THE MARRIAGE PROBLEM: How Our Culture Has Weakened Families -03/24/2002

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subject: The Marriage Problem: How Our Culture Has Weakened Families -3/02

from: Smart Marriages

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A286-2002Mar21.html

THE WASHINGTON POST
Sunday, March 24, 2002; Page BW03

Households Divided
'The Marriage Problem: How Our Culture Has Weakened Families' by James
Q. Wilson
Reviewed by Jean Bethke Elshtain

THE MARRIAGE PROBLEM: How Our Culture Has Weakened Families
By James Q. Wilson
HarperCollins. 274 pp. $25.95

James Q. Wilson is one of our most distinguished social scientists. His name
is linked to controversial approaches to criminal behavior and punishment
that are credited with having helped to reduce crimes against persons and
property in a number of cities, including New York. That city's former
mayor, Rudolph Giuliani, relied on Wilson's argument that public officials
should not allow petty crimes and nuisances to proliferate. The
deterioration in the quality of life that results when aggressive squeegee
men attack automobiles, panhandlers accost pedestrians or vandals trash
subway cars undermines respect for the rule of law overall, creating a
climate in which serious violent crime grows. In recent years, Wilson has
turned his attention to another area in which he sees deterioration --
marriage and the family. He brings the most reliable empirical evidence to
bear to make his case.

So important is the family, and so intractable the differences in family
stability, form and structure that distinguish one part of America from
another, insists Wilson in The Marriage Problem, that we are in fact two
nations. He describes these nations as follows: "In one nation, a child,
raised by two parents, acquires an education, a job, a spouse, and a home
kept separate from crime and disorder by distance, fences or guards. In the
other nation, a child is raised by an unwed girl, lives in a neighborhood
filled with many sexual men but few committed fathers, and finds gang life
to be necessary for self-protection and valuable for self-advancement." In
the first nation, children look forward to the future and make plans. In the
second, children disbelieve that they will have a future and live for the
immediate moment. Harms occur in both nations, but in the  second nation
"they proliferate -- child abuse and drug abuse, gang violence and personal
criminality, economic dependency and continued illegitimacy."

Wilson argues that the destructive features of a world without fathers
are by now so well documented that they are beyond challenge. No
responsible person wants to see that world expand, given its clear and
present dangers. But how did it come about, and how are we to bring the
second nation closer to the standard of the first in order to ensure
that, in the parlance of the moment, no child is left behind? Wilson
reminds us that when Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan first alerted the
country in 1960 to the troubles looming on the horizon as the world of
fatherlessness and rising out-of-wedlock birth was coming into view, he
was denounced, accused of everything from racism to sexism to cultural
imperialism, even as many people within the black community were saying
the same thing -- that a leap in fatherlessness was a "pathology." But
that made no difference to the mainstream media or scholarship. As a
result, it was easy for the first nation, irresponsibly, to ignore the
problem of the second.

Forty years later, facing an epidemic in teenage motherhood -- by 1995,
"three out of every four births to all teenagers were to unmarried girls;
for black girls, it was nine out of ten" -- the alarm bells finally went off
as politicians and social analysts converged on the same point: This trend
cannot continue, as too much measurable harm is being done to children. As
the evidence piled up, even those most resistant to the notion that
fatherlessness as an independent factor generated risk factors for children,
whatever the family's socio-economic status, were forced to acknowledge the
data. "Children in one-parent families, compared to those in two-parent
ones, are twice as likely to drop out of school. Boys in one-parent families
are much more likely than those in two-parent ones to be both out of school
and out of work. Girls in one-parent families are twice as likely as those
in two-parent ones to have an out-of-wedlock birth."

Undoing these harms proves to be a far more difficult challenge than
documenting them. Wilson sees no way to go other than to stabilize and renew
a strong culture of marriage. He makes a pitch for the family as an
institution that arises from powerful natural sentiments and inclinations,
insisting that stabilizing sexual unions through marriage is the only way to
generate optimal settings for child nurture. He looks at the problems that
arise when sex ratios are out of balance, when there are fewer men in
relation to women, or the other way around. This, it turns out, is a
particularly poignant problem in the African-American community, because so
many young black men are in prison or because they die at much higher rates
than black women from "disease, alcoholism, drug abuse, auto accidents,
homicide, and suicide." This lopsidedness in sex ratio offers a partial
explanation for the rise in fatherlessness in the black community.

But Wilson puts the heavy explanatory weight on the continuing legacy of
slavery. Many will find this a surprising move on Wilson's part. Claims
based on slavery's debilitating effects are most frequently a feature of
analysis from the left side of the political spectrum. Never one to
worry about ideological labels, however, Wilson utilizes the work of
sociologist Orlando Patterson to examine the horrific consequences of
"natal alienation" for those caught in the cruelty of the slave system.
The black man could not offer the mother of his child his name, or
security, or stability, or status of any kind. Wilson detects lingering
effects of this social horror in the sexually predatory features of
inner-city youth culture: A young man can dominate over a woman but
cannot provide for her or protect her.

What does Wilson propose that we, as a country, do? Bringing down the
divorce rate would help, as the evidence indicates that the first nation
increasingly exhibits pathologies related to fatherlessness that flow
directly from an exponential leap in divorce over the past four decades.
Wilson also worries about the speeded-up quality of contemporary life
and the paucity of time available to overworked parents for their
offspring; but he doesn't believe that full-time maternal employment has
harmful effects on children's development. He favors high-quality day
care -- who doesn't? -- noting, however, that behavior problems with
children rise if day care is inadequately staffed or if children are in
day care 35 hours a week or more. He believes that caregivers themselves
need support.

But the real gravamen of his argument is that mothers and fathers should
marry and stay married unless there is palpable abuse. Nothing compensates
for the loss of rock-bottom familial stability. A culture that was once
supportive of marriage now treats it as just another lifestyle choice rather
than as the normatively preferable way a decent culture creates a stable
environment for children.

We could try to alter the culture's assault on what is already a fragile
institution, Wilson insists, but he doesn't offer much that is concrete
here. He believes we are hard-wired to seek intimacy and to have children,
but not so hard-wired that we can't screw it up. All in all, he is
pessimistic about our prospects. He believes we have ignored the trouble
signs for so long that we have accustomed ourselves to a world of two
nations, with the first nation fearful of the second and the second fearful
of those in its own midst. This is not a happy picture.

Jean Bethke Elshtain is Laura Spelman Rockefeller Professor of Social
and Political Ethics at the University of Chicago and the author of
"Jane Addams and the Dream of American Democracy."

© 2002 The Washington Post Company

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