would have predicted it? Not a bad start. Now it's time to really get going.

David Blankenhorn is president of the New York-based Institute for American Values. Before founding the Institute, he  worked for seven years for several nonprofit policy and advocacy organizations in Virginia and Massachusetts. He graduated from Harvard University and received an M.A. in history from Warwick University in England. He is the author of Fatherless America, and his articles on family and civic issues have appeared in many publications.  

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