Tag: family

Millennials are staying married; thus divorce rate plummets

9:08 pm

Good news the future’s children! New data shows that millennials are returning to more traditional marriage patterns, staying married longer and thus causing the divorce rate to plummet.

New data show younger couples are approaching relationships very differently from baby boomers, who married young, divorced, remarried and so on. Generation X and especially millennials are being pickier about who they marry, tying the knot at older ages when education, careers and finances are on track. The result is a U.S. divorce rate that dropped 18 percent from 2008 to 2016, according to an analysis by University of Maryland sociology professor Philip Cohen.

…the divorce rate’s decline isn’t a reflection of a decline in marriages. Rather, it’s evidence that marriages today have a greater chance of lasting than marriages did ten years ago. “The change among young people is particularly striking,” Susan Brown, a sociology professor at Bowling Green State University, said of Cohen’s results. “The characteristics of young married couples today signal a sustained decline [in divorce rates] in the coming years.”

The news is not all good. The drop in the divorce rate is partly there because of the non-stop behavior of baby boomers to get divorced, repeatedly. Their behavior warps the stats, and makes a mediocre marriage stat by Millennials appear better than it is. Nonetheless, the change in behavior between these two generations is a very good sign. And it will be an especially good thing for the innocent children that result from these more stable marriages, which in turn will be better for society as a whole. One of the reasons American culture has become more crude and unstable in the past few decades is strongly linked to the raising of children in broken homes. Give children a stable home and numerous studies have found they will grow up more stable and mature, and thus help make society itself more stable.

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A mother and father is still the best for kids

2:14 pm

Science discovers the obvious: Several new studies have found again that children generally do better in a stable family with a mother and a father than in any other combination.

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). 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, co-authored 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.”

I think it amusing that some scientists wonder “why this is so.” I also realize that by stating this obvious fact of nature I and these scientists are being racist homophobes who want to oppress minorities, but who am I to argue with reality?

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