The Marriage Problem: How Our Culture Has Weakened Families

James Q. Wilson's book is an enlightening look at the state of marriage in America (although he cites statistics from other countries as well.) The work is easy to read and is credible. The reader will gain a clearer understanding of what is happening to families in the U.S. The children, of course, are the victims in the breakdown of the family. As they grow up, the cycle of divorce and single parenting continues. Wilson gives adequate solutions to these grave social problems that we face.

"Two nations, between whom there is no intercourse and no sympathy." Benjamin Disraeli was speaking of the nations of the rich and the poor, but Wilson sees underlying causes. One nation is married, reasonably affluent, educated, and invests heavily in their children. The other nation is fatherless, poor, and does not invest in their children. On page 11 he quotes a study by William Galston, a former advisor to President Clinton. Galston shows that you only have to do three simple things to avoid being poor: finish high school, marry before having a child, and wait until age 20 to have a child. Only 8% of people who do these three things are poor, compared to 79% for those who do not. The problems in the fatherless nation go beyond poverty. Children of single mothers are more likely to be delinquent; they are more likely drop out of school, become suspended and suffer from emotional problems. This is not from the lack of financial resources; the researchers Sara McLanahan and Gary Sandefur were able to show that the poverty that resulted from being a single mother only explained about half the difference in outcomes between children with single mothers and children with married parents. The results for cohabitation are not much better, particularly since cohabitating relationships typically end in less than two years, sometimes in marriage, but about as often in separation. Furthermore, the marriages that result from cohabitation are more likely to end in divorce. Wilson develops the theory of sex ratios. When the ratio between men and women is high, men have to compete with each other for women, and women that bargaining power to secure monogamous relationships. But when the ratio is low, women have to compete for the limited supply. This results in women having to accept sex outside of marriage, polygamy (depending on the culture), and a general loosening of morals as women use their sexuality to increasingly "outbid" each other for the limited supply of men. This explains a great deal of why single motherhood has devastated the black community in America; with many black men in jail the sex ratios are extremely low. But the research shows that sex ratios do not explain the full story. A whole host of research, from that of Guttantag and Secord, to Mark Fossett and Jill Keicolt, to James Wilson himself, show that the correlation between sex ratio and illegitimacy is stronger for blacks than it is for whites or Latinos. Wilson partly attributes this to slavery, and partly to the lingering effect of various African cultures, and makes a convincing case. Wilson also takes on the "disappearing jobs" theory of the increase in black out of wedlock childbirths. It suffers from numerous flaws. Christopher Jencks looked at black men with steady jobs. 80% of them were married in 1960, but only 66% were in 1980. The difference is that men with jobs were less inclined to marry. Furthermore, Robert Lerman and others have shown that immigrants in the sa

Marriage is a problem, argues Wilson. That is, it is in a problematic state. Marriage is good for societies, for individuals, and especially for children. But the Western world is quickly moving away from marriage. As a result a host of problems are arising. Wilson begins with what are now well-known and depressing figures. Any other type of relationship but marriage is bad for the adults and especially bad for the kids. Take cohabitation, for example. People who cohabit before marriage short-change themselves and their children in numerous ways. First, the average duration of a cohabiting couple is 1.3 years. Cohabiting couples are far more likely to divorce when they do marry than couples who did not cohabit before marriage. Moreover, children of cohabiting couples are likely to be as poor as children in single-parent families. And in England, children of cohabiting couples are twenty times more likely to suffer child abuse than kids from married couples. Or consider step-families. The homicide rate for children in such families is seventy times higher than for those living with both biological parents. Child abuse is also much higher in these families. The evidence merely confirms what common sense has always told us: "people care for their own children more than for those of others". Wilson then examines the social, cultural and biological/evolutionary evidence for why marriage and families exist. In addition, the historical development, and recent decline, of marriage and family are discussed. While a combination of nature and nurture, biology and culture, made marriage a civil necessity, the doctrines of the Enlightenment sowed the seeds of its demise. Beginning with the Enlightenment, marriage began to be seen less as a sacrament and more as a contract. Today it is seen less as a contract and more as an arrangement. Individual rights and freedoms, the product of modernism, have undermined the rationale for and the basis of marriage. Thus it is surprising that people bother to get married at all in the modern, secular, individualistic West. Wilson also examines how government policies, especially economic policies, impact on the family. He acknowledges that many policies have a negative impact on families, but questions to what extent government policies can in fact help families. While marriage is in the best interests of children, there are limits as to how much a government can do to encourage marriage. After examining a number of federal programs aimed at doing just that, Wilson concludes: "getting single mums to marry is harder than keeping married couples together". Thus while financial incentives from the government can help to an extent, they are no panacea. Indeed, the cultural incentives, or disincentives, to marriage, may be more crucial. And these cultural trends may be harder to overcome. A concern for relationships has replaced a concern for marriage. This is the result of larger cultural shifts such as the Enlightenme

Wilson's book goes beyond the surface of a lot of the talk about the state of the family today. Unlike some other publications geared toward the religous community, this is purely a secular work, even if it does confirm many of the problems pointed out by pro-family Catholic and evangelical groups. The thesis is this: in the wake of society's overall material wealth and the advancement of individual rights, both good things in general, the state of marriage as a societal good has declined considerably. In too many cases, the cohesive unit that functioned as a means of protection, support, and guidance for children has lost its glue, and the government has come to step in and perform some of these functions in certain situations, which isn't necessarily a good thing. The chapter-by-chapter layout takes a look at the problem from different angles (single motherhood, divorce, African-American slavery, etc.) and compares the trends not with a romanticized ideal, but with what other cultures have done historically, to determine whether this trend is an anomaly or something to be expected, and where it might lead. Among the more interesting tidbits is the fact that for whatever problem no-fault divorce has had today, it was not the result of a nefarious plan by feminists or others whose goal is to take down the family structure. Rather it was the unintended consequences of a plan to make technical corrections to the law to comply with what had become practice. The drafters of the no-fault laws were working under the naive assumption that these changes to remove the threat of a judical order finding fault would be complemented with government incentives to enter therapy and reconcile before the order be given. When this didn't happen, the no-fault divorce provisions made it easier to dissolve the marriage without any restrictions. This detail was to highlight that you're not getting a political or cultural polemnic in this book, but rather a systematic discourse on the problem with angles not normally seen in this debate.

Wilson's excellent book sumarizes the findings of virtually all of the factual studies of the consequences of divorce and illigitmacy for children and for American society done over the past decade and more. Those reviewers who have traduced the author are precisely the kind of ultra feminist ideologues who for over a decade have been denying the facts, ignoring the consequences, touting the tired old 60's rhetoric of rights without responsibilities, continuing to insist against all the empirical evidence that divorce is good for the children, and, all in all, burying their heads in rhetorical sand because the reality of the world they have made doesn't square with the prognostications of their ideology.