The Ring Thing - Mother's Day - 5/2007

[Smartmarriages]

- THE RING THING

The Ring Thing
We must have marriage.
May 11, 2007 
National Review On-line
By W. Bradford Wilcox


This Sunday, neighbors, husbands, and especially children should lift a
glass to the mothers who have managed to get and stay married to the
fathers of their children. For, despite the fact that single motherhood [
http://article.nationalreview.com/print/%28http:/www.theatlantic.com/doc/200
509/gottlieb
]never seems to go out of style with the media, motherhood typically works
best - for our nation's neighborhoods, children, and even most moms - with
a wedding ring.

 You will not read any of this in the New York Times, [
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/19/magazine/319dad.html?ex=1178942400&en=fb46
9898d2974262&ei=5070
]which seems to think sperm-donor-dads are just fine, but married mothers
serve our nation's neighborhoods, children, and even themselves better
than any of the dizzying array of alternatives to married motherhood. This
truth was abundantly clear to me after surveying the social-scientific
literature on marriage and child well-being with 15 other family scholars
for a recent report, [ http://www.americanvalues.org/html/r-wmm.html ]Why
Marriage Matters: Twenty-Six Conclusions from the Social Sciences.

 Take crime. Mothers who manage to get and stay married are much less
likely to produce boys who end up terrorizing playgrounds, parks, and
little old ladies walking home from the grocery store. One recent
Princeton study found that boys who grew up in an intact, married family
were half as likely to end up in prison as young adults. After studying
murder and robbery rates in our nation's cities, Harvard sociologist
Robert Sampson observed, "Family structure is one of the strongest, if not
the strongest, predictor of variations in urban violence across cities in
the United States." This is why neighbors should thank the married mothers
on their block.

 Or take psychological well-being. Children who are fortunate to grow up
with a married mother and father are much less likely to find themselves
in serious emotional trouble. By contrast, children who grow up without
their father are significantly more likely to suffer from depression. And
for some children, it gets much worse than depression. In the last
half-century, suicide has more than tripled among teens and young adults;
one recent Harvard study found the single "most important explanatory
variable" behind this disturbing rise in youth suicide was the "increased
share of youth living in homes with a divorced parent." This is why
children should thank their mothers for getting and staying married.

 Or take a mother's relationship with her sons and daughters. No one is
surprised to learn that divorced and never-married fathers typically have
poor relationships with their fathers. After all, most nonresidential
fathers do not even see their children once a week. But even mothers are
much more likely to have poor relationships with their children when dad
is not in the picture. One study found that young adults whose parents
were divorced were nearly twice as likely to report that they had a poor
relationship with their mother compared to young adults who were raised in
an intact, married family (30 versus 16 percent). This is why mothers, who
usually make great efforts to have good relationships with their children,
should also make every effort to get and stay married.

 This is not to say that mothers should endure abusive or adulterous
relationships, nor is it to devalue the heroic sacrifices that many single
mothers make on behalf of their children. (Full disclosure: I think my own
mother did a wonderful job raising me and my sister all on her own.)
Indeed, the best social-scientific evidence suggests that children do
better when their parents part ways if their relationship is characterized
by serious physical or emotional abuse.

 But the sad fact of the matter is that most divorces - two-thirds, [
http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog/AMAGER.html ]according to a recent book
by Penn State sociologists Paul Amato and Alan Booth - do not involve such
abuse. All too many divorcing spouses "grow apart," take an interest in an
attractive coworker, or decide that their personal happiness is more
important than the happiness of their spouse and children. And, according
to Amato and Booth, these divorces are precisely the ones that are most
devastating to the children who have to endure them.

 Why does marriage matter so much for children? Typically, two parents
bring more social and economic resources to the parenting enterprise than
does one parent. Two parents offer one another mutual support,
encouragement, and relief when a child is difficult, disobedient, or
depressed. For instance, a husband can step in and relieve a wife who has
grown angry or exhausted with her children. This, by the way, is one
reason married moms are more likely to have children who report good
relationships with them; because of the financial, practical, and
emotional support they receive from their husbands, married moms are more
likely to be affectionate and authoritative - and less likely to be
abusive - than are single mothers.

 Marriage also binds children to their fathers, who usually find it very
difficult to maintain consistent and positive relationships with their
children without the support and encouragement of their children's mother.
Finally, children who are fortunate to have married parents who are
considerate of and committed to one another enjoy a measure of emotional
security - not to mention a model of adult love that gives them hope for
their own marital future - that their peers in broken homes do not.

 So, this Mother's Day, lift a glass to dear old Mom, and lift it
especially high if she honored the vows she made on her wedding day.

 - W. Bradford Wilcox, assistant professor of sociology at the University
of Virginia, is a fellow at the [ http://www.winst.org/index.php
]Witherspoon Institute.
 National Review Online -
http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=ODIyNDE3OGZhZTk0Y2YyYjNkMGEyZWJkMWRiN2M
5NjQ=


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