Americans like to think of their country as a family-centered society. Sadly, it isn’t. The numbers speak for themselves. More than half of all births to women under 30 occur outside marriage in America. More than 40 percent of unmarried cohabiting couples have children—but these relationships are five times more likely to break up than marriages, which themselves have nearly a 50 percent likelihood of ending in divorce. Asked recently whether children were important to having a successful marriage, only 40 percent of Americans said yes. Ranked more important: sharing household chores; intimacy; and mutual interests.
The numbers I just cited come from a recent eye-opening report by a writer I’ve admired for many years. Barbara Dafoe Whitehead is a journalist who first rose to prominence with a 1993 article in The Atlantic Monthly magazine provocatively titled “Dan Quayle Was Right.” The article detailed then-new sociological research showing that, cultural wishful thinking aside, the rise in divorce that began in 1970s America had devastating effects on children.
I still remember reading that article. I was in college, years and years away from marrying and having children of my own. I knew nothing about parenting, about families, about marriage. My own parents remained married until my father died five years ago. Yet for some reason the article struck a deep chord. I have no idea why. Somehow it cemented something I’ve always felt intuitively. Families matter. They matter more than we understand.
Unfortunately that sentiment doesn’t seem to be shared in contemporary American popular culture. Americans pretend to share it. They get riled up by hot-button political issues and make grandiose statements about “the institution of marriage.” None of the rhetoric is backed up by action. Many American corporations offer virtually no paid maternity leave. Paternity leave is out of the question. (It doesn’t have to be. See this fascinating article about the effect on fatherhood of a recent Swedish paternity-leave mandate.)
Publicly funded universal preschool is a political nonstarter in this country. Ditto adequate provision for long-term elder care. I still remember the expression of utter shock on the face of a friend in Mexico when I told her about American nursing homes. “You mean you don’t take care of your parents yourselves? You don’t move them in with you?” Of course not. Because Americans’ real priorities are themselves, not their families. We are a materialistic, self-reliant, freedom-loving society that loathes limits on our self-determination and resents being asked to be responsible for others.
That’s the implication of Dafoe Whitehead’s latest research. The report I read is called Life Without Children: The Social Retreat from Children and How it is Changing America. It’s part of a research project Dafoe Whitehead co-directs called The National Marriage Project, a Rutgers University-based initiative that seeks to gather and disseminate non-partisan research on American marital and family life.
The report is 46 pages long and I can’t begin to summarize it here. This passage, though, struck me: “In recent decades, marriage (in America) has been deinstitutionalized—that is, it has lost much of its influence as a social institution governing sex, procreation and parenthood. Legally, socially and culturally, marriage is now defined primarily as a couple relationship dedicated to the fulfillment of each individual’s innermost needs and desires.”
That is, for many Americans, getting married is no longer seen primarily as the first step in starting a family. It’s seen as an end in itself, the culmination of a lifelong quest for a soulmate relationship that mutually enables both partners to achieve their life’s full potential.
I don’t begrudge people who get married for that reason. More power to them. The problem arises when such couples have children. Children, as any parent will tell you, make an inwardly focused marriage impossible. They require a massive investment of time, emotion and energy. They repay that investment many times over. But they change the nature of a marriage. They require parents to look beyond themselves, to change their priorities and their definition of what constitutes personal success and fulfillment. You can’t be self-centered and be a parent without damaging both yourself and your child.
Here’s how Dafoe Whitehead puts it: “Thus, although this new kind of American marriage is potentially more rewarding for adults, it is demonstrably less secure for children. The high expectations for personal satisfaction in marriage, though a good thing to pursue and even better to achieve, have also made such marriages harder to sustain. The greater liabilities and costs associated with the fragile, couple-centered marital ideal fall heavily on children….In short, soulmate marriage is more oriented to meeting adults’ emotional needs for intimacy than to ensuring children’s emotional needs for secure and long-lasting attachments.”
Why has this change occurred in American society? What does it mean for those of us who are trying to raise children? Why do people have children in the first place anyway? Does religious faith enter this picture at all? Those are all big questions, and I want to try to tackle them in subsequent blog posts. For now it’s enough to raise the issue and share this information, which I found fascinating and ultimately sad.
A society disinterested in children is, to me, a sad society. A society lacking in imagination and love. A society more focused on getting than giving. More focused on freedom than responsibility. I look forward to thinking about this more and sharing with you what I come up with.
