Pew Survey Exposes Disconnect Between Marriage and Parenthood
July 2nd, 2007 by Peter
“Marital Priorities Change” yawns the headline in yesterday’s Courant. As noted by Maggie Gallagher, the Pew Research Center had a more descriptive headline for its own poll: “As Marriage and Parenthood Drift Apart, Public Is Concerned About Social Impact.” An excerpt from the AP story that ran in the Courant:
NEW YORK – The percentage of Americans who consider children “very important” to a successful marriage has dropped sharply since 1990, and more now cite the sharing of household chores as pivotal, according to a sweeping new survey.
The Pew Research Center survey on marriage and parenting found that children had fallen to eighth out of nine on a list of factors that people associate with successful marriages – well behind “sharing household chores,” “good housing,” “adequate income,” a “happy sexual relationship” and “faithfulness.”…
The survey also found that, by a margin of nearly 3-to-1, Americans say that the main purpose of marriage is the “mutual happiness and fulfillment” of adults rather than the “bearing and raising of children.”
In many ways, this is the heart of the crisis in the American family. For too many folks it’s a small leap from saying that children are not important to marriage to saying that marriage is not important to the well-being of children. And it was this growing disconnect between marriage and parenthood that brought our culture to the point where same-sex “marriage” could even become thinkable. More:
The survey’s findings buttress concerns expressed by numerous scholars and family-policy experts, among them Barbara Dafoe Whitehead of Rutgers University’s National Marriage Project.
“The popular culture is increasingly oriented to fulfilling the X-rated fantasies and desires of adults,” she wrote in a recent report. “Child-rearing values – sacrifice, stability, dependability, maturity – seem stale and musty by comparison.”…
According to the survey, 71 percent of Americans say that the growth in births to unwed mothers is a “big problem.” About the same proportion – 69 percent – said that a child needs both a mother and a father to grow up happily [emphasis added].
In other words, nearly 70% of the public understands a core reason why same-sex “marriage”–which would create permanent and obligatory motherlessness and fatherlessness for the children of those “marriages”–is bad public policy. Helping them make that connection–and reconnecting marriage and parenthood in general–is the challenge that lies ahead.
So are you saying that marriage requires children? And that marriage without children isn’t marriage after all? Please clarify.
[…] West Virginia University Link to Article rutgers university Pew Survey Exposes Disconnect Between Marriage and Parenthood » Posted at FIC Blog on Monday, July 02, 2007 “Marital Priorities Change” yawns the headline in yesterday’s Courant … , among them Barbara Dafoe Whitehead of Rutgers University’s National Marriage Project. “The popular View Entire Article » […]
“The survey also found that, by a margin of nearly 3-to-1, Americans say that the main purpose of marriage is the “mutual happiness and fulfillment” of adults rather than the “bearing and raising of children.”
Well, what do you know? What a farce…I believe someone should have shown this survey to Surpreme Court Judges in Washington and New York…was there whole deal why two adults, of any gender, who wanted to share mutual happiness and fulfilment couldn’t because the point of marriage was procreation.
Come on folks, give me a break…it’s the 21st century…procreation is NOT the primary reason for marriage these day.
Let your gay friends and relatives get married already…
BTW…just because some one is gay or lesbian doesn’t mean they are infertile…Guess what folks, gays and lesbians can and DO have kids and families…these families and children need the security and legal protection now made illegal and unlawful to them even though their adult parent not only want “mutual happiness and fulfillness” but also “raising children.”
It seems that Reily has contradicted himself in his arguments for SSM:
“procreation is NOT the primary reason for marriage these day.”
& “these families and children [of gays and lesbians] need the security and legal protection now made illegal and unlawful to them”
At the very least, he is trying to argue from both ends, against the middle–the great **middle America** composed of common sense people. (And I include here the common sense people who live in New England, the South, the East Coast and West Coast.)
Those common sense people realize that whatever the latest poll may say, this nation’s very survival depends upon its foundation units, which are NOT any government, be it federal, state, town etc. Statistically speaking, the most advantageous and successful environment for raising future well-rounded and productive (tax-paying) citizens is the natural family, headed by a man and woman married to each other.
And your sources for your statistics are?????
How can you make your last statement without citing a source…Expressing your opinion is one thing…quoting statistics to support your point should include the source.
Protection under the law should not be a popularity contest…seems you think that it should be.
Reily,
I was about to post links to abundant studies showing just what I stated, but before I take the time to do that, please, just show me one reliable study showing that homosexuals raise children who are just as well-rounded and productive citizens.
Btw, you can easily go to the home page, here, and link onto the amicus briefs filed in the Kerrigan v. Connecticut case, which will cite various scientifically conducted research studies which prove my statement.
Link to such a study.
The abstract reads:
Also, no one has answered my initial question. Does marriage require children? Does that mean that Peter et. al. believe marriage without children isn’t marriage after all?
Genghis asks:
In truth, it’s a rhetorical question meant to steer and frame the debate. The literal answer is that obviously there are some married couples who are unable or unwilling to have children, and yet their lack of children does nothing to invalidate their marital status. We’ve certainly discussed this at length before, to point out the “potentiality of procreation” that may nevertheless exist within marriages that are presently childless. Likewise, we’ve discussed the effect that even unproductive male/female marriages have in instilling a role model within society for others to emulate as the normative behavior of lifelong commitment, which tends to reinforce a more orderly pattern of parentage.
But let’s not get so distracted by the I-957 rhetoric (i.e. the folks in Washington State who say that they want to make procreation a requirement of marriage) that we miss a more fundamental point about the importance of marriage to children. Just flip the question around: Do children deserve anything less than being raised by a mother and father within marriage?
That is what I believe Peter meant to suggest when he cited The National Marriage Project and emphasized – in bold text – its report that 69% of Americans say that a child needs both a mother and father to grow up happily. It is our collective understanding and wisdom that speaks so loudly, telling us that children have a natural right to a mother and father and that they deserve nothing less as the ideal family structure. Yes, it is true that this ideal may not be realized in every case, due to the tragedies of premature death by a parent, divorce, or children that are born out of wedlock. But the reality of these unfortunate circumstances should not cause us to redefine societal standards. We should strive toward a system in which as many children as possible are raised by a mother and father, and encourage child rearing in situations that follow this model to the extent that it is possible.
Women still want children. US Census data shows that 80% of women have a child by age 40, according to analysis reported by Jane Lawler Dye in “Fertility of American Women: June 2004”. The difference we are seeing since the 1970s is that more often women are having these children outside of marriage. Many are choosing cohabitation with their partner instead of marriage. Others are following the path of single motherhood, whether by choice or as a consequence of abandonment by the father. From the conservative perspective, these are lamentable situations that leave children without the stability and necessary balance in their upbringing.
Our collective moral consciousness encompasses such strongly held views that it’s unlikely to be swayed by the findings of a college psychology professor (Charlotte Patterson) and her two students (Jennifer Wainright and Stephen Russell). After all, how compelling an argument can you make based upon a study of just 44 children raised by same-sex parents, when it is weighed against the wisdom borne through millennia of experience within human societies? Despite your attempt to downplay the significance of popular opinion, we ought still to have a government “of the people, by the people, and for the people”. Science should inform our thinking, but it should never become the equivalent of king or dictator in aiding the establishment of laws contrary to the will of the people.
There is a real danger in thinking that we ought to alter societal structures to match the presently observed behavior within the population. Effectively this means “dumbing down” the ideal until we reach the least common denominator. Following this way of thinking, one might ask – since so many women are evidently giving birth out of wedlock – whether we ought to dissolve entirely the concept of marriage and simply accrue some package of special rights to motherhood. After all, this would empower women with greater liberty to choose whatever family model they find to be to their own personal liking. But does this justify the potential harm to children, who might be deprived of their natural right to being raised by a father as well as a mother? Moreover, what of the natural rights of a father in raising his own children? The only family model that is equitable to all parties is for children to be raised with both a mother and father; and for family rights to accrue on that basis, favoring unduly neither gender. Other family structures that fall short of this ideal may need our support, but this should not cause us to redefine the ideal.
Genghis,
I apologize for not being CLEAR enough for you, especially as you are often deliberately *obtuse* (as Dave earlier pointed out in answering your first “rhetorical question:” “Does marriage require children?”).
The study you’ve cited won’t cut it, as “adolescents” are NOT (in the main) “well-rounded and productive (tax-paying) citizens.” That is how I framed the criteria in my initial statement to Reily: “Statistically speaking, the most advantageous and successful environment for raising future well-rounded and productive (tax-paying) citizens is the natural family, headed by a man and woman married to each other.”
Adolescents are still in a developing, and often confused, volatile (subject to frequent changes, etc.) stage of life, so any evaluation at that stage says little if anything about their ultimate success in life. And, Genghis, I believe I looked at a book at the library about the study you cited, and that study was not even conducted according to correct research methods, because the parents of the studied adolescents were VOLUNTEERS, not a random sample.
I don’t believe there IS any scientifically valid study showing comparative outcomes of adults (say at least age 25 or so) raised by homosexual couples as opposed to those raised by married heterosexual couples. This aberration in society is too new (and fortuately too rare until very recently) to have enough “history” that could even potentially prove the preposterous and unsupportable claim that SSM will not harm society or children.
Thanks Tricia for pointing the fallicy of that study. I was going to it you weren’t. Coming from a former Pharma perspective-scientific studies are meaningless unless they are randomly sampled. Period. FIC could do a study about families and come up with data showing that most families have 5 or more kids-because the volunteers for the study would probably have larger family sizes. Gay parents, who had kids with problems were probably not going to volunteer to be in a study that was supposed to promote gay parenting.
Is it possible for a gay couple to raise a productive member of society? Yes, of course. But are the majority of gay couples going to raise socially well adjusted children-that is something that we just don’t know yet. And we won’t for quite some time, as this is a relatively new phenemona. You would really need a survey of several thousand children who are adults in their mid thirties or so, to really get a valid result. When that kind of study comes out, then we can talk…
Until then, I prefer to look at the studies that say that children who are raised without one parent tend to have a lot more problems than children raised with both a mom and a dad. Because two moms are not the same as a mom or a dad…
Opal