Why family matters, and why traditional families are still best
Article here. Excerpt:
'It’s been a good month for champions of the traditional family, but don’t expect the family wars to be ending any time soon.
In recent weeks, a barrage of new evidence has come to light demonstrating what was once common sense. “Family structure matters” (in the words of my American Enterprise Institute colleague Brad Wilcox, who is also the director of the National Marriage Project at the University of Virginia).
And Princeton University and the left-of-center Brookings Institution released a study that reported “most scholars now agree that children raised by two biological parents in a stable marriage do better than children in other family forms across a wide range of outcomes.” Why this is so is still hotly contested.
Another study, coauthored by Wilcox, found that states with more married parents do better on a broad range of economic indicators, including upward mobility for poor children and lower rates of child poverty. On most economic indicators, the Washington Post summarized, “the share of parents who are married in a state is a better predictor of that state’s economic health than the racial composition and educational attainment of the state’s residents.”
Boys in particular do much better when raised in a more traditional family environment, according to a new report from MIT. This is further corroboration of Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s famous 1965 warning: “From the wild Irish slums of the 19th century Eastern seaboard, to the riot-torn suburbs of Los Angeles, there is one unmistakable lesson in American history; a community that allows a large number of men to grow up in broken families, dominated by women, never acquiring any stable relationship to male authority, never acquiring any set of rational expectations about the future — that community asks for and gets chaos.”'
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Comments
Alas, not so good for dad
Problem is, even w/out an anti-father "family court" system that devalues dad, the trad'l family system still puts everything on the father-husband: income, responsibility, etc. Mom gets to stay home and if there's a divorce, she gets half of stuff she hasn't been forking over her hard-earned cash for, even if dad gets the kids.
The kids may be better off, and on the whole, most women may be happier on aggregate than they are reporting they are now (sometimes, getting what you asked for ain't all it's cracked up to be...), but father-husband still gets the shaft.
In any case, I will continue to recommend that men do not have children with a woman unless they are VERY sure it is what both people want and the woman a man has them with has a *proven* track record of love and dedication, and most of all, strength of character and integrity to match the degree of trust a man must put in her if he is to take the risks associated w/ becoming a father. And obviously, he has to be 1000% sure he wants that, too. Otherwise, it's Splitsville, and everyone knows is.
As someone who was adopted as
As someone who was adopted as a child, and as an adult I h*ve had children outside of marriage and within marriage, I fully agree with this article. The article is not about traditional gender roles, it is about traditional families (marriage first and then children.) I don't think the author is making any references to how a couple shares financial and domestic duties.
Heterosexual married couples h*ving biological children are the ideal situation. Any other committed/living together two parent situation is second best, and two parents living apart is third best, and single motherhood/revolving male partner is the worst. (and somewhere in the middle I would place "open marriages")
H*ving children together has risks for both genders and should be thought out carefully.
If a person does not want children from the current day and beyond, he or she should take precautions and not trust their partners birth control. A man should h*ve a vasectomy (if h*ving sex with women of child bearing age), and I personally would not recommend anyone get married if they don't plan to h*ve kids. I see only risk. Any rewards of marriage can be individually chosen and achieved by signing legal documents.
BTW - When my husband and I began dating, he told me he was a life-long committed bachelor (he saw no value in marriage without children, and he didn't want children). That was fine with me as I already had two kids, and didn't need any more. However, then my husband wanted to live together (I said no way because of my children), then he hit 30 and decided he did want a child. Like me, he only sees marriage of value for h*ving children, but he wanted me to get pregnant first (to make sure we were both fertile, as he didn't want marriage if we weren't). although I understood his point, I was not comfortable with that. My ex had left me while pregnant, after telling me he was committed. While marriage is no guarantee of commitment, society values it more and it is harder to get out of.