Marriage Gap Grows

Marriage is a human universal and a core cultural institution that orders society and greatly benefits children. No matter how feminists and other liberals try to spin it, children are better off living with their own married parents.

For example, not only is a residential father more emotionally and financially invested in his children than a non-residential father, children living with their own married parents are less likely to be poor, do drugs, get pregnant outside marriage, or end up in jail. Children living with both their parents do better in school, have fewer behavior problems, and report higher levels of psychological well-being.

Despite these and other benefits of marriage to children, Middle America is turning its collective back on the institution. According to a new report from the National Marriage Project, the 58 percent of Americans with a high school diploma and possibly some college (the “moderately educated”) are increasingly having babies out of wedlock, reporting lower marriage quality, and getting divorced.

In fact, these moderately educated Americans are starting to resemble the poor, where childrearing and marriage typically are disconnected.

In contrast, reports “When Marriage Disappears: The Retreat from Marriage in Middle America,” (108 pages PDF), the 30 percent of Americans with at least a college degree (the “highly educated”) are more likely to embrace marriage, bear children only after marriage, and attend weekly church services.

Thirty years ago, only two percent of babies born to highly educated mothers were outside marriage; today it’s six percent. Thirty years ago, moderately educated mothers had babies out of wedlock at the rate of 13 percent. Today, 44 percent of their babies are born out of wedlock. Fifty-four percent of babies born to the least-educated mothers are outside marriage.

“The vast majority of American adults aspire to marriage,” said sociologist W. Bradford Wilcox and author of the lead essay in the report, “and children are much more likely to thrive if they are raised in a married hope with their own mother and father. Unfortunately, marriage has now fallen out of reach for millions of adults and children in Middle America.”

The marriage gap between the moderately educated and the highly educated has a tremendous impact on the life changes of children. Senior Manhattan Institute fellow Kay Hymowitz discussed the marriage gap between better educated mothers and less educated single mothers in Marriage and Caste in America: Separate and Unequal Families in a Post-Marital Age. She described the differences in childrearing between the college-educated and uneducated. Despite the 1960s-era “free love” movement and a-woman-needs-a-man-like-a-fish-needs-a-bicycle-style feminism, better educated women continued to marry before having children.

Better educated mothers tend to be dedicated to what Hymowitz calls The Mission, “the careful nurturing of their children’s cognitive, emotional, social development,” with the goal of producing children with better life outcomes and do well in school, go to college, marry, and have children. She calls it common sense (backed up by research) that women have a better chance of fulfilling The Mission if they have a husband.

The marriage gap between whites and blacks has existed for a long time. Family instability arguably is the most important issue among blacks. More than 70 percent of black babies are born out-of-wedlock. A mere third of black children grow up living with their own married parents.

The link between marriage and successful life outcomes for children can’t be downplayed or ignored. “Marriage plays a central role in securing the American Dream for countless Americans,” Wilcox said.” Adults and children fortunate enough to live in an intact, married family are much more likely to succeed in school and the workplace, to acquire a home of their own, and to experience upward mobility.”

Hymowitz goes even further to say the founders saw marriage as necessary to the republic. American marriage, different from the arranged marriage of old Europe, would reflect the principles of liberty and self-government. But self-government also meant self-reliance, and children need to be socialized and educated to function in the new political order.

Among the report’s recommendations to narrow the marriage gap between the moderately educated and the highly educated is to pursue public policies that reconnect marriage to childrearing and “strengthen religious and civic institutions that lend our lives meaning, direction, and a measure of regard for our neighbors—not to mention our spouses.”

While politicians tend to pit the Haves against the Have-Nots, stirring class envy doesn’t improve children’s lives. The research is mounting, and the results are solid. Family instability is correlated with poverty and all kind of social pathologies. Marriage isn’t obsolete, and neither is what’s best for children of any race or any income level.

**Typos? Will fix later!

Read more at La Shawn Barber’s Corner