First of all, i don't particularly have a favorable opinion of marriage in general. I understand that most of it is probably from having observed mostly loveless relationships with parents sticking together just for the children's sake and watching them grow more and more miserable together. I don't particularly find a point to marriage beyond reasons adhering to money, alot of that may also have to do with my age. But having read this article got me thinking about the rising divorce rates, so i'll go ahead and chip in with my opinion on this first.
http://www.slate.com/id/2185944
I found it funny because this is exactly the kind of reasoning that people use to defend marriage when it comes to these arguments.
All that is being done is presenting statistical data without properly explaining them, he just grabs the conclusions and inmediatly classifies them as the effects of the lack marriage. Here, there wasn't even an attempt to explain how unwed parenthood causes these things. The idea of a single parent providing less monetary support for a child is evident, however the mention of it leading to inequality, psychological problems and school drop out is simply lazy reasoning.Some researchers identify out-of-wedlock births as the chief cause for the increasing stratification and inequality of American life, the first step that casts children into an ever more rigid caste system. Studies have found that children born to single mothers are vastly more likely to be poor, have behavioral and psychological problems, drop out of high school, and themselves go on to have out-of-wedlock children.
But he didn't mention that one key to effective fatherhood is first becoming a husband.
Having unmarried parents can be devastating for children who start out with no cushion in life. In 1999 congressional testimony, Isabel Sawhill of the Brookings Institution said that the increase in single-parent families—mostly due to unwed motherhood in the past few decades—"can account for virtually all of the increase in child poverty since 1970." A recent study found that the stress of early childhood poverty can literally damage developing brains.
Then there are those who say that...Mitt Romney mentioned the statistics in his presidential withdrawal speech. He cites declining religious observance, easily available pornography, and the possibility of gay marriage as the causes—a platform that seems unlikely to reverse the birth trends.
Smart people= more marriage= therefore marriage is a smart decision? Maybe it has more to do with the fact that college women may wait longer to marry/have children than marriage being the solution to all these problems. And that seems to tie in more with the with the second block, as it seems those with better education understand the need to not have children unless they are absolutely capable of handeling it. Sounds to me like the problem is people having children when they can't/shouldn't rather than them really needing to marry in the first place.And to avoid the trauma of divorce, those with less education began forgoing marriage altogether. Better-educated women, who once upon a time were at a disadvantage in finding a mate, "are now more likely to marry than their non-college peers," according to the National Marriage Project at Rutgers University.
But perhaps in our desire not to make moral judgments about personal choices, young women wholly unprepared to be mothers are not getting the message that there are dire consequences of having (unprotected) sex with guys too lame to be fathers.
Basicaly, this article sort of got me riled up as i saw it as another attempt to grab current problems in any given society and try to use them as justification for a more conservative agenda, that is, that all the bad things that happen now are happening because we're divorcing more/getting married less. What are your opinions on the article and on the idea of marriage in general? Also sorry for long post.