Must Read - Marriage Debate at Cato - 1/30/08

[Smartmarriages]

- THE MARRIAGE GAP
- AGAINST FAMILY FATALISM
- THE FULL DEBATE CAN BE FOUND AT:

I've been remiss in not getting this out to the list. However, the
conference brochure is now to press, so I can begin some serious catching
up.  

There is a must-read MARRIAGE DEBATE taking place on the Cato Institute
website ­ a lead essay by Stephanie Coontz with reaction essays by Kay
Hymowitz, two economists, and Norval Glenn.

I encourage you to print the entire debate, but I'm going to reprint the
Norval Glenn and Kay Hymowitz pieces. Norval, because he makes our case for
prevention and Kay because she so clearly makes the case for the growing
Marriage Gap and the need to act. Kay received the Smart Marriages 2007
Impact Award for her book *Marriage and Caste in America* and many of you
heard her keynote in Denver. I encourage you to buy enough copies of her
book to give to all the policy makers and foundations in your community
(order from $10.95 on amazon http://tinyurl.com/2tnqtu)

Also, from the Glenn essay this reminder of WHY it is so IMPORTANT to help
presidential and other candidates understand what Marriage Education is
(and, isn't) and what it has to offer:

> Space limitations preclude a detailed discussion here of the marriage
> education movement and the associated national and state healthy marriage
> initiatives, but I predict that they will be at least moderately successful
> unless the marriage initiatives fail to survive the current wave of political
> change. If moderate liberals can get over feeling that they must oppose
> anything associated with the Bush Administration and will inform themselves of
> what the marriage initiatives are really doing ‹ which doesn¹t include trying
> to recreate the fifties family ‹ they will find a lot to like about those
> programs and are likely to support them.

- THE MARRIAGE GAP
By Kay S. Hymowitz
January 16th, 2008
Reaction Essay

Let me begin with a slightly different description than the one given by
Stephanie Coontz of where we are marriage-wise in the United States today.
She alludes to the fact that almost half of all marriages end in divorce.
She also points out that close to 40% of children ­ 38% ‹ are born to
unmarried mothers. What she does not mention is that there is a yawning
class divide hidden inside these numbers. The large majority of individuals
who are divorced or who are never-married parents are low-income and lacking
a college, and in many cases a high school, degree. The large majority of
middle-class men and women, on the other hand, marry before having children
and stay married while raising them. When she assures us that marriage is
not on the verge of extinction, she¹s right ­ if you¹re white and went to
college.

This marriage gap, as I call it, has profound implications for our
political, social and economic prospects for one simple reason: overall,
children do better in life if they are raised by their own married parents.
Believe me, social scientists didn¹t want to reach this conclusion and
throughout the 1970¹s and 80¹s they blithely assured us it couldn¹t be true.
But as research methods have become more sophisticated and as studies have
poured in, there has been no escaping it: even controlling for race, income,
and maternal education, children raised by single mothers are more prone to
school failure, delinquency, emotional problems, alcohol and drug abuse,
teen pregnancy, and becoming single parents themselves. Put together these
two facts ­ a breakdown of marriage among low-income men and women and worse
outcomes for children of single parents ­ and what you have is a recipe for
entrenched, trans-generational poverty, inequality, racial disparities (the
black extramarital birth rate is over 70%, almost twice as high as the
national average), reduced social and economic mobility, and ­ libertarians
take note! ­ demands for government taxes to fund programs to correct the
mess.

The fact that even in an age that celebrates family diversity kids are
better off growing up with their married parents points us to the glaring
omission in Coontz¹s thumbnail history of marriage: children. She states
that ³marriage has been about picking the right in-laws²; wealthy families
sought advantageous connections and the middle class sought respectability.
This thesis is like confusing shopping for a car with transportation. It
vaults past the obvious fact that unless you had a son and your chosen
in-laws had a daughter or vice versa, there was no picking to be done.
Evolution has presented societies with three fundamental problems: one,
humans¹ favorite activity, sexual intercourse, leads to babies; two, those
babies are helpless for years, leaving their mothers in need of help if both
are to survive; three, men have a tenuous tie to those babies. Marriage was
the institution designed to solve this predicament; as the anthropologist
Malinowski best described, it tied a man to a woman and their children.

Yes, marriage has had other social purposes. Depending on the culture, it
provided companionship, it organized kinship groups, it regulated
inheritance of property; as reproduction-is-basic-to-marriage skeptics often
observe, many cultures have allowed older women, generally widows, to marry
if they had enough wealth to attract a suitor. (Less liberal cultures
declared them useless and had them burn themselves on their husbands¹
funeral pyres.) Yet there were many other conceivable ways to regulate
property or provide companionship; it was the inevitability of children in a
sexual union that made marriage the universal human institution that it
became.

If this theory is correct, then Coontz¹s analysis of what happened after
³the Sixties² or what Francis Fukuyama calls ³The Great Disruption,² also
misses the big picture. No question about it, Coontz is correct that love ‹
actually I would put it more generally as personal fulfillment ‹ became more
central to our understanding of marriage. No question also that after The
Disruption people began marrying later than they had in earlier decades,
that they starting living together outside of marriage, and that more
decided to opt out of wedded bliss altogether. And yes, women¹s liberation,
affluence, and technological advances created the conditions that enabled
these choices. But the chasm that separates the post-sixties and the rest of
human history is the belief that marriage and childbearing /childrearing
could go their separate ways. Working mothers are not new; marrying at later
ages is not new. A large population of single mothers and fatherless
children? Now, that¹s new.

This history is worth so many pixels because Coontz¹s presumption that
marriage is not fundamentally linked with reproduction and childrearing has
become commonplace in American society. In surveys half of young women say
they might consider having a child outside of marriage. Courts are putting
the idea into law. Yet here we are almost 40 years after the
children-are-one-thing-and-marriage-is-another revolution began and even
with mass affluence that relieves us of some of evolution¹s burden by making
single motherhood more economically viable, we find that kids growing up
with their married parents are still in a better place in life¹s
sweepstakes. Doesn¹t that suggest that the revolutionaries were ‹ are ‹
missing something?

Now, as Coontz observes, this is an international revolution. In much of
Western Europe, out of wedlock childbearing is even more commonplace than in
the United States; in 2007 more than half of French babies were born to
unmarried women. Growing affluence, women¹s independence, a global media,
the de-stigmatization of sex outside of marriage, and increasing
expectations for self-fulfillment are accompanying skyrocketing divorce
rates in more unlikely places like Japan, China, and the former countries of
the Soviet Union, though out-of-wedlock childbearing remains rare, likely
because it constitutes the most radical rejection of human custom.

But I would suggest that the de-linking of marriage and childrearing is a
particular dilemma in the United States for reasons that libertarians should
find compelling. In America, marriage has been inextricably entwined with
national ideals of political and economic freedom. Following the theories of
the Enlightenment and John Locke, the founders rejected the clannish,
patriarchal arrangements of the old country and placed their hopes in what
we might call republican marriage. The self-choosing, nuclear couple was to
be an economically self-sufficient unit; it was also supposed to socialize
the next generation of independent, upstanding republicans, an endeavor that
the founders understood to be labor-intensive. Contemporary affluence does
not ease the inherent difficulty of raising children in America; in fact,
given the intense educational preparation required for success in a
knowledge economy, it has made raising kids harder. The founders certainly
wouldn¹t be surprised to hear that children growing up with their married
parents are more likely to graduate from high school and to go to and
graduate from college than their single-parented peers. The marriage gap, in
other words, produces a human capital gap.

Coontz says we ³know a lotŠ about how to help every family build on its
strengths, minimize its weaknesses, and raise children more successfullyŠ²
Actually, we don¹t. The United States has spent billions trying to prop up
fatherless families through welfare payments, nutrition programs, early
childhood education, Title 1, child support, and a teeming, maddening family
court system. We don¹t have much to show for it. I have no idea whether it
is possible to restore our understanding of the core meaning of marriage, or
to put it in more concrete terms, to increase the percentage of American
children growing with their married parents. This is a cultural problem and
it¹s hard to see that outside warnings from the bully pulpit, government can
do very much about it. But I do know that a future that accepts the
separation of marriage and childrearing will severely challenge some of
America¹s core ideals, not least of them, limited government.

- AGAINST FAMILY FATALISM
By Norval D. Glenn
January 21st, 2008
Reaction Essay

With the publication of The Way We Never Were in 1992, Stephanie Coontz
became a major spokesperson for the family-change-is-irreversible school of
thought. That school includes the view that attempts to retard, stop, or
reverse any major aspect of recent family change are futile and thus are at
best a waste of effort and at worst downright harmful because they tend to
stigmatize persons in single-parent and other increasingly prevalent kinds
of families. There are different forms of the irreversibility thesis, and
Coontz¹s 1990s version of it was one of the less extreme ones, in that
Coontz acknowledged that there have been some distinctly negative
consequences of family change and took a less absolutist view of
irreversibility than did some other commentators. However, she, in common
with others of the irreversibility school, argued that the only reasonable
way to deal with any negative consequences of family change was to adapt
other institutions to the newly prevalent family forms and to ameliorate
those consequences by extending the services of the welfare state. A major
part of Coontz¹s book was devoted to attacking alleged nostalgia for the
American family of the 1950s and an alleged desire of many people to
recreate that family in the present.

I have major problems with the family-change-is-irreversible school of
thought and with Coontz¹s 1990s writings, and those are relevant here
because near the end of the generally sensible essay by Coontz in this
exchange, there is a reprise of some of the more questionable aspects of The
Way We Never Were.

For instance, after apparently moving away from a hard-line position that we
should do nothing to try to reverse any of the important recent trends in
marriage, and after acknowledging that some of those trends have reversed
already, she writes,

    The right research question today is not ³what kind of family do we wish
people lived in.² Instead, we must ask ³what do we know about how to help
every family build on its strengths, minimize its weaknesses, and raise
children more successfully?²

To me, putting these different questions in opposition to one another, as
though they were mutually exclusive, makes no sense and is inconsistent with
what Coontz says earlier. Is there only one right research question? Why not
ask both? To follow Coontz¹s advice is to put all of one¹s policy-relevant
eggs in the ³cure² basket and none in the ³prevention² basket. To ignore
family structure, as Coontz apparently would, is to ignore the huge amount
of recent social scientific evidence, from hundreds of studies, that family
structure matters, and matters to an important extent, especially for
children but for adults as well. This evidence, while not absolutely
conclusive, is about as nearly conclusive as social scientific evidence ever
is, and it is more nearly conclusive than the evidence for any of the causal
conclusions that Coontz draws from the social scientific literature. (Her
conclusion about the effects of late marriage is based on the findings of
only one study.)

The fatalistic position concerning family change that Coontz apparently
still embraces is a curious one for liberals to take, because they do not
take it in regard to most other kinds of change that can be attributed
ultimately to such master trends as industrialization, urbanization, and
economic development. Take the case of climate change and environmental
degradation ‹ changes attributable ultimately to the same major influences
that led to recent family changes. Some commentators do say that those
changes are part and parcel of economic development and should be adapted to
rather than resisted, but I know of no liberals who take that position.
While acknowledging that there is no pre-industrial environmental Golden Age
to which we can return, liberals generally believe that some of the negative
environmental trends ensuing from economic growth can be and should be
slowed, stopped, or reversed. A reasonable question is why liberals don¹t
consistently take a similar stance in regard to family change.

A second criticism I have of the final paragraphs of Coontz¹s essay is that
Coontz reverts to her old practice of attacking straw men ‹ that is, of
criticizing positions that very few people hold. Her entire major emphasis
on alleged nostalgia in The Way We Never Were is of that nature, not because
there isn¹t considerable nostalgia, especially among persons who experienced
the fifties and had a reasonably good family life then, but because the
nostalgia usually doesn¹t translate into the belief that we can or should
try to recreate the family of the fifties in the present. No sophisticated
family scholar or commentator could take that position, but Coontz, at least
by implication, attributed that view to persons who simply wanted to reverse
or retard some specific family trends that they perceived to be destructive.
I¹ve spent a great deal of time examining survey data collected in the 1980s
and early 1990s to see if there is evidence of widespread adherence in the
general public of that time to the goal of recreating the fifties family,
and I¹ve found no such evidence. It seems to me, therefore, that Coontz used
an inordinate amount of space to criticize a position that was rather
uncommon. In the essay in this exchange, Coontz continues her straw man
tradition in such references as those to ³fantasies about returning to a
mythical Golden Age of marriage in the past² and ³the assumption that all
long-term commitments and care-giving obligations should be or can be
organized through marriage.² Who has the fantasies, and who makes the cited
assumption? I¹m sure that examples could be found, but I¹m equally sure that
their numbers are small.

A third problem I have with the Coontz essay is its implication that the
historical evidence leads logically to the hard-line
family-change-should-not-be-resisted position with which the essay seems to
conclude. It is of course true that no exact configuration of family
characteristics that existed in any society in the past is going to be
replicated in any society in the future and that it is impossible to impose
a pre-industrial or early industrial family system on a post-industrial
society. However, there are numerous historical examples of reversals in
specific marriage and family trends, including, for instance, in trends
toward either permissive or restrictive sex norms. In recent decades there
has been a resurgence of the ideal of marital fidelity in American society,
and while I suspect that Coontz is correct in not expecting a similar
resurgence of the ideal of premarital chastity, even that is not
inconceivable. Coontz talks about the recent increase in the success of
marriages of well-educated persons in this country but does not mention that
anyone who took seriously even the relatively soft version of the
family-change-is-irreversible thesis in The Way We Never Were would not have
expected such a change. History tells us, among other things, to expect the
unexpected.

My view of the future of marriage in this country is not radically different
from Coontz¹s but is more optimistic. Coontz mentions some favorable trends,
such as a decline in divorce, during the past decade or so but seems to
think that they will not go much farther. I¹m beginning to think that they
probably will. No one knows for sure why marriages have recently become more
successful among highly educated Americans, but there is at least tentative
evidence of a re-institutionalization of marriage at that level of society.
The old norms based on a rigid gender division of labor are gone, but new
egalitarian norms have emerged that are in some ways just as constraining.
As previously mentioned, the ideal of marital fidelity has staged a
comeback, as has the ideal of marital permanence and even the once rapidly
disappearing view that under certain circumstances unhappily married parents
should stay together for the sake of their children. These attitudes are now
considerably more prevalent among well-educated persons than among others,
but they are likely to be disseminated downward to the lower socioeconomic
levels where, in spite of negative economic influences on marriage, they
should have more than a negligible effect. Space limitations preclude a
detailed discussion here of the marriage education movement and the
associated national and state healthy marriage initiatives, but I predict
that they will be at least moderately successful unless the marriage
initiatives fail to survive the current wave of political change. If
moderate liberals can get over feeling that they must oppose anything
associated with the Bush Administration and will inform themselves of what
the marriage initiatives are really doing ‹ which doesn¹t include trying to
recreate the fifties family ‹ they will find a lot to like about those
programs and are likely to support them.

Overall, the essay by Coontz shows that she has modified her views in
response to very recent trends in marriage, and has done so more than have
some of the more dogmatic adherents of the family-change-is-irreversible
school. However, I don¹t think that she has modified her position enough.

Norval D. Glenn is the Ashbel Smith Professor of Sociology and the Stiles
Professor of American Studies at the University of Texas at Austin
 
- THE FULL DEBATE CAN BE FOUND AT:
 http://www.cato-unbound.org/2008/01/14/stephanie-coontz/the-future-of-marri
age/

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