This week the National Marriage Project released a study charting the decline of the two-parent family among what it calls the “moderately educated middle” — the 58 percent of Americans with high school diplomas and often some college education, but no four-year degree.
This revelation came as no surprise to Ross Douthat, New York Times columnist, who wrote Monday that “we’ve known for a while that America has a marriage gap: college graduates divorce infrequently and bear few children out of wedlock, while in the rest of the country unwed parenthood and family breakdown are becoming the new normal.”
It didn’t used to be that way. A generation or two ago, the soldiers in the sexual revolution were the well-educated upper middle class. Beginning in the flapper ’20s and growing stronger for the following half century, it was affluent college grads who scandalized society with their liberal views on sex and their ever-increasing divorce rates.
In those days, it was the blue collar factory worker and his family who attended church and practiced the family values that most people preached.
Today, surveys show, the college educated are the most faithful church-goers while that “moderately educated middle” is moving away from organized religion steadily.
The increased divorce rate among less affluent parents and the decision by more and more women to become unwed mothers is truly alarming. The family — as preachers and academics in all of the social sciences continue to proclaim — is the basic unit of society. The importance of stable families to the well-being of the whole society is obvious. The threat posed by the decline in the percentage of young couples who divorce or choose not to marry in the first place is very real.
Single mothers are the poorest segment of the population because it is so difficult for them to meet the double challenge of earning a living while raising children. Divorced men come next because they must pay alimony and child support to their separated wives and children while also providing for themselves. Single moms and divorced dads are, to be blunt about it, a drag on society. There are high-earning exceptions to this generalization, of course, but as a group they don’t create wealth; they deplete it.
A very significant portion of America’s wealth is made up of the wealth of America’s families. Today our rich and well-to-do families — which is to say the top 5 percent — are richer than ever and adding steadily to their wealth. That is not the case for the other 95 percent of us. The net worth of most families has decreased because the value of their homes has dropped by 30, 40 or as much as 50 percent, and 17 percent of U.S. men and women are either unemployed or underemployed, meaning they are eating into whatever savings they may have.
This unhappy picture is clouded still further by broken homes and the growing number of single parents.
OBJECT LESSON: The more stable American families become, the more prosperous those families and the society which together they comprise become.
We are talking about money; about growth; about stability. For the purposes of this discussion, leave aside the issues of sexual morals and religion and concentrate on the contribution that the marriage vows men and women make to one another — the legal contract that they sign — make to the economy and our democracy.
Think on these things and maybe you, too, will decide that building strong families deserves the highest priority in building a stronger nation.
— Emerson Lynn, jr.
