Marriage between a man and a woman may have had value fifty years ago, but today it's just one option among several. Children can get along just as well without dad around. The family is a quaint anachronism. Those are opinions one heard frequently in the seventies and eighties but less so today. The research being done on the importance of a two parent family is just too hard to ignore. Rebecca Hagelin talks about what we've learned about the family and why it matters that children live with both parents. Here's an excerpt:
Adolescents in intact families, for example, perform better on a number of measures when compared with their counterparts in non-intact families. As family expert Jennifer Marshall of The Heritage Foundation notes, children in intact families "have better health, are less likely to be depressed, are less likely to repeat a grade in school, and have fewer developmental problems." Their peers in non-traditional households, meanwhile, "are more likely to experience poverty, abuse, behavioral and emotional problems, lower academic achievement, and drug use."
This is not to say that being raised in an intact family is a guaranteed ticket to success, or that children in non-traditional families have no hope of doing well. But as a group, the odds strongly favor the children raised in intact families. It's really a question of giving our children the best possible chance to succeed. Cohabiting couples may wish it were otherwise, but in general their lifestyle doesn't serve their children -- or the wider society in which they are raised -- as well as the traditional family does.
In our headlong rush to escape traditional morality and social structures we've jettisoned the wisdom of two millenia because a) we wanted to and b) a few social scientists told us it was outmoded and unnecessary. Dumb.
HT: Jason.
RLC