The average split costs a couple $2,500. A new single-parent family with children can cost the government $20,000 to $30,000 a year. That’s $33 billion to $112 billion a year total in divorce-related social-service subsidies and lost revenue.None of this should come as a shock, certainly not to those who've gone through the ordeal of divorce, but it shows yet again the social disaster which was the sexual revolution, one major consequence of which was the weakening of marital commitment and, eventually, no-fault divorce. Now we're all paying for society's sexual "liberation" in a host of social programs designed to meliorate its consequences.
If the U.S. “enjoyed the same level of family stability today as it did in 1960,” there would be 750,000 fewer children repeating grades, 1.2 million fewer school suspensions, about 500,000 fewer acts of teenage delinquency, about 600,000 few children receiving therapy and 70,000 fewer suicides every year, writes W. Bradford Wilcox in a 2009 paper, referring to research by Pennsylvania State University professors Paul Amato and Alan Booth.
Children of divorce have shorter life spans - by an average of five years - compared to children whose parents didn’t divorce, according to a new study by Howard Friedman and Leslie Martin.
That longevity data is “the most devastating analysis that we’ve seen … of the impact of divorce on children. They don’t ‘get over it,’ ” said Mr. Gersten, who was a Department of Health and Human Services official in the George W. Bush administration.
Marriage and divorce are not just personal issues between the principals. They're moral matters in which the entire society has a stake because the entire society is affected.
