Today on Stepfamilies/Delaware Marriage Savers/Staten Island/Horn in Ireland - 10/05

[Smartmarriages& #174; Mailing List]

- RESET YOUR VCR: TODAY SHOW SERIES ON STEPFAMILIES
- MARRIAGE SAVERS IN DELAWARE
- STATEN ISLAND MOCHA MOMS WORKSHOP SAT OCT 22
- WADE HORN IN IRELAND
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- RESET YOUR VCR: TODAY SHOW SERIES ON STEPFAMILIES
Last week the Today Show featured Elizabeth Marquardt on children of
divorce.  This week they are presenting a series on life in Stepfamilies.
Francesca Adler-Baeder will be one of the featured experts. I know many
Smart Marriages Conference attendees are in her fan club and will want to
see her. Right now she's scheduled for Friday.  Series expected to air in
the 9-10am segment. I'll send updates if I get them. You can also focus on
stepfamilies at Smart Marriages in Atlanta where we'll feature a Stepfamily
track. - diane  

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- MARRIAGE SAVERS IN DELAWARE

Clergy, lay leaders invited to conference on marriage
The News Journal (Delaware)
Oct 15, 2005 

Can clergy and lay leaders create stronger marriages in Delaware and the
Eastern Shore of Maryland?

That's a question underlying a conference from 8 a.m.-4:30 p.m. Thursday Oct
20th at the Delaware Technical & Community College Conference Center on
Dover's Terry campus.

Columnist Michael McManus of Potomac, Md., is one of the speakers. With his
wife Harriet, McManus created Marriage Savers, a mentoring program that
pairs a couple thinking of marriage with those already successfully living
as husband and wife.

In addition, McManus has been an advocate of community marriage policies.
Under these, clergy in towns and cities agree to premarital education, such
as mentoring, prior to marrying couples.

Such programs are aimed at lowering divorce rates, said Robert P. Hall,
executive director of the Delaware Ecumenical Council on Children and
Families.

-----------
****Mike and Harriett will present their two-day Marriage Savers training on
June 21 & 22 at the Smart Marriages Conference.  Learn how to recruit and
train marriage mentors and create a Marriage Savers Congregation.  This
institute will anchor a NEW FEATURE at Smart Marriages Atlanta: a full TRACK
of Marriage Mentoring workshops.  Lots of exciting Marriage Mentoring
materials published this year and so many requests for more Mentoring
workshops on your conference evaluations.   - diane

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- STATEN ISLAND MOCHA MOMS WORKSHOP SAT OCT 22
"Loving Ourselves, Loving Our Men"
Sat, Oct 22, noon - 3pm
For info and to rsvp: 718-818-8100
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- WADE HORN IN IRELAND

Interesting to see how others digest Wade Horn's message.
- diane 
 
The Irish Times
October 15, 2005
Most children thrive in a stable marriage
By Breda O'Brien

There is nothing unusual about a representative of the US federal government
meeting Irish civil servants or cabinet ministers. However, my antenna went
up when I heard that Wade Horn was in town for that purpose last week, and I
was delighted to get a chance to interview him.

Dr Horn is a man with a mission, and that mission is to ensure that as many
children as possible grow up in intact, two-parent, married families. He
believes that on average, children in stable marriages do better on a whole
slew of social science indicators than children of lone parents, whether
those parents are never married or divorced or separated.

That is not to say that lone parents cannot do a fine job, as patently they
both can and do, but that on balance it is easier to achieve a good outcome
with married and involved parents.

Given the sensitivities, it is intriguing that the Irish Government would be
seen to be even dipping a toe in these particular waters. Mind you, there
has been an undercurrent of unease that social welfare policy was actually
preventing people setting up stable two-parent families, hardly an intended
or desirable outcome.

Dr Horn has a neat line in self-deprecation. In the US government, he says,
you can tell how important a person is by how short his or her title is: the
president, the vice-president. He then points out that his own title is
assistant secretary of health and human services for children and families.
Be that as it may, although he oversees 65 social programmes, he has
attracted an extraordinary amount of attention for just one of them, the
Healthy Marriage Initiative (HMI).

This funds non-governmental organisations, including faith-based
organisations, to deliver marriage education and skills-training on a
strictly voluntary basis, primarily to lowincome and at-risk populations.

The Bush administration intends to spend $300 million annually on the HMI.
The sums involved are relatively small. Dr Horn's oversees an annual budget
of $46 billion.

The HMI is not uncontroversial. Some people oppose it because they believe
the government has no right to intervene in people's relationships, to which
Dr Horn replies that the government is already heavily involved in
supporting one-parent families, so why not spend a tiny fraction of the
budget on supporting marriage?

Others doubt it will have any effect, because single-parent families are
often lacking in education and worthwhile job prospects, both of which are
significant obstacles to marriage.

In response, Dr Horn asks whether stable marriages are to be reserved for
well-off people? Ultimately, he says cheerfully, it does not matter whether
individual initiatives succeed.

What matters is rescuing the marriage word, and making it a respectable part
of the culture once again. He says that there is no precedent in history of
getting more of something that people agree is good, by pretending it
doesn't exist. For 20 years, the US government was afraid to mention
marriage. Culturally, that spread a message that marriage was somehow an
embarrassing anachronism. That is no longer the case.

There is now wide agreement across the political spectrum in the US that
marriage works best for children. Of course, some social scientists argue
that it is the quality of the relationship between parents and children that
matters, not the family form. However, from left and right, there is a
chorus of voices saying that marriage matters.

In 1994 president Bill Clinton lamented the decline of marriage, warning:
"We cannot renew our country when within a decade more than half of the
children will be born into families where there has been no marriage."

Something similar has been happening in academia. For example, Sara
McLanahan, herself a lone parent, and a respected sociology researcher, set
out to prove conclusively that it was not marriage, but poverty, that was
the primary determinant of outcomes for children. Instead, her research led
her to the conclusion that marriage matters. Not that poverty does not, but
family form is intimately connected to poverty. Children raised by
never-married parents, principally mothers, are at far more risk of poverty
than those in married families.

Although Dr Horn may have been invited to Ireland by the Government, it is
hard to imagine any Irish political administration embracing the idea of
promoting marriage as an ideal. Firstly, we are aware that until all too
recently lone parents were stigmatised and made to feel responsible for all
the ills of society. No one wishes to return to that. We have not yet found
a language that allows us to talk about the value of marriage in a way that
does not appear to relegate unmarried parents to second-class status again.

This debate progressed in the United States by focusing on fatherhood. Do
fathers matter? On average, is it better for children to grow up in a house
where their dad loves them and loves their mother, and is committed to both
them and her for life?

Few people would argue with that. Lone parenthood is rarely a conscious
choice. Much more often, it is a less than desired outcome which people get
on with and make the best of, out of love for their children.

What we need in Ireland is a recognition that when it comes to best outcomes
for children, it is not a stand-off between those who believe family form is
the most significant factor, and those who believe that poverty is most
damaging. If we are serious about solving child poverty, we need to work on
providing education for the most disadvantaged, that maximises their chances
of finding satisfying work.

Education is one of the single biggest predictors as to whether people will
delay childbearing until they are in a stable or married relationship.

We also need a generous social welfare system that provides a safety net,
without disincentives to marriage.

Difficult? Sure. But it was difficult to move beyond stigmatising lone
parents, particularly lone mothers.

Now we need to find ways of removing the stigma attached to saying that most
adults and most children thrive in happy, married relationships, and trying
to maximise the chances of that happening.
 
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