Scholar Andrew Cherlin wrote at Bloomsberg News on Christmas Day (and I’m just catching up):
A large U.S. government-funded experiment to encourage low-income parents to marry, a legacy of the George W. Bush administration’s Healthy Marriage Initiative, has just fallen flat.
Even if you were a skeptic all along of the wisdom of the government promoting marriage, as I was, this isn’t good news. For the children of these unmarried couples, it is bad news: It portends years of unstable, complicated home lives. The apparent failure of marriage promotion makes the task of finding other ways to help them even more urgent.
In 2005, Congress authorized $150 million a year for promoting healthy marriage and responsible fatherhood. The most visible project was a social experiment to help young, unmarried couples who were expecting a child, or who had just had one, stay together and marry.
The Administration for Children and Families engaged well- known and dedicated researchers and clinicians to design new “relationship skills” programs to improve communication, avoid conflict and build trust — an approach that had previously seemed to help middle-class couples remain together. With high hopes, it hired a leading research firm, Mathematica Policy Research, to recruit about 5,000 couples in eight sites across the nation.
Half of the couples, chosen at random, were offered the program and some additional services, at an average cost of $11,000 a couple. The other half weren’t offered the program and served as a control group. Both sets of couples were followed for three years.
The agency released the long-awaited final results on Nov. 30: Relationship-skills education had failed to contain the forces that pull young, unmarried couples apart. Couples who were offered the program were no more likely to have remained together or to have married than were those who weren’t offered it.
Nor was there a difference in relationship quality between the two groups. Only the Oklahoma site showed some positive effects. Attendance was not good: Just 55 percent of couples in the program ever showed up for a relationship-skills session. Even among those who did, there was little evidence that the program had an effect.
Like many other liberal social scientists, I’m uncomfortable with having government favor one form of family life over others. Yet I also am convinced that children do best in stable family environments and that repeated parental breakups and “repartnering” can be harmful to them. Stable families don’t have to involve a marriage, but in the U.S. (unlike, say, Sweden) cohabiting relationships don’t last very long. Marriage is the way that most American parents maintain stable bonds.
Only 57 percent of couples in the program were still romantically involved after three years. Many of their children will see a succession of parents’ new partners moving in and out of their homes. Some will grow up in complex families with full- siblings, step-siblings, half-siblings, parents and parent- figures spread across several households.
Yet the lesson of the marriage-promotion experiment shouldn’t be to simply give up trying to encourage stable relationships. There are broad hints elsewhere in American society about where we should go next. While marriage has been in decline among the poor and the working class, it has strengthened among the college-educated middle class. more
To see other recent contributions to this debate, see the new issue of State of Our Unions including the essay by Theodora Ooms and Alan Hawkins (begins on page 47 of the pdf), the symposium we recently hosted with an ideologically diverse range of a dozen scholars and opinion leaders at FamilyScholars, a new piece by Lois Collins at the Deseret News, and a new interview with Brad Wilcox by Kathryn Jean Lopez at NRO.
Categories: General, Marriage, Marriage and Money
See this comment by Scott Stanley http://slidingvsdeciding.blogspot.com/2013/01/family-stability-and-relationship.html
One of the things Cherlin points out that I’ve been thinking about as well is that we need to learn something from where the (rare) brighter spots are: Why are college educated people doing so much better at reducing divorce and avoiding unmarried childbearing?
The first thing I’d like to discover is whether or not its true this segment of the population has the same attitudes and values–i.e. has been equally as affected by the sexual revolution. College educated people are now more religious than the rest of the population, so its not clear to me this is true.
But I agree that work and status are disciplining sex in this group in a way that is probably unique and important. We work harder, longer hours than ever before. You can’t really cat around, or have out of wedlock children, and sustain high status under postmodern conditions.
Interesting
“How globalization tamed the sexual revolution,” or something like that
If CDC statistics are accurate, college-educated people participate enthusiastically in the “sexual revolution” (in quotes because it’s an outdated term). They aren’t chaste before marriage. They are more likely to use birth control, and more effective means of birth control. College-educated men are considerably more pro-birth control than non-college-educated men—more likely to use condoms, more likely to cooperate with their partner’s use of birth control, less likely to sabotage their partner’s birth control.
La Lubu, I don’t think the CDC collects “attitude” surveys. Just behavioral ones.
My point is that it is possible more conservative values towards sex and marriage and divorce and unmarried childbearing could be part of the reason why college-educated Americans have a stronger marriage culture. Or not, I don’t know.
But obviously no demographic is untouched by the sexual revolution in attitudes or behavior.
I wasn’t suggesting that.
The term, while perhaps old-fashioned, can hardly be archaic while those of us who lived through it are not yet dead, nor collecting social security. : )
My point is that behavior is the only thing that matters. “Attitudes” that are not expressed in behavior are irrelevant. The entire “red family/blue family” divide is predicated on behavior, not on what people imagine (or would like to imagine) their behavior to be.
My ish with “sexual revolution” is that the term is often used incorrectly. What is/was revolutionary isn’t that people have more sex, or that they have more sex before marriage (really—any comparison of birth records with marriage records shows that sex before marriage has always been a very popular activity). No, what’s revolutionary is that women can control our fertility.
College-educated people marry later—they finish school first. This adds years of maturity and greater life experience, which is quite helpful in maintaining a relationship. It’s also helpful in discerning who would be a good marital partner, as opposed to who is a fun friend-but not “marriage material”. It also gives people a chance to gain some personal stability (settle into their “real job”; lay down roots in their new location) before complicating their life with another’s (sometimes conflicting) needs.
yeah on that we disagree. Attitudes affect a lot of things, including behavior. Behavioral measures are also crude–by necessity.
I’m not saying not the most important or useful, they just don’t capture everything that matters.
To give you an example La Lubu: A personal who commits adultery believing it is a wrong is different from a person who believes marriage does not requires fidelity.
The behavior matters, but the values/attitudes also matter.
In the end they are quite likely to affect behavior–if not hte adultery the response to the adultery.
LaLubu – I think there have been some significant changes in social behaviors and attitudes from the sexual revolution.
I think the number of partners a woman has in her lifetime has increased. The attitude towards women who have pre-marital sex has changed profoundly. What we talk about publicly has changed. The percentage of people who have participated in various acts has changed. The age at which young women first have sex has gone down.
The attitudes towards and treatment of children born outside of marriage has also changed profoundly. They have more legal rights.
And while it’s not exactly the same thing, our behavior in terms of getting divorced has changed profoundly.
Diane M., all of the changes you listed have to do with the increase of women’s legal rights, and can be traced directly to the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 (and later laws that stemmed from that, such as Title IX. Title IX wasn’t just about sports—it also resulted in legal challenges to schools that kicked young women out for getting pregnant).
Views on women’s sexuality changed because views on women changed—in response to women gaining more civil rights.
Behavior reflects a person’s true attitude. If a person says, “stealing is wrong”, but goes ahead and pilfers someone else’s wallet because of whatever rationalization…..then it is more than fair to say that the thief does not, in fact, believe that stealing is wrong. Only that one must come up with one’s own rationalization for why one’s actual stealing isn’t “really” stealing.
None of which matters to the person who finds his or her wallet empty.
@Maggie Gallagher:
A few ideas on how college might help couples have lasting marriages:
College students have roommates and live in dorms. This helps them to learn how to live with strangers and resolve conflicts over noise, etc. A lot of marriage is about figuring out how to live with someone else.
College students get socialized by other students in their dorms, etc. So someone other than your spouse rubs off some of your rough edges and bad habits.
The socialization process at college may include teaching norms of male and female equality that help a relationship. It will probably at least include ideas about how males and females should treat each other.
College students have a chance to meet a good number of people with somewhat similar backgrounds to them who are their age and single. This helps them to make a selection that is better for them and allows them a chance to try more than one possible suitable match.
Of course, it must also help that college students are delaying marriage and childbearing and that after college they are likely to have jobs with family-friendly hours and health insurance.
A final more discouraging thought: At this point, college students may be a population with fewer children of divorce in it than non-college students. So that might increase the divide in terms of who stays married.
Diane M, very interesting.
As I said I’m not black and white on this. Many things may matter for college-education Americans.
A.N. Wilson on living through the sexual revolution: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2257379/Ive-lived-greatest-revolution-sexual-mores-history-damage-appals-me.html
Truth will always win in the end…follow the yellow brick road
Another way of saying the same thing:
Truth is true but blame is pointless.
Learning from it, however, is priceless…
(A.N. Wilson on living through the sexual revolution:)
God I hate these mea culpa pieces where the regrets of old people are treated as the basis for policy prescriptions. Everyone over the age of 25 has regrets about the choices they’ve made. But rather than acknowledge their responsibility for their bad decisions or current unhappiness they shift the blame. It’s not their fault – it was the sexual revolution or feminism. If only society had limited everybody’s choices they wouldn’t be forced live with the consequences of their bad or ill-considered behaviour. A.N. made his choices and he needs to man up and accept responsibility for those choices. If he thinks his decision to divorce was a bad one he should detail why and take responsibility. Suggesting that he and his wife didn’t turn into Darby and Joan because of the sexual revolution is just a complicated excuse. A 1000 words to say it’s not my fault I behaved like a dick.
good point about taking responsibility. This man describes the sexual revolution as something that happened to him, but he could as easily describe himself as a one time active participant in the sexual revolution.
“Everything you do is based on the choices you make. It’s not your parents, you past relationships, your job, the economy, the weather, an argument or your age that is to blame. You and only you are responsible for every decision and choice you make. Period.”
Source: Anonymous
What Mont said.
Again, the so-called sexual revolution cannot be examined separately from women’s civil and human rights. The sexual revolution exists solely because of greater rights for women in the public sphere. You can’t have it both ways.
Meanwhile, here are some reminders of the fabulous positive effects of the so-called sexual revolution; positive effects that greatly outweigh any negative effects (such as A.N.’s insistence that the “sexual revolution” was to blame for his own choices to behave poorly/treat others shabbily):
(1) women can choose whether or not to have children, and choose to limit their number (birth control is legal), (2) abortion is safe and legal, (3) women’s sexual response is recognized and affirmed, (4) pregnant women can keep their jobs and stay in school if they so choose, (5) women can remain unmarried without being regarded as freaks, (6) single mothers can choose to raise our own children rather than having them whisked away to strangers, (7) marital rape is a crime, (8) rape crisis centers exist, (9) victims of rape have greater rights/legal protections, (9) spousal abuse is a crime (not a “private family matter”), (10) shelters for victims of abuse exist…..I could go on and on. A.N. Wilson has a very selective reading of history. Men of his station (white, upper-middle-class) have always been free to cheat on their wives—and often did. Geez, it was a standard rite-of-passage for fathers to take their sons to the whorehouse when they came of age, and part of the standard advice for brides back-in-the-day was how to tolerate your husband’s cheating (it was assumed that he would cheat).
I’m glad things have changed. I’m even more thankful for gaining the legal standing that made all the other changes possible. A.N. Wilson sounds more upset that he has consequences for his bad behavior—consequences that didn’t exist for men in the generation previous to his. Pffft.
@Mont D Law – I didn’t think A.N. Wilson was blaming others for his life choices. I think he was saying he did things that didn’t work – and that British society as a whole has gone in the wrong direction.
I think he lumps together many different aspects of social change, though. The sexual revolution due to the Pill and relaxing standards on obscenity are different phenomenon from the increase in divorce.
@LaLubu – I don’t think the sexual revolution was mostly about feminism. I think it came primarily from the new technology of relatively reliable birth control. That plus a population with a large group of young people in it.
I think there were and are aspects of the sexual revolution that aren’t particularly pro-women (or anti), and some that end up hurting women.
I think some of the social changes you list came about due to feminism and were sort of after the first bit of the sexual revolution. Things like changing the laws on rape and starting rape crisis centers were I think more in the 1970s and 1980s.
So anyhow, back to the blog. Apparently offering young, low-income couples a chance to get counseling did not help them to stay together after having a baby.
I would be interested in knowing if the counseling did increase the father’s involvement with his children later on, though.
Unlike Cherlin, I am comfortable with the idea that government should try to encourage families with two committed parents whenever possible.
Ideally, it would be good to prevent young couples who aren’t married from getting pregnant in the first place.
If that fails, what then?
Another thought – it’s going to be important to distinguish between programs that work (or don’t work) for low-income parents and programs that will work for middle-class parents.
The increase in children being born outside of marriage in the middle class may have different causes. It may have different results. Scholars are going to have to study this, although we should do something in the meantime.
Don’t get me wrong, I agree that the technology for birth control was very important—just that equal rights were even more important. Without the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the technology of birth control would only be available to married women, and even then only with the permission of their husbands.
@La Lubu – I’m glad for the Civil Rights Act, anyhow.
@ Elizabeth Marquardt – The links to Lois Collins and to Sweden are weird.
The Wilcox interview seemed to go well to me. I was thrilled to see that he was promoting a $3,000 refundable tax credit per child. For people who don’t make enough to pay a lot of taxes, that would be wonderful.
I also support making it easier for two parent families to get social services like food stamps, although I’m not sure if that is aimed as much at the 60% who are somewhat educated.
I want to see more, though. I think if we really want to promote parents becoming families and staying together, it’s going to take more than removing bad incentives and adding a little income.