It’s a great honor to be here today on a topic which is dear to my heart, and I do think is generally increasingly acknowledged in this country to be perhaps the most important domestic issue facing America. Increasingly it is obvious that it is not just an American problem, that there is a rapidly increasing rate of family fragmentation throughout the developed world.
I have to say that it’s a problem which came to America first and fastest, and yet I think American society, which has a long history of facing social problems and trying to find solutions to them, is also perhaps the developed country which is facing the crisis in family life most directly and beginning to organize to do something about it.
Because I began writing about family issues in the late ‘80s and I have seen dramatic changes in the climate in this country, among elite opinion, in the media, in politics and society, I’d like to talk a little bit about how the ways in which that kind of change comes about. But first let me tell you a little bit about what I spend most of my time doing, which is research and writing and public education on what we grandiosely called the B case for marriage, but which really should be called the A case for marriage. It’s an important one, but not the only one that can be made.
Michael commented that we have been engaged for 40 years in this country in a grand or not so grand social experiment in what we now call family diversity. And the truth is that the results of this experiment are now in. We have not hundreds, not thousands, but literally tens of thousands of different research studies on the consequences of family fragmentation, whether through divorce, unmarried childbearing, or fatherless ness, on children, on adult men and women, and on society.
To sum up the broad outline of this very large and complicated body of research: First of all, when it comes to children, children do better when parents get and stay married. In fact, a child who was raised outside of an intact marriage -- an average, good- enough, intact marriage -- is dramatically more likely to become involved in conduct disorders, juvenile delinquency, and, later, adult crime. Such children have higher rates of mental illness, suicide, drug abuse, early and promiscuous sexual activity leading to sexually transmitted diseases, and higher rates of unwed and early pregnancy. There is a greater risk of school failure, becoming a high school dropout, or being held back a grade, as well as higher rates of physical illness and greater risk of mortality from all causes.
Again, across a very wide field of domains, what scholars have found is that even after you control for things like income, family background, and race, a child whose parents don’t get and stay married is two to three times more likely to experience any of these negative outcomes, including the most obvious and most persistent one, which is a high risk of living near, if not in, poverty.
What is less well known is that a similar body of literature exists on the relationship between marriage and adult well-being. Again, to sum up a very broad body of research, in every way that social scientists know how to measure, both men and women do better when they’re married. They live longer, they’re physically healthier, are happier, and have lower rates of mental and emotional distress -- less anxiety, less hostility, less depression. They make more money than otherwise similar people. This is particularly true of men who are not married. And at the same income level, married couples build more wealth than people with the same or similar income who are single or who only live together rather than getting married. To top it off, married people even have better sex more often than people who are single.
There’s a third category of marriage beneficiaries, which I’ll just call the taxpayers’ case for marriage. It’s become very clear that when the needs of children, of elderly adults, and of adults who are not elderly are not met in the context of an intact family, where the obligations and affection and respect between the members remain strong, the result is an enormous increase in other social needs that have to be met by the community at large. In developed, sophisticated nations, this translates into the taxpayer costs of divorce and unmarried childbearing.
So just about every domestic social problem that we spend money on in this country is being driven at least in part by our very high rates of family fragmentation. Our enormous and expensive criminal justice system, which we all may support, is a terribly expensive substitute for families that effectively control and regulate and tie their children to the social order. Our drug abuse programs, our teen pregnancy prevention programs, our mental health system, Medicaid, welfare-just an enormous burden which has never really been effectively quantified -- is shifted from the private sector to the public sector when people find it hard to do what was once taken for granted: the simple thing of making sure that your children are born within the context of a loving, permanent, public, committed, married family that is going to be there in the long haul; the members for each other and for their children.
Now, one of the things that has changed over the 15 years or so that I have been involved in public debate on this issue is that it’s less often, in this country at least, that you hear such outright attacks on marriage as you heard in the ‘70s and ‘80s, that it’s an outmoded institution, that it’s not important. Instead, we’re seeing a very powerful attack on marriage but cast in a different way. This is the argument that, sure, marriage may be good, but marriage is just another word for a nice, healthy, loving, emotional relationship between two people, and that’s what really matters. And if we use the word marriage and focus on marriage, we’re being old-fashioned, moralistic, or religious. What we should really be concerned with is couples in general. An excellent Canadian scholar named Dan Cere refers to this as the close relationship theory, replacing marriage as a social institution.
As you may or may not know, the prestigious American Law Institute recently recommended that states change their laws to grant a large number of marital benefits to couples who are just living together. If you look at the scholarship and family law in general, you hear this argument made over and over again. In many Canadian and European jurisdictions, it’s no longer an argument; it is the actual state of family law.
I was very struck when I read in the Family Law Quarterly, which is probably the most important intellectual journal for family lawyers in this country, an article in the summer of 2000 by Harry Krause, who is a very respected legal scholar. Basically, he said, it’s only religious mysticism and sentiment that leads us to treat two couples differently when they’re in the same functional position. Marriage is just a word, in other words; what matters is the couple. I looked for a footnote, because one of my jobs is to keep track of the literature on cohabitation and marriage, and there wasn’t one. This man, a well-educated, intelligent, leading scholar, felt no obligation to assert any evidence. He felt it was self-evidently true.
One of the questions that I think our grand social experiment can help us answer is, “Is cohabitation just as good as marriage?” Is it the functional equivalent of marriage? And the answer, certainly in America, is by and large no. In some cases cohabiting adults get some small part of the marriage benefit. In many cases they get none at all. The general rule from American research is that children of cohabiting parents look more like children of single parents in their outcomes than they do children of intact married families, and adults who cohabit look more like single adults than they do married couples.
One study a few years ago looked at happiness in 17 nations. In 16 of those nations-the exception was Northern Ireland, and I don’t know why-married couples were much happier than single people, which is a very common finding. Cohabiting couples were a little bit happier than single people, but they got about a quarter of the benefit that married people did. In other realms, such as wealth creation, for example, the longer you stay married, the more wealth you build. This is true for a lot of reasons, which if I had more time I could go into. But the reality was that for cohabiters it didn’t matter. There was no relationship between how long you had lived with someone and whether or not you had built wealth. Marriage is not just a piece of paper, you see. It is not simply living with another human being that creates the benefits of marriage. Marriage is a powerful social institution that in a well-functioning society changes the relationship between two people. It changes the way they look at each other. It changes the way they look at the future. It changes the way that others look at and treat them. And for marriage to function successfully, the boundaries around it have to be maintained.
If you can’t tell who’s married and who’s merely living together, if these are treated as functional equivalents, what happens is not that cohabiters become like married people, but being married becomes more and more like merely living together. You have not expanded human freedom; you’ve actually constricted it. You’ve taken an option off the table, an option that is very, very important for the well-being of children and of societies, because marriage is not just a ceremony. Again, the bottom line is that it’s a powerful, wealth-creating institution. By wealth I mean all the goods that human beings can produce together, both those that are valued in the marketplace and any other, and the many other valuable goods that are not denominated in dollars or any other currency.
I was asked to talk a little bit about media treatment of the family, which in my dual hats as opinion columnist and researcher means, I’m afraid, perhaps critiquing something of my own performance. But I have to say that over the last 15 years I’ve become pretty happy with the way the media treats marriage and family issues in this country. The Washington Times certainly was an early trailblazer, but the family is now on the table in American discussions in a way that it wasn’t. It is understood not just in the negative-that there are difficult or undesirable trends such as divorce, fatherless ness, and unmarried childbearing-but also the positive, that these trends are really about what we think about marriage, what we think about keeping our families together, what we think about fathers.
What I’d like to talk about is not that the battle is won but some of the flips in the way the issue is framed that I think helped bring this about. This also reflects the continuing challenges in dealing with the media and how the media deals with these issues. One critique that you hear about the media a lot is a certain sloppiness, particularly in the area of the existence of bad facts. I think that’s very true, particularly where we don’t have good facts. So perhaps under the pressures of the need to write the story, or perhaps for ideological reasons, we see bad facts repeated over and over again as if they were true.
One place you see this all of the time, just one choice out of many, is the question of how many children have gay and lesbian parents in this country. As there is a legal push for same-sex marriage, this becomes more and more a publicly discussed issue. The figure you see over and over again is 6-12 million children. Well, that’s the first clue that you don’t have a fact. If it’s between 6 and 12 million, then you don’t know how many. The truth is, we don’t know because gays and lesbians are a small segment of the population and good research on small segments of the population is very expensive and seldom done, particularly if you can get the media to repeat bad facts that are considered advantageous to your side.
But it’s perfectly obvious, if anyone bothered to think about it, that this number is not credible. I see it in legal journals and scholarly journals as well as in newspapers, so perhaps I can’t blame journalists too much, but there are over 70 million children in this country and 2 to 3 percent of the population identifies itself as gay and lesbian. The figures cited would mean that every gay and lesbian had to produce three or four children, when the average person produces 1.7. That 2-3 percent of the population is producing between 8 and 20 percent of the children is simply not credible, but that doesn’t prevent that figure from being presented over and over again.
But what in some ways are more interesting and difficult are what I’m calling these framing issues. Let me name four of them that have been very important and continue to be part of the struggle with how these issues are presented and debated in America. Let me again say I’m sympathetic, having been a working journalist myself. Particularly if you’re producing daily stories, there’s a temptation to make the story fit into the easiest existing frame that produces a conflict. It’s very important to at least be aware of these framings, because how you choose them makes an enormous difference to what you’ve decided the story is.
On the marriage issue, one of the original frames was that this is a story of people who hate other people versus people who love other people. This is a story of people who are bigoted against and want to make the lives of single mothers difficult versus people who want to support and love unmarried mothers and their children. You see the same framing, by the way, very clearly and solidly in place on the same-sex marriage debate, which is not even a debate at this point. We’re talking about a major change in our most basic social institution, and it is almost always framed as: are you bigoted against homosexuals or not?
One of the things that happened, I think, in the marriage movement is that many people like myself -- I’m married now but I was a single mother for 10 years --who have been children of single parents came forward in a way that allowed us to recognize that the question of whether we would like more of our children to grow up in intact, loving, married homes, to know their fathers or not, could not really be captured as a black-hat, hate single mothers versus white-hat like single mothers issue. That is one of the reasons we made some progress.
The second framing, which Wes Pruden talked about somewhat, is liberating progress versus stodgy traditionalism. In America, if you have a choice between the future and the past, it isn’t any choice. We’re always on the side of the future. Now, the interesting thing about this is that people didn’t notice that what was being described as progressive and liberating was a social trend that was impoverishing millions of children and women. It produced vast inequalities in the relative life chances of certain people, as well as imposing an enormous amount of suffering.
This was really brought home to me in 1996 when the abolition of marriage came out. I did a radio show in Chicago, and a man called in and said to me, “You know, I’m a liberal and I agree with everything you say.” And I said, “Well, I don’t see why you shouldn’t, as a liberal, believe everything that I say. I don’t really understand why debates about supply-side economics and national health insurance and the size of government should somehow have become translated into whether or not you think it’ a good idea for children to grow up in fatherless families with struggling single mothers and experience all of the emotional and financial and social capital losses that take place in that context.”
Once again, increasingly, the process of changing that framing in this country has been for more and more people to take this out of the ideological realm, to have more and more people from both sides of the aisle begin to say things that might have seemed obvious 50 years ago, but after 40 years of social science research I think we can say with even greater confidence are true.
The third framing issue, which is kind of subtle, and I apologize if I’m not as concise in communicating it, is framing one side as being scientific and the other side as being religious or moral. The function of this is to say that one side has an argument you can make in public and the other side has an argument that you can only make in private. It only applies if you have a particular set of religious beliefs and we’re not interested in that. So in a country with a very large population of people of faith, this way of framing the issue functions to disenfranchise the opinions of the majority of people and leave important social questions of how we live together to a small cadre of scientific experts.
Now, one of the things that I have done over the last 10 years is to take a look at that assumption that science is on the side of, in this case, the fragmentation of families and to use the methods of science and solid research to challenge this assumption. But even deeper than that, there is a real problem when we understand moral issues to be private and something else called science or health to be public. Because what the word morality means is a reasoned opinion about what the good is, how we should pursue it, how we can live together. If you take morality out of democratic debate, you’ve taken the democracy out it essentially.
Again, this was perhaps crystallized for me when I did a Wisconsin public radio interview a few years ago, after the marriage movement statement came out. If you’re interested in that movement, this statement is online at www.marriagemovement.org. A woman called me up and said, “I don’t know why you’re talking about these moral issues. Why aren’t we talking about nuclear disarmament?” I stopped for a minute and said, “You know, I think not blowing up the whole world is a pretty important moral issue.”
This theory that there are some issues that are moral, and by that we usually mean they have something to do with sex, means that we just can’t talk about those things because everyone has their own opinion. And then there are the other really important issues, like how do we fight terrorism without losing our civil liberties and is it unjust for the United States to lead a coalition to invade Iraq.
The main thing I want to point out is that not only is that disabling and destructive to democracy but it’s fundamentally false. Science can tell us whether certain things are true, but how we order those truths, how we use those truths to pursue the good, always involves a moral judgment that we knit together, hopefully in reasoned debate.
Finally, the last framing issue that I still see and that is perhaps the single most effective argument left against the case for marriage is what I call the argument from despair. Here again, it is a version of the idea that there is something called progress in history, which moves in only one direction and that is toward secular humanism.
When I was born in 1960, the vast majority, something like 95 percent, of American children, were born to married households, and 80 percent of those marriages lasted for life. So we’re talking about a very large change that’s taken place, in historical terms, in the blink of an eye. And yet we’re told there is nothing we can do about them. Yes, it impoverishes children. Yes, it costs these huge public burdens. Yes, it damages the life chances of adults as well. Yes, it leads to enormous wealth inequalities as the sectors of society that still marry and are still able to sustain marriage continuously outperform those that are living in essentially marriage less social mores. But you know, there is nothing we can do about it because it’s a historical trend, and all we can do is adapt our social institutions. We can blur the distinctions between marriage and other relationships in the hopes that if we can’t tell who’s married or not, we can stop worrying about the fact that fewer and fewer of our children are growing up in married households.
The good news, as I said, is that the experience of the United States shows that these trends are not impenetrable. The divorce rate in America is extremely high, but it is lower than it was 20 years ago. It seems to have peaked around 1980. A majority of our first marriages do appear to be headed to lasting for life. Unmarried childbearing, which, again in my lifetime, has approximately doubled every 10 years, is now tapering off. So are trends like teenage childbearing, which for years seemed to be impervious to any efforts.
We did a lot of very important social science research on the effectiveness of teen pregnancy, and what social scientists learned was that if you want a program to reduce teen pregnancy, you have to tell children it’s a bad idea to have a baby while a teenager. It’s amazing the number of approaches we tried that did not include telling children it’s a bad idea to have a teen pregnancy. None of those worked, while the ones that did [tell children that] varied in form but they worked.
At any rate, the good news is that there are signs that when a society faces, names, and organizes to deal with social problems of this kind, it can see improvement, it can see progress. The decline in marriage is not inevitable. Increasingly, the argument from despair is being revealed as a hollow one. Thank you.