Marriage was once seen as a permanent bond intended to
promote monogamous love, spousal devotion, and childrearing. Today, however,
many view marriage, or rather its deliberate avoidance, as a means of defying
tradition, asserting feminist ideologies, and/ or avoiding commitment. Perhaps
most alarming, the mainstream public is supportive but ignorant of the
consequences of this shift.
A Pew
Study released Wednesday reveals that 50 percent of adults believe that
society is just as well off if people have priorities other than marriage and
children, whereas only 46 percent believe society is better off if people make
marriage and having children a priority. However, social science data suggests
otherwise. In marriage are contained the five basic institutions—the basic
tasks—of society: family, church, school, marketplace and government. MARRI research has emphasized
the multitude of benefits the intact, married family confers on children as
they learn to value and perform these five fundamental tasks. A few of these
advantages are highlighted below.
Family
Families with either biological or adoptive parents present
have the highest quality of parent-child relationships,
perhaps because marriage enhances an adult’s ability to parent.
Married people are more likely to give and receive support with their parents
and are more likely to consider their parents as means for possible support in
case of an emergency.
Furthermore, those
who marry experience increased commitment and stability. Men raised in married families have more
open, affectionate, and cooperative relationships with the women to whom they
are attracted than do those from divorced families. Correspondingly, married mothers report more
love and intimacy in their romantic/spousal relationships than cohabiting or
single mothers.
Church
A larger fraction of
adults who grew up in an intact married family than from non-intact family
structures attend religious services at least monthly. Those from married
families are less likely to see religion decline in importance in their lives,
less likely to begin attending church less frequently, and less likely to
disassociate themselves from their religious affiliation.
School
Children of married parents are more engaged in school than
children from all other family structures.
Individuals from intact families completed, on average, more years of schooling
and were more likely to graduate from high school and college than were their
peers raised in non-intact families.
High school students in intact families have GPAs 11 percent higher than those
from divorced families.
Marketplace
Intact married families have the largest annual income
and the highest net worth of all
families with children (widowed families excepted). Married couples file less than half of
all income-tax returns, but pay nearly three-quarters of all income taxes. Marriage increases the income of
single African-American women by 81 percent and single white women by 45
percent; African-American men also see an increase in income after marriage.
Government
Crime. Adolescents
from intact families are less delinquent and commit fewer violent acts of
delinquency.
Likewise, a lower fraction of
adults and youths raised in intact families are picked up by police than those
from non-intact families.
Violence and Abuse.
Marriage
is associated with lower rates of domestic violence and abuse, in comparison to
cohabitation.
Correspondingly, Children in intact married families suffer less child abuse
than children from any other family structure. Compared to teenagers from intact families, teenagers from divorced families
are more verbally aggressive and violent toward their romantic partners.
Health.
Married
men and women are also more likely to have health insurance.
A lower fraction of married than widowed, divorced or separated, never-married,
or cohabiting persons have fair to poor health.
Married people are least likely to have mental disorders,
and have higher levels of emotional and psychological well-being than those who
are single, divorced, or cohabiting.
This data indicates that,
contrary to popular opinion, society will not be “just as well off” if marriage
and childrearing is neglected or even rejected. Marriage is the
foundational relationship for all of society, and a prerequisite for a
prosperous nation.
Thinking otherwise, half of
Americans are out of touch with reality.
(For
full citations, please see the MARRI’s synthesis paper “164 Reasons to Marry”)
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