Over at The Atlantic,  Elizabeth Marquardt and Brad Wilcox take on the “Does parenthood make your marriage miserable?” question, based on the findings from the  new State of Our Unions report out today. 

Also, if you are in the New York City area, Marquardt and Wilcox will be discussing the new report tonight at the Center for Public Conversation. Yours truly and my wife and fellow FamilyScholars blogger Amber Lapp will also be in on the conversation, which will be moderated by David Blankenhorn (Amber and I are new parents — so we’re supposed to have something to say about the report!). See here for full details.

What do Occupy Wall Street protestors think about marriage? Of course, we don’t know–it would make for a fascinating study. But at least one couple who met at Zuccotti Park one month ago tied the knot on Sunday. According to the New York Daily News, “In front of about a dozen friends and onlookers, Emery Abdel-Latif, 24, and Micha Balon, 19, held a traditional Muslim wedding on Trinity Place and Liberty Street, perched on a small bench next to the park’s famous sculpture of a seated man with a briefcase….The two activists met in September when they were trying to find a space in the crowded park to pray. They immediately hit it off.” Read more here.

Thanks to Diane Sollee for passing this great piece of wisdom along.

The investment banker was at the pier of a small coastal Mexican village when a small boat with just one fisherman docked. Inside the small boat were several large yellow fin tuna.  The investment banker complimented the fisherman on the quality of his fish and asked how long it took to catch them.

The fisherman replied, only a little while.

The investment banker then asked why didn’t he stay out longer and catch more fish?

The fisherman said he had enough to support his family’s immediate needs.

The investment banker then asked, but what do you do with the rest of your
time?

The fisherman said, “I sleep late, fish a little, play with my children, take siesta with my wife, Maria, stroll into the village each evening where I sip wine and play guitar with my amigos, I have a full and busy life, senor.”

The investment banker scoffed, “I am a Harvard MBA and could help you.  You should spend more time fishing and with the proceeds, buy a bigger boat. With the proceeds from the bigger boat you could buy several boats, eventually you would have a fleet of fishing boats. Instead of selling your catch to a middleman you would sell directly to the processor, eventually opening your own cannery. You would control the product, processing and
distribution.  You can leave this small coastal fishing village and move to Mexico City, then LA and eventually NYC where you will run your expanding enterprise.”

The fisherman asked, “But senor, how long will this all take?”

To which the American replied, “15-20 years.”

But what then, senor?

The American laughed and said that’s the best part.  When the time is right you would announce an IPO and sell your company stock to the public and become very rich, you would make millions.

Millions, senor?  Then what?

The American said, “Then you would retire.  Move to a small coastal fishing village where you would sleep late, fish a little, play with your kids, take siesta with your wife, stroll to the village in the evenings where you could sip wine and play your guitar with your amigos.”

 

While we’ve been having our own spirited debate about cohabitation here and here and here at FamilyScholars, today’s New York Times Room for Debate takes up the debate with this question “Should Parents Marry for the Kids?”

Scholars including Stephanie Coontz, Brad Wilcox, Amy Wax, Sharon Sassler, and Ralph Richard Banks (who will be discussing his book Is Marriage for White People at the Institute’s Center for Public Conversation on Sept. 26) weigh in on the question.

You should read it for yourself, but here are some of the bits I’ll be chewing on:

From Stephanie Coontz:

Encouraging couples with these risk factors to marry is no panacea, since a conflict-ridden relationship or a disruptive divorce can be worse for kids than a stable single-parent home. But of course we should be concerned about the number of children whose parents cycle in and out of relationships. Several things might help lower that number: available, affordable contraception and education to help young people delay childbirth until they have a reliable partner and/or the educational, emotional and social resources to raise a child; a revival of family-wage jobs for less-educated individuals, to increase the pool of marriageable men and decrease the number of women who feel compelled financially to stay with an unreliable man; and relationship counseling both before and after young people enter cohabiting relationships.

I agree that, given our society’s understanding of marriage today as “as long as our love shall last,” encouraging couples to marry is no panacea. Agree that family-wage jobs and relationship counseling are important ideas. To solutions, I would add bolstering the norms of lifelong marriage and marital friendship–so that when our children do get married, they will have the benefit of a culture that is a “friend to their marriage”; that is, a culture that encourages them to love and cherish for better or worse, in times of plenty and little–rather than advancing the myth that people change, love comes and goes, and there’s nothing really we can do about that.

From Brad Wilcox:

But is cohabitation really the problem, or some deeper factor — like poverty or relationship troubles that predated the cohabitation? The truth is that these other factors account for some of cohabitation’s negative impact but the best studies suggest that cohabitation also has an independent negative effect, precisely because it does not institutionalize commitment in a way that is easily understood and honored by romantic partners and their friends and family.

Anyone who disagrees should answer this question: When was the last time you saw a cohabiting couple enter their relationship by vowing, in front of their closest friends and family, to love and cherish one another, for better for worse, for richer for poorer, in sickness and in health, till death do they part?

This last question gets to a question I asked in a post that no one has yet answered: If most of us agree that serial cohabitation is a problem, what is the alternative? And if the alternative is not marriage, how is that alternative different from marriage?

From Sharon Sassler:

Most disadvantaged populations, including single and cohabiting mothers, also aspire to marriage. But many defer, believing they should first attain what is often unattainable — a stable job, some savings, and residential autonomy. In my interviews with cohabiting couples, most of them know that a long-lasting and satisfying marriage takes more than just love. Marriage is an economic arrangement. For many young couples, a firm financial grounding has been made more difficult by today’s bad economy.

I agree that most disadvantaged populations aspire to marriage and that economy isn’t helping matters at all. A big question I’m chewing on is “How do we renew an economy that enables broad economic prosperity?” My hunch is that it means, among other things, more local economies, less Big Corporation, revival of the family wage, renewal of thrift ethic (i.e. wise use of resources). That said, I do fault Sassler  for failing to consider in her post how the roots of the problem are both cultural and economic. In addition to economic reasons, many couples are deferring marriage because marriage no long means to love and to cherish until death do us part–and they want to be with somebody for life, but are unsure of how to make that happen.

In his Huffington Post interview about the new Why Marriage Matters report, Brad Wilcox drew an interesting analogy:

Marriage is not just a piece of paper: it’s a social institution that is often transformative for men and women. The analogy here is that people, for instance, could contract with smart PhDs on an informal, private basis to get highly educated. And some would do just as well with that approach as people who would go to college. Nevertheless, in general, college provides people with a script and a set of norms and rituals and experience and gives them something more valuable.

Seems like a good analogy to me.

I wonder what Hanna Rosin and her Slate colleagues would say about that. In this Slate segment (skip to the 10 minute mark), they maintain that cohabitation is only a problem because it isn’t normal yet. Rosin suggests that “If we would do a better job of legitimizing cohabitation, that would be much better than constantly telling people to get married.” I wonder if  she also thinks that we should tell poor and working class Americans who aspire to a well-paying, white-collar job that they don’t need a college degree–it’s just a piece of paper after all. They can get the equivalent of a higher education through their own efforts.

Rosin concludes: ”You should focus on these serial cohabiters and what you can do to help them make their life better because that will be a much better thing than making everybody get married.” Behind assertions like this is a naive view that the poor and working classes cohabit merely because they’re the equivalent of European bohemians who are  done with marriage. As Rosin asserted, “People aren’t getting married in America. So stop telling them to–it’s just not gonna happen.”

That’s extremely insulting. As the 2010 State of Our Unions issue shows (see figure 7) 75 percent of least educated Americans and 76 percent of moderately educated Americans say that marriage is “very important” or “one of the most important things” to them. As my wife and I heard in our interviews with working class young people–and as we wrote about here–working class young people desperately want a happy marriage, but many fear the prospect of divorce and are determined to make absolutely certain that their partner is the “right person.” So are we really prepared to tell these Americans that marriage for them is “just not gonna happen?” (Incidentally, Rosin acknowledges, most poor and working class people are not in cohabiting, monogamous relationships–but they will if we make it a norm. So if we can make monogamous cohabitation a norm, why can’t we make marriage a norm? Seems like a case of convenient determinism to me.) 

Most poor and working class Americans are not cohabiting because they’re avant garde. They believe in marriage. So when we tell poor and working class Americans who aspire to marriage that they can get the goods of marriage without the institution, it’s like telling poor and working class Americans who aspire to higher education that they can get the goods of higher education without the institution.

Living in New York City, I usually think nothing of the magazine booths filled with racy magazines or billboards depicting practically pornographic women. That’s New York City, I shrug. But now, as an expectant father, I find myself suddenly asking “Do I want my son to see these ads when he is two?”

Along those lines, The New York Times yesterday posted a thoughtful commentary by a Canadian law professor, Joel Bakan, about how corporate interests threaten children’s welfare. Bakan cites a recent Kaiser Family Foundation study that found “that children spend more hours engaging with various electronic media — TV, games, videos and other online entertainments — than they spend in school.” Why is this troubling? Because as he notes “Much of what children watch involves violent, sexual imagery, and yet children’s media remain largely unregulated. Attempts to curb excesses — like California’s ban on the sale or rental of violent video games to minors — have been struck down by courts as free speech violations.”

He cites as well the increasing medication of children with potentially harmful drugs and the exposure of children to “increasing quantities of toxic chemicals”—both of which are driven by the Big Corporation.

He concludes thus:

“As Nelson Mandela has said, ‘there can be no keener revelation of a society’s soul than the way in which it treats its children.’ By that measure, our current failure to provide stronger protection of children in the face of corporate-caused harm reveals a sickness in our societal soul.”

Our legal system’s hallowization of free speech and regular dismissal of concerns about the quality of our moral environment reminds me of what my old politics professor calls children in the contemporary West: “freedom’s orphans.” Whether we’re talking about commercial conception or abortion or food or TV programming or the pharmaceutical industry—isn’t it time we thought about freedom’s orphans?

The New York Times today reports on the new edition of Why Marriage Matters. See here.

I just received  in the mail today a copy of Oklahoma’s 2001 baseline statewide survey on marriage and divorce. As many of you know, Oklahoma launched in 1999 the Oklahoma Marriage Initiative. One of the first things it did was to adminster this survey of Oklahoman’s marriage attitudes and behaviors. It has some interesting data. Here is some of the stuff that jumped out at me:

Table 14 asks “Do you ever wish that you, yourself had worked harder to save your marriage?” Thirty-five percent of husbands reported “yes,” and 21 percent of wives reported “yes.”

That table also asks “Do you ever wish that your spouse had worked harder to save your marriage?” Seventy-five percent of husbands reported “yes,” and 73 percent of wives reported “yes.”

Tables 18 and 19 looks at the association between age of first marriage and probability of divorce and later marital happiness. Their findings suggest both that those who marry very young (younger than 20) have the highest rates of divorce–and report  higher rates of marital happiness than those who married 28+.

Table 20 looks at individuals’ ratings of marital happiness, by frequency of attendance at religious services. Of those who “never or almost never” attend a religious service, 52 percent report a “very happy” marriage, and 5 percent report a “not too happy” marriage. Of those who attend one or more times per week, 73 percent report a “very happy” marriage, and 2 percent report a “not too happy” marriage.

Table 22 looks at responses to the question “Are you glad you are still together?” by currently married people who report that they at some point thought their marriage was in trouble or thought of divorce. Of those who were still together <1-7 years after the crisis, 79 percent said they are “glad” that they are still together. By 8-18 years later, 96 percent of the respondents said they were glad to be still together.

Interesting stuff.

Amber and I have an essay over at First Things suggesting that the contemporary social script about sex, timing of children, and marriage disproportionately hurts Middle Americans. Read more here.

Barry Deutsch posted a thoughtful response to my earlier post on my allegation that Stephanie Coontz betrays a determinist attitude when it comes to marriage and family trends. He suggests this:

David’s analogy badly misrepresents Coontz’s actual views. Coontz doesn’t argue that divorce will only increase, for example, or that marriage rates can only go down. A more accurate analogy would be that Coontz is like an economist saying that although we can reduce poverty and unemployment, there will always be some poor people and some unemployed people.

Good point, Barry: Coontz didn’t say that out-of-wedlock childbearing and divorce would only increase. And we can be grateful that most of us agree that it shouldn’t. However, it does remain unclear what Coontz has in mind when she implies that there will always be “some” children born outside of marriage, “some” cohabiting relationships, and “some” divorce.

I would pose this question to Coontz: do you think we as a society should exert tremendous energy in reducing the chances of divorce and the proportion of children born outside of marriage to the levels that we see among the highly educated (11% and 6%, respectively)? And that we can see a dramatic reduction–among people from all classes–in the number of sexual partners young people have, the proportion of children born outside of marriage, and the chances of divorce?

If Coontz answers “yes” to those questions, then I’ll gladly be proved wrong that she is not a determinist.

Also, a further question would be, What does it look like to “emphasize commitments and relationships” apart from upholding the ideal of marriage? Sure, we shouldn’t encourage every couple to get married. But if we’re emphasizing commitment, don’t we naturally end up talking about marriage?

It seems to me that Coontz creates a dichotomy between “commitment and relationships” and “strengthening marriage.” She sees it as two different aspects of a larger program. I see it as one. After all, how do you talk about “commitment” without upholding the exemplar of commitment, the institution of marriage?

Family scholar Brad Wilcox presents his findings on the retreat from marriage in Middle America at Heritage Foundation today. You can see video here.

In an article for the blog “Conservative Home,” Brad Wilcox responds to Hanna Rosin’s criticisms that seeking to strengthen marriage in Middle America is a “patrician solution.” To the contrary, Wilcox argues: statistics consistently show that the vast majority of Americans from all classes want to be happily married, so “it’s not ‘patrician’ to think about helping Middle Americans realize their marital dreams.”

Also, check out Wilcox’s interview at National Review, NY Post columnist Rich Lowry’s take on the report, and the Huffington Post’s latest article on the report.