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| Mike... |
 Posted: Tue Oct 27, 2009 5:29 pm |
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news.google.com
For better or worse: Report says marriage's best days have gone by
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, October 25, 2009
The institution of marriage in the United States has steadily declined
in strength over the past four decades, according to a report released
last month by a panel of scholars and advocates.
The U.S. Marriage Index, the brainchild of David Blankenhorn,
president of the Institute for American Values, seeks to quantify the
health of marriage in the United States in the same way economists use
leading indicators to parse the state of the country's economy.
"We're just proposing a way of numerically capturing these trends so
that people can see them," he says.
The index combined five statistics -- the percentage of adults between
the ages of 20 and 54 who are married, the percentage of adults who
reported being a "very happy" with their marriages, the percentage of
first marriages intact, the percentage of births to married parents
and the percentage of children living with their own married parents
-- to reach a composite score illustrating the state of America's
nuptial unions. In 1970, that score totaled 76.2; by 2008 it had
dropped to 60.3.
Almost 90 percent of children were born to married parents in 1970;
last year it was 60 percent. Of adults between ages 20 and 54, 78.6
percent were married in 1970, compared with 57.2 percent in 2008. The
portion of first marriages that remained intact dropped from 77.4
percent in 1970 to 61.2 percent last year.
Blankenhorn says the index was born partly out of his frustration with
the difficulty of talking publicly about the subject of marriage.
"There's a lot of genuine opinion out there that really marriage is
something that we ought to leave to people's private decision-making
and it's not society's business to get into," he concedes. "You're
going into their bedroom. You're going into their private lifestyle
choices. You're going into situations you can't possibly understand."
Blankenhorn takes issue with that stance largely because marriage has
such a significant impact on children. He points to statistics showing
that kids who grow up in homes where their parents are married to each
other are, on average, less likely to live in poverty, to have
emotional or behavioral problems, to engage in premature sexual
activity, to use drugs or commit suicide.
"Every single pathology or problem or difficulty a child can
experience -- every single one -- growing up outside of a married-
couple home elevates the risk," he says.
Blankenhorn's hope is that the index, a collaborative effort by 15
academics, researchers and policy experts intended for release every
other year, will become a bellwether signaling the direction marriage
is headed in the United States. And that it will galvanize concern and
support for the institution.
"It's impossible, really, to make progress unless you have some shared
understanding," he says. "There's no disagreement among us about high
rates of unemployment -- nobody runs around saying it's fine to have
20 percent of us unemployed. But we really are not at that level of
agreement about marriage."
Blankenhorn says increases in divorce and in out-of-wedlock childbirth
are the two factors that contributed most to the decline in the health
of marriage in the last half century. The index also includes 101
suggestions to strengthen marriage in America, written by Blankenhorn
and collaborator Linda Malone-Colón of Hampton University. Among them:
creating community-based marriage mentoring programs, and encouraging
government funding of marriage education.
"All we're saying here is, can we just think about that for a minute?
Can we do better?" he says. "And would we do better as a country if we
did better on this?" |
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