Frode Thuen, a lifestyles researcher at the Hemil Center in Bergen, said marriage no longer marks the beginning of a life together for two people. "Now it's used more as a confirmation that two people want to live together, after testing out their relationship over time," he said.

Thuen also noted that couples who have children without being married remain three times as likely to break up than married couples are.

Aasa Rytter Evensen, a local expert on lifestyles, said it was "unfortunate" that so many Norwegians have children without being married. "It's worrisome that people who choose to have children together don't dare to commit themselves more in relation to each other," she said. "The children risk growing up with less stability."

Children in two-parent families generally had access to more financial resources and greater amounts of parental time. They also were more likely to participate in extracurricular activities, progress more steadily in school, and have more supervision over their activities such as television watching. The presence of two parents continues to be one of the most important factors in children's lives.

As a result of methodological limitations, prior research may have artificially attenuated the magnitude of the broken homes/delinquency relationship. As a result of theoretical limitations, prior research has achieved only limited success in identifying the mechanism through which broken homes may promote delinquency. The present study addresses both issues using a national probability sample of 1,725 adolescents. Results suggest that divorce/separation early in the life course may be more strongly related to delinquency than prior research implies and that remarriage during adolescence may be strongly associated with status offending. Overall, results also suggest that association with deviant peers and attitudes favorable to delinquency account for the broken homes/delinquency relationship better than do a number of alternative explanations.

One additional point to make in refuting the "marriage was not intended to last this long" argument is that the most fragile years of marriage are the early ones, not the later ones. The divorce rate per year of marriage goes down after the third year of marriage, and half of those who ever divorce do so within the first ten years. If marriage were an endurance test, you would expect divorce rates to increase over time -- kind of like joggers giving up running over the years because the human body was not built for that kind of exercise to continue into late adulthood (I know mine wasn't). But the evidence of history is that we are indeed "built" for marriages that last until death, human frailty notwithstanding, unless an anti-marriage culture intervenes.

Given that moms would like the song's message, one might think most hip hop fans would hate it. But Nas is no Mickey Mouse, or even a bubblegum pop rapper like Will Smith. Nas has some street cred, so kids will listen to this song. Here are the last lines from "I Can":

If the truth is told, the youth can grow
They learn to survive until they gain control
Nobody says you have to be gangstas, hoes
Read more, learn more, change the globe
Ghetto children, do your thing
Hold your head up, little man, you're a king
Young Princess when you get your wedding ring
Your man will sing, "She's my queen"

"Nas is wearing a shirt that says, 'I am the American Dream.' I think that summed it all up. You can be whatever you want to be. When you speak about it, it sounds a little corny, but when it's delivered to you the way Nas does and you see these kids, it's real and touches you."

Young Latinos aren't afraid to mix it up personally with other American races and cultural groups. Like Asian Americans, they have shown a strong tendency to intermarry. Roughly 30 percent of second-generation Latinos and Asians now wed people from outside their own racial groups. Mixed-race births in California have grown from 40,000 in 1980 to more than 70,000 annually; one out of every seven babies born in the Golden State in 1997 had parents of different races. This unprecedented mixing alone guarantees the development of an increasingly blended culture, not only for Latinos and Asians in particular but for young Americans as a whole.

Though I don't see anything wrong with gendered roles within marriage (e.g. woman does most of the housework, man works on the lawn, car, home repair, etc.) as long as burdens are shared, I think it's great when men do more housework. Goodness knows many moms are overburdened. But I'm skeptical about Coltrane's apparent push for gender-neutral parenting. From the article:

At the same time, father�s interactions with their children remain shaped by older expectations about what men and women should do. For example, fathers spend about four times as much time doing sports with children as mothers and spend more time in play or leisure with children than doing housework with them

Of the 41.8 million kids under 15 who lived with two parents last year, more than 25 percent had mothers who stayed home, according to a Census Bureau report.That was up from 23 percent, or 9.4 million children, in such situations in 1994, a bureau analyst said. Full-time, stay-at-home dads took care of 189,000 kids in 2002, up 18 percent ... The Census Bureau also reported that 55 percent of women who gave birth between July 1999 and July 2000 returned to the labor force within a year of having their babies. That was down from a record high of 59 percent the last time the survey was conducted in 1998.

That's not to say there haven't been some significant changes in marriage over the past two decades -- some positive and some negative, the researcher said. But the positives and negatives appear to balance one another out.

For example, Booth said, couples have become more egalitarian in marriage. That is, "they are more equal in terms of the number of times each gets his or her own way," he added. "The relationship is becoming more of a partnership where both people have equal standing."

On the other hand, couples in 2000 were more likely to report living together before getting married. And cohabitation tends to have a negative effect on the stability of marriage, according to Booth.

"People who cohabit are much more likely to divorce," he said.

How do men grow into that magnificent thing, a good father, except by taking on the challenge? The most interesting thing about the new hit "Finding Nemo" is that it depicts, simultaneously, both a boy's journey toward manhood and a man's journey toward fatherhood. In defending his son, Marlin becomes someone bigger, better, stronger, more admirable and reliable than he had ever imagined possible.