In other words, when we say that traditional marriage is “natural,” what we really mean—or should mean—is that it is “normal.” We made traditional marriage normal through centuries of civilizational trial and error because countless generations of wise people figured out that it was a best practice for society. And over those centuries we heaped layer upon layer of law, tradition, and custom on top of the institution. It has become dogma so old that we have forgotten all of the reasons for it. But rather than respect its time-tested value, we instead subject it to the razor of reason. We think that, because we cannot see—or remember—its myriad functions, they must not exist.
The family—in form, function, and ideal—has changed a great deal in a remarkably short period of time. Divorce has lost most of its social stigma, as has out-of-wedlock birth. Even adultery and “open marriage” are accepted or even celebrated by certain segments of society, particularly among some bohemian elites. A recent New York Times Magazine essay asked the question “Is an Open Marriage a Happier Marriage?”7 The popular medical website WebMD article on open marriage reports that “those who practice open relationships or polyamory often say they are ‘hardwired’ this way and that laying the ground rules for multiple relationships spares everyone hurt and disappointment.”8
Open marriage is not an epidemic. But, again, that misses an important point. The way we talk about marriage has changed profoundly since the 1960s, and that by itself has profound consequences. Marriage as an institution depends upon how the society around it talks about it. The rhetoric around marriage affects its desirability, for both men and women. When the sophisticated opinion is “Who needs it?” there are real consequences, both in law but also in the far more important climate of expectations people have about how to live a fulfilling life. When the mainline Protestant churches caved in to the bourgeois cultural populism of the “me decade” by removing or loosening many of the stigmas, rules, and customs that attached to divorce, they were downgrading the status of marriage.
“Prior to the late 1960s,” writes the University of Virginia’s Brad Wilcox, one of America’s leading marriage researchers (and an AEI colleague of mine), “Americans were more likely to look at marriage and family through the prisms of duty, obligation, and sacrifice. A successful, happy home was one in which intimacy was an important good, but by no means the only one in view. A decent job, a well-maintained home, mutual spousal aid, child-rearing, and shared religious faith were seen almost universally as the goods that marriage and family life were intended to advance.”
This is what Wilcox calls the “institutional model” of marriage.9 Sex was reserved—according to the ideal, at least—for marriage. Certainly marriage was the only legitimate, or at least desirable, model for having children. In short, the old attitude was that one must work for the marriage. The new attitude was that the marriage had better work for me. In 1962, roughly half of American women agreed with the statement “When there are children in the family parents should stay together even if they don’t get along.” By 1977, only one in five American women agreed.10
Where the culture goes, so goes the state. Ronald Reagan signed the first no-fault divorce law as governor of California in 1969. As so often happens, where California “leads,” much of the nation follows.
In the decade and a half that followed, virtually every state in the Union followed California’s lead and enacted a no-fault divorce law of its own. This legal transformation was only one of the more visible signs of the divorce revolution then sweeping the United States: From 1960 to 1980, the divorce rate more than doubled—from 9.2 divorces per 1,000 married women to 22.6 divorces per 1,000 married women. This meant that while less than 20 percent of couples who married in 1950 ended up divorced, about 50 percent of couples who married in 1970 did. And approximately half of the children born to married parents in the 1970s saw their parents part, compared to only about 11 percent of those born in the 1950s.11
No-fault divorce was just one way in which the state accelerated the cultural trend. Under the Great Society, with an overabundance of good intentions, the federal government started subsidizing women who had children out of wedlock. For instance, a program—Aid to Families with Dependent Children—originally intended to provide modest pensions for the widows of coal miners became a broad entitlement for single mothers, paid out on a per-baby basis. The problem is that the way the program was structured, the funds were cut off if the recipient got married, thus penalizing mothers for seeking a more stable family. Welfare reform in 1996 fixed some of these problems, but it didn’t eliminate them. According to a study by C. Eugene Steuerle of the Urban Institute, a single mother working full-time at a minimum-wage job who marries a man also working full-time at the same wage would lose $8,060 in cash and noncash welfare benefits.12
Trying to pinpoint single causes for the profound transformation in attitudes and practices around marriage is pointless. This is a big, diverse society, and big, diverse phenomena have big, diverse causes. Still, the statistics speak for themselves. Roughly seven out of ten black children are born out of wedlock. The out-of-wedlock birth rate for whites (29 percent) is now higher than what it was for blacks (24 percent) when Daniel Patrick Moynihan issued his (in)famous 1965 report: The Negro Family: The Case for National Action.13
Since 1974, roughly one million children per year have experienced the dissolution of their family, and these children “are two to three times more likely than their peers in intact marriages to suffer from serious social or psychological pathologies.”14
Now, it must be acknowledged that the transformation of ideas about marriage had some benefits. This is not all a tale of woe. Whatever complaints you might have about various forms of doctrinaire or radical feminism, the core gains from the women’s rights movement are not ones even most social conservatives would be comfortable rolling back, starting, of course, with women’s suffrage, but also the broader acceptance that women have an equal right to pursue happiness to men. I certainly wouldn’t want to go back to a world where women’s occupational choices were limited to a few “women’s jobs” like teaching, retail sales, nursing, and working at telephone switchboards. As the son and husband of successful “career women” (already a kind of antiquated term) and the father of a teenage girl whom I expect to follow in their footsteps, I welcome many of these changes. Nor would I like to see anyone trapped in an unworkable marriage.
In other words, we can acknowledge that important progress has been made, but we should also recognize that the implosion of the institutional model of marriage has had profound consequences for society, especially children.
No matter how impressive a single mother—or a single father—may be, the simple fact remains that, as a generalization, two parents are better than one. Such statements are upsetting to many Americans, who believe that to say such a thing unfairly stigmatizes single parents and the children of single parents. One can sympathize with the desire not to make an already formidable burden even heavier, but facts do not care about feelings (which is why we are in the midst of a war on facts on all sides these days).15
A recent study by Princeton University and the left-of-center Brookings Institution reported that “most scholars now agree that children raised by two biological parents in a stable marriage do better than children in other family forms across a wide range of outcomes.”16
Sociologists Sara McLanahan and Gary Sandefur determined that adolescent children of divorced parents were almost three times more likely to drop out of high school (31 percent to 13 percent for children of intact families). They also found that a third of adolescent girls with divorced parents became teen mothers (whereas 11 percent of girls from married parents became teen mothers). More than one in ten male children of divorce (11 percent) spent some time in prison before the age of thirty-two. “Only” 5 percent of boys from intact homes were ever incarcerated.17
It is a cruel
fact of human nature that evolution makes us biased toward our own kin in ways the rational mind cannot always accept or explain. Andrew J. Cherlin reports that even remarriage isn’t the solution many of us hope it will be. In The Marriage-Go-Round: The State of Marriage and the Family in America Today, Cherlin recounts that “children whose parents have remarried do not have higher levels of well-being than children in lone-parent families.”18
Cherlin attributes this to the stresses associated with moving and bonding (or not bonding) with stepparents and siblings. No doubt that’s part of it, but there are surely deeply rooted biological factors at play as well. “A parent’s patience will tend to run out with stepchildren more quickly than with biological children,” notes Steven Pinker, “and in extreme cases this can lead to abuse.”19 A dismaying study by Nicholas Zill of the Institute for Family Studies found that adopted children have a harder time at school than kids raised by their biological parents. What makes this so dismaying is that adoptive parents tend to be better off financially and are just as willing as traditional parents, if not more so, to put in the time and effort of raising kids.20
Zill’s finding highlights the problem with traditional family triumphalism. Adoption is a wonderful thing, and just because there are challenges that come with adoption, no one would ever argue that the problems adopted kids face make the alternatives to adoption better. Kids left in orphanages or trapped in abusive homes do even worse. Similarly, the well-established finding that parents of non-biological children often struggle with non-biological offspring doesn’t mean that people with children should not remarry. What is required in such marriages is extra effort to compensate for the inevitable pull of human nature.21
Obviously, I believe this is much more than an argument about economics, but looking at the family through an economic lens helps us see the real-world consequences in ways table-pounding rhetoric and nostalgic nostrums about “the way things used to be” cannot. Consider the stress so many families go through when elderly parents can no longer care for themselves. The pressures involved can hardly be captured solely by economic considerations. The feelings of obligation adult children have toward their parents and to their own children cannot be easily or fully translated into financial terms. But they can be illuminated by them. A RAND Corporation study found that elderly people with no children end up paying far more over their remaining lifetime for nursing home care. Why? Because they spend more time in nursing homes. People with children, particularly daughters, spend less because the kids make a nursing home less necessary.22 The data are silent on the emotional significance, but it’s not hard to fill in the blanks.
How we take care of the elderly is an important issue, but how we raise children matters more for the future of the country. The Brookings Institution’s Isabel Sawhill—no Bible-thumping right-winger—has found that 20 percent of the increase in child poverty since 1970 can be attributed to family breakdown.23 A study by Brad Wilcox found that states with more married parents do better on a broad range of economic indicators, including upward mobility for poor children and lower rates of child poverty.24 On most economic indicators, the Washington Post summarized, “the share of parents who are married in a state is a better predictor of that state’s economic health than the racial composition and educational attainment of the state’s residents.”25
Also left out of the conversation is the incredible economic benefit marriage has for men. Married men, controlling for all factors, make 44 percent more than single men.26 Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry notes that the wage benefit for marriage is roughly equal to, if not greater than, that of going to college.27 But, he adds, economists are quick to extol the vital importance of going to college but are loath to emphasize—or even talk about—the benefits of marriage.28
Ron Haskins, also of the Brookings Institution, has identified what he calls the “success sequence”: “at least finish high school, get a full-time job and wait until age 21 to get married and have children.” If young people do just these three things, in that order, they are almost guaranteed to climb out of poverty. “Our research shows that of American adults who followed these three simple rules, only about 2 percent are in poverty and nearly 75 percent have joined the middle class (defined as earning around $55,000 or more per year).”29 Undoubtedly, some teenagers could be persuaded to follow these steps with appeals to cool reason. But is it really so ridiculous to claim that society as a whole would have an easier time persuading more kids to follow this sequence if they were in families that modeled this practice themselves? Or if celebrities and other elites openly promoted these lifestyles? Or if they put just a smidgen of stigma on out-of-wedlock births and “baby daddy” culture?
Indeed, this highlights the profound failure and hypocrisy of elites in our culture. Amidst all the talk of marriage’s decline, an important trend often gets overlooked: Marriage among elites is doing okay. The divorce rate among affluent Americans stabilized in the late 1980s and has largely recovered, at least among whites. The share of young white women with college degrees who were married in 2010 was just over 70 percent. That’s pretty much where it was in 1950.30 Less than 9 percent of college-educated white women had an unwed birth in 2011, very close to the number for women in 1950.31 A Pew Research Center analysis of the most recent U.S. Census Bureau data found that marriage is more correlated with socioeconomic status than at any time in our history.32 College-educated Americans tend to get a degree, get married, and have children—in that order. Meanwhile, marriage, particularly among the working class, has gone out of style. (Charles Murray’s Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010 exhaustively documents these trends.) Not surprisingly, college-educated professionals tend to marry other college-educated professionals, widening the rift between elites and everyone else. “It is the privileged Americans who are marrying, and marrying helps them stay privileged,” Andrew J. Cherlin, a sociologist at Johns Hopkins University, told the New York Times. Up to 40 percent of the growth in economic inequality may be attributable to changes in the pattern of marriage in the United States. “The people with more education tend to have stable family structures with committed, involved fathers,” Princeton sociologist Sara McLanahan added. “The people with less education are more likely to have complex, unstable situations involving men who come and go.”33 Wilcox attributes these trends to the degradation of the institutional model of marriage and to the subsequent ascendancy of the “soul-mate” model. The romantic ideal of finding a soul mate has deep historical roots, but for most of human history, marriage was a political, religious, and economic institution largely removed from notions of “true love” and soul mates. That started to change not long after the economic miracle of the Lockean Revolution. Soul-mate marriage is not a uniquely American ideal, but it has been most intensely idealized and democratized in America, and this ideal is arguably America’s greatest cultural export, though marriage for love is still not the norm in many parts of the non-Western world.34
The big change in recent years is the one Brad Wilcox identified. Finding a true life partner was always an important consideration, but it was not the sole criterion. It was always nice in an arranged marriage when the youngsters found each other agreeable, but it was hardly the only item on the checklist. Even after arranged marriages ceased to be an acceptable norm, the checklist approach endured. Women—and their parents—still defined a “good match” beyond the narrow calculus of finding “the one.” Would the man be a good provider? Would the woman be a good mother? Did he or she come from a good family? Practice the right faith? And so on. A few generations ago, marrying purely for love was a luxury largely reserved for the affluent. We are in some respects returning to that model, the difference being that in the past the poor still got married. Not so much anymore.
Today, the soul-mate model works on the self-centered though not necessarily selfish view that there is a single person out there who will allow me to be the person I want to
be. This pursuit of happiness, newly defined, has much to recommend it, particularly for women. I certainly wouldn’t want to go back to a time when the choice of whom to marry didn’t reside entirely with the couple involved (except in the case of my daughter, where I would like veto power!). The problem isn’t that men and women have the right to choose their own life partners; it is that, culturally, the range of factors taken into account for that choice has narrowed. And that has drawbacks.
For starters, it is more likely to lead to divorce. If marriage is all about romantic notions of personal fulfillment, there is precious little left to fall back on when marriage isn’t all you hoped it would be. By telling poor people, especially, that they must “hold out for ‘the one,’ ” society is, if not closing, then at least narrowing access to the best institution for raising children, getting and staying out of poverty, and finding meaning beyond purely individualistic terms. It is remarkable that, in all of the hand-wringing about the rise in economic inequality, the issue of marriage’s dissolution almost never makes an appearance in the debate.
Family lays all the crucial groundwork for the kind of person you will become. When I say that the family is the gateway to civilization, I mean that literally. The family civilizes barbarians. It imprints them with language, customs, mores, values, and expectations for how society should work. If culture is a conversation, then the family is where all conversation begins. To be sure, other institutions pick up and round out the work of the family. Some researchers claim that peers have more influence on kids than parents do. Maybe. But parents have a huge role in who their peers will be—from where they live to where they send their kids to school to what hobbies they pursue and associations they form. Still, as nearly every teacher in the world will tell you, the first and most important work starts in the home.