From the Daily Mail:
Marriage is as important to the future of the nation as climate change and poverty, a senior family lawyer said yesterday.
Baroness Deech said the growing numbers of families without fathers was doing more harm to the next generation than other factors such as smoking, alcohol, poor diet and lack of exercise.
And she warned that a conspiracy of silence surrounded the issue because political leaders were afraid to say married families were better for children than cohabiting families or single parent families.
Lady Deech, who is head of the Bar Standards Board, made her remarks at a conference organised by the Marriage Foundation, a pressure group led by High Court family judge Sir Paul Coleridge. She said marriage was based on a public promise and evidence showed married parents were twice as likely to stay together through a child’s early years as cohabiting parents.
Children of single mothers have greater problems than those of cohabitee parents, and children of cohabitees have greater problems than those of married parents…
Categories: Marriage
The Daily Mail, really?
I don’t think anyone thinks marriage doesn’t matter, or that it lacks value, in general. Each person, and couple, decides whether marriage is the right thing to do. The issue isn’t, “is marriage a good thing?” but rather, “is it the right thing for me? Or even “is it available to me?”
For better or worse, marriage is a consumer good. People choose marriage with the same kind of pros and cons analysis they apply to other goods. There’s still a certain amount of momentum propelling a person to get married, but there’s plenty of reasons to abstain, too.
The pain of divorce is probably the biggest reason not to get married. And you don’t have to be a mathematician to calculate the odds that you’ll get a divorce. In fact, a supposed divorce rate of 50%, whether accurate or not, is probably the best known statistic about marriage out there. Not “how many couples are married,” or “what’s the average age of a first-time bride,” or any other statistic. But everybody knows the divorce rate!
@Kevin – what I think is harder to get people to agree to is that children are better off if their parents are married and stay married.
And I guess the corollary that therefore people should not see marriage as just a consumer good to figure out if they personally want it or not – at least not if they have children.
I couldn’t agree more, Diane. I’ve long said that adults can do what they want with regard to their marriage but once children are present, it’s a whole different set of issues. It shocks me, honestly, that our society has so little expectation of married couples with children, with regard to divorce.
I’ll probably scream out loud if I read for the umpteenth time that marriage is about children. If only!