It's no surprise to me that young people are tired of their parents' loose attitudes towards marriage. According to an article from "ToTheSource", the Pew Research Center has been studying these attitudes (I can't find the exact Pew Study, but it rings true for me). Although some divorces are unavoidable and mistakes happen, no fault divorce has long given way to "trial marriages" and other problems. A different Pew Research study also shows some interesting statistics.
Young people want that to change. Whereas their parents believe that divorce should be considered more freely, children now see divorce as a last resort. That's refreshing.
What isn't so refreshing is their solution- cohabitation. Dr. Jennifer Morse has a great article on her website about how cohabitation doesn't lead to healthier marriages, and may contribute to an even higher divorce rate.
In my experience giving speeches on campuses, I have been stunned by how many students are sick of divorce. They’ll tell me about their parents’ four divorces. Or they’ll tell me how horrid it was when their mom kicked their dad out of the house. One young man described his humiliation watching his mom’s parade of boyfriends. Even students who disagree with me about things like gay “marriage,” admit I’m right about the problems of children of unmarried parents. These young men and women want lifelong marriage for themselves, and for their children.
Unfortunately, some of their other views will not serve them well in their ambitions for life-long married love. The same Pew report showed them to be tolerant of cohabitation. The trend toward cohabitation is partly due to fear of divorce: people view cohabitation as a safe alternative to marriage and as a test-drive for marriage. Unfortunately, neither of these perceptions is accurate. Cohabiting does not protect a person from the pain that breaking up so often causes. And, cohabiting couples are more, not less likely to divorce, if they ultimately do marry.
The Howard Center for Family, Religion and Society confirms the instability of cohabitation, especially when children are involved. From the report:
Governmental social agencies love to identify populations at risk to justify intervention programs that allegedly minimize those risks. But rarely is the welfare industry willing to relate childhood risks to parental marital status, perhaps fearing that acknowledging that children suffer from parental divorce or single parenthood might lower the self-esteem of their client base.
Yet the evidence continues to pour in, this time from across the Atlantic, that the retreat from marriage puts children at risk. In a new study of British data from the Office of National Statistics (ONS), researcher Henry Benson of the Bristol Community Trust has found that three quarters of all family breakdowns that affect young children involve cohabiting, but unmarried, parents.
According to the ONS numbers on divorce and jointed registered births, some 88,000 children under the age of five suffered from the separation of their unmarried parents in 2003. That compares with only 31,000 children under the age of five who experienced the divorce of their married parents.
Given that 59 percent of British households with children are headed by married parents and that 11 percent are headed by cohabiting parents, the disproportionately high number of breakups among the latter suggest their inherent instability and, one might add, their inherent unsuitability for rearing children who yearn for stability and belonging.
Whether social agencies, given their track record in dealing with domestic affairs, should attempt to entice cohabitants to marry is not all that clear. Yet they could begin to address the issue by elevating marriage as a public good and discouraging those things that deny the public good, including cohabitation, divorce, and illegitimacy, because they leave children out in the cold.
