Love, Joy, Feminism
I recently came upon an article titled “We Can’t Let the Family Die,” via Ladies Against Feminism. After talking about the decline of marriage rates in the UK, the author, Kathy Gyngell, writes the following:
The fact remains that children who grow up with parents who aren’t married are more likely to experience the double whammy of fatherlessness and disruption. One in two cohabiting couples splits up before their child’s first birthday. Exposed to disinterested boyfriends and multiple carers, children in single and cohabiting families are more likely to suffer physical abuse, fail at school, play truant, suffer from depression and other mental illnesses or turn to drugs and alcohol than children whose parents are married. Their progress through life is less safe and less secure. In adulthood they are less able to cope or to form stable, caring and responsible relationships, so the problem is amplified down the generations.
The tragedy is that the cost of family breakdown has been known for so long and yet has been wilfully ignored by politicians of both parties. Since the early Seventies, the decline in marriage, the rise in divorce and in the number of couples cohabitating has reflected the liberalisation of the divorce laws, changes in public opinion and the rise of feminism. The Finer Report in 1974 was first to note its impact, concluding that the effects of marital breakdown on children were underachievement, delinquency and psychological damage.
I’m left to wonder why, once again, no one understands the difference between causation and correlation. Look, if a parent isn’t married, there are reasons for that. You can’t compare unmarried parent homes with married parent homes without keeping that in mind. Gyngell makes the common mistake of assuming that children in unmarried parent homes would do as well by various measures as children in married parent households if only their parents would get married or stay married, but this assumption is just that—a mistake.
Let’s use two couples as an example. Abby and Bob meet and start dating. They both have stable, well paying jobs, and they find that they work well together. They marry and start a family. Mandy and Owen meet and start dating around the same time. Owen can’t seem to hold down a job, and Mandy works in the service industry for minimum wage. They move in together, but decide to put off marriage until they’re more stable financially. Then their relationship turns south, and Owen begins drinking more heavily. When Owen hits Mandy during a fight, she leaves him. When she realizes that she’s pregnant, she decides to keep the baby and raise it on her own.
Abby and Bob’s children will likely do better in school than Mandy’s child, but does Gyngell really think that Mandy’s child would be better off if Mandy had married Owen? The factors that led Abby and Bob to marry—financial stability and personal compatibility—were not present for Mandy and Owen. Owen was a financial drain on Mandy, and he ultimately became abusive. Marriage would not have changed this, and had Mandy and Owen married, their child would have grown up in a financially troubled and abusive home. In other words, not only would Mandy and Owen’s child still not have done as well as Abby and Bob’s children in school had they married and stayed together, she might actually have been worse off.
It is true that children in married parent homes perform better than children in unmarried parent homes on a variety of measures. It is false, however, to assume that the solution is marrying all of those unmarried parents. This confuses correlation with causation. Just because poor performance in school, etc., correlates with unmarried parent homes does not mean it is caused by unmarried parent homes rather than by some other factor. Similarly, the fact that children in married parent homes tend to perform better than other children by various measures does not mean that children in unmarried parent homes would perform better if their parents married. People who condemn divorce rarely stop to ask whether it is better for a child to grow up in a “broken” home or in a home with parents who are constantly fighting and unhappy.
But let’s imagine, for a moment, that we do believe that growing up in married parent homes is best for children and that we should encourage married parent homes and discourage unmarried parent homes. How should we set about this? Well first, we should work to ensure that people can afford to marry—this might mean more job training programs, more funding for education, etc. We know already that child poverty correlates with lower educational outcomes, so we should also work to cut down on child poverty, which means providing more support to poor families (whether or not the parents are married—we’re thinking longterm here, remember). We should also find more ways to teach things like consent and healthy relationship skills, both in school and elsewhere. We should make couples therapy more accessible, perhaps even making it government-funded in an effort to provide couples with positive interpersonal skills.
Note that conservatives, who are the ones who tend to push marriage as a solution to various social ills, don’t tend to favor any of the above policy proposals. Instead, they tend to favor pressuring couples to marry through various avenues, and then pressuring married couples considering divorce into staying together. But if we want to produce more of the type of married parent homes that currently produce positive results, these are exactly the things we should be avoiding. Why? Because it is voluntary marriage that currently correlates with positive outcomes for children, not pressured or forced marriage. Creating more of these married parent homes requires reproducing the contexts that lead couples to voluntarily choose to marry.
Or better yet, how about we simply do what we can to improve people’s mental and economic wellbeing and then let them decide whether to marry? What if, instead of presenting marriage as a solution to current social problems, we instead tackle those social problems themselves? We should ensure that our policies don’t discourage people from marrying, yes, but we should also ensure that our policies don’t pressure people into marriages they would prefer to avoid. Children don’t benefit from having their children forced to marry and stay married, they benefit from having loving caregivers and some degree of financial stability. Marriage may often accompany those things, but it does not create them.
By the way, the best place to go for more information on marriage, children, and poverty is Family Inequality, a blog by sociologist Philip Cohen.
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