The Two-Parent Heresy
The Atlantic’s cover story exposes what academia and the media have tried to suppress: Children need their parents.
The April cover of the Atlantic provocatively shouted, “Dan Quayle Was Right.” The issue quickly disappeared off the racks. And well it should. Barbara Dafoe Whitehead’s synthesis of contemporary research on the decline of the American family should be required reading for all Americans. Despite academia’s and the media’s view that “the changes in family structure are, on balance, positive,” Whitehead reports that the tide of scientific evidence shows otherwise: the decline of the two biological-parent family is extracting a horrific toll on our nation’s children.
Christians have good reason for being suspicious of social-science research. In the field of sexuality, for example, the work of Alfred Kinsey now stands as a powerful example of ideological biases leading to poor research methods, which, in turn, generate fallacious results. Studies on the effectiveness of sex-education and family-planning programs have declared their success in fostering effective “birth control,” leading many to think such programs decrease unwanted pregnancies and premarital sex. In reality, these programs manage to control births by increasing the use of abortion to “terminate pregnancies.” Social-science research is particularly vulnerable to distortion in pursuit of ideological agendas, and the landmark Atlantic cover story is a case study of how that happens.
Whitehead ties the steady decline of marriage in America to three assumptions, which took hold in the sixties: that women could afford financially to be mothers without the support of a husband, that divorce caused no significant permanent harm to children, and that all diversity in family structure is good. The result? Today half of all marriages end in divorce. People who cohabit are more likely to divorce, not less. Most divorcees will remarry. More second marriages than firsts end in divorce, more thirds than seconds, and so forth. More and more children are living in single-parent, stepparent, and cohabiting homes.
While there are many notable exceptions, children of marriages that end in divorce, and children of single mothers, are more likely to be poor and stay poor, to be dependent upon welfare, essentially to be deserted by their fathers both financially and relationally, to have emotional and behavioral problems, to fail to achieve academically, to get pregnant, abuse drugs and alcohol, to get in trouble with the law, and to be sexually or physically abused.
Children in stepfamilies are generally worse off than kids in single-parent homes. They are more likely to be sexually or physically abused. They are less likely to feel a part of a family. Stepparents invest less rather than more time in their kids.
And the evidence suggests that many of these kids do not “bounce back” as was previously assumed. For many, the scars last into adulthood, interfering with their vocational stability, capacity to nurture children, and to have a stable sense of well-being. In perhaps the most tragic irony, many have difficulty forming lasting love relationships and are more likely to get divorced themselves.
According to Whitehead, the core truth that emerges from the research is this: “The adult quest for freedom, independence and choice of family relationships conflicts with a child’s developmental needs for stability, constancy, harmony, and permanence in family life. In short, family disruption creates a deep division between parents’ interests and the interests of children.”
Why has it taken so long for social scientists to admit these realities? In part, they have quailed before iconoclasts who rail against any attempt to speak of how it ought to be. The power of social strictures that once helped keep marriages together and unmarried people out of reach of others’ beds is now directed effectively at muzzling those who might point out the damage the erosion of the family is causing. In our culture, says Whitehead, “the worst thing you can do is make people feel guilty or bad about themselves.” And these findings often go against the personal values and personal life choices of social science researchers.
Whitehead suggests that the media, in an amazing inversion of reality, often depict “the two-parent family as a source of pathology.” She suggests this may be due to society’s attempt to come to grips with ever widening diversities of lifestyles. When we have trouble coping with our perceptions that our world is in trouble, we respond by normalizing the pathological and pathologizing the normal. Two-parent families are made to look like stifling prisons, while Murphy Brown looks courageous and admirable.
So Dan Quayle was right about the two-parent family. That should not surprise anyone who accepts God’s design for marriage as a lifelong bonding between man and woman. The larger question for Christians is how to respond wisely to this new awareness.
First, we should redouble our commitment to living out Christian marriage and Christian singleness. Both are vocations; neither is a natural state of affairs to sinful people. But by our acts of fidelity we may be able to help counteract the damage done by the effects of sinful life choices across the generations.
At the same time, we must not let our excitement over this scientific endorsement of God’s view of the family degenerate into pride or self-righteousness. We cannot ignore the evil perpetrated within intact families—such as the physical, emotional, and sexual abuse of children. We must also avoid using this new information simply to blame the victims of family tragedies, thereby compounding their pain.
A correct diagnosis is a step toward health, but it is not a cure. Our culture is beginning to realize it is ill. Christians can help to administer the treatment.
By Stanton L. Jones, chair of the psychology department of Wheaton College.
Are Christians Fanatics?
The rush is on to link the religious lunatics of our time—namely, David Koresh, who believed he was the Messiah, and Michael Griffin, who believed it was God’s will to stop abortion with a .38 caliber revolver—with mainstream Christianity in America.
Shortly after Griffin gunned down Dr. David Gunn, Anthony Lewis wrote in the New York Times that the murder “tells us the essential truth about most abortion activists. They are religious fanatics who impose their version of God’s word on the rest of us.” Others in the media joined in collapsing the space between faith and fanaticism. Columnist Ellen Goodman likened antiabortion activists to domestic terrorists, on a par with those who blew up the World Trade Center. Time’s Lance Morrow saw these recent tragedies as born of the “death force” of faith.
Not all media commentators, fortunately, have religious and historical blinders. Columnist Charles Krauthammer points out in Time magazine, “For the past half-century more than a quarter of the earth’s people were controlled by political movements whose pursuit of the millennium was as fanatical as that of their religious counterparts—and far more destructive.… Has any religious vision occasioned more human sacrifice than ‘total communism’?” Think about our century: Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot. Nonreligious fanatics have destroyed millions of lives.
So why do some see the violent acts of Koresh and Griffin as indictments of faith itself? Ignorance and insecurity play a part. But believer and unbeliever should keep in mind one thing: If this kind of behavior were typical for people of faith, it would not be front-page news.
By Kenneth M. Meyer, president of Trinity Evangelical Divinity School in Deerfield, Illinois.
After I Graduate
This month thousands will graduate from the nation’s colleges. CT asked Michael D. Groat, student body president at Gordon College in Wenham, Massachusetts, for a perspective from the new generation of leaders.
From my view in the graduation line, things look disheartening. Gangs carve out city blocks for themselves. Lakes and rivers spit up gobs of trash and toxins. The holy priest is no longer wholly trusted, and society is fragmented by moral and cultural relativity.
All of us in the Class of ’93 are disheartened by the prospect of trying to clean up a culture that someone else messed up. We have to live with the results, and that scares us. It is easy to want to give up, to blame our elders, to buy into the spirit of nihilism that hangs over our generation like a rain cloud.
Critiques of today’s college students portray us as self-centered hedonists, and there is a lot of truth in that. But why shouldn’t we grab all the gusto we can? Practically every message we have received, from childhood on, has been delivered in splashy, sexy, sensuous overtones. In psychological terms, the generation at the helm of the economy provided the stimulus; we are just providing the response.
But not all of us are ready to throw in the towel. Some of us have been fortunate enough to hear from Christian professors and fellow students that if there is any hope for the world, it will come from people who fully integrate their Christian faith with all of life. In a world with few positive role models, some of us have found meaning at colleges where commitment to Christ is upheld as worth dying for.
Our generation looks at a bleak landscape. But some of us have been filled with the zeal to reclaim the world for Christ. We sense our faith has everything to do with the so-called secular world. We are determined to apply that faith in wise, compassionate, and energetic ways.
