Polemics

New study: unmarried parents four times more likely to split up than married couples

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Dina sent me this article from the UK Daily Mail.

Excerpt:

Unmarried parents are four times more likely to split up than those who have wed, research revealed yesterday.

It also indicated that co-habiting couples with children under 16 are now responsible for the majority of  family breakdowns.

On average, 5.3 per cent of these relationships ended each year from 2009-12, according to the study.

But among those who had taken their vows, the average rate was only 1.3 per cent, said the Marriage Foundation think-tank and university academics.

The high rate of co-habiting parents in family splits comes despite these couples making up only a fifth of those with children.

The figures were gathered from the findings of a £50 million state-sponsored research project, the Understanding Society survey.

Over the last 20 years, it has gathered information on the progress of families and now tracks events in 40,000 homes.

I have a friend who moved in with a non-Christian guy before she became a Christian and they broke up. She told me all about it. When I was listening to her, the thought occurred to me that women and men think that co-habitation is leading to different places. And it turns out that there is some evidence to support this intuition.

Consider  this fascinating article from the Atlantic, authored by marriage researcher W. Bradford Wilcox. The article discusses the variances between cohabitating men and women regarding goals and expectations.

Excerpt:

According to a new paper from RAND by sociologists Michael Pollard and Kathleen Mullan Harris, cohabiting young adults have significantly lower levels of commitment than their married peers. This aversion to commitment is particularly prevalent among young men who live with their partners.

Pollard and Harris found that the majority of cohabiting young men do not endorse the maximum indicator of relationship permanence: 52 percent of cohabiting men between ages 18 and 26 are not “almost certain” that their relationship is permanent. Moreover, a large minority (41 percent) of men report that they are not “completely committed” to their live-in girlfriends. By contrast, only 39 percent of cohabiting women in the same age group are not “almost certain” their relationship will go the distance, and only 26 percent say they are not “completely committed”. Not surprisingly, the figures above and below also indicate that married women and men are much less likely to exhibit the low levels of commitment characteristic of many cohabiting relationships today.

Women are thinking that it is going to lead to some deeper commitment from the man, but men are thinking that they are getting what they want already (sex) and that they want to avoid the higher risks of making a more formal commitment.

News

Is the healthcare.gov web site working?

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No, still not working as of Sunday morning:

Transcript from that clip:

GEORGE HOWELL, HOST: We know the first thing you have to do when you go to this website you have to select your state. Is that working?

ALISON KOSIK, CNN BUSINESS CORRESPONDENT: And what’s funny is I was talking with Matt, and, yeah, that seemed to work, right, when you logged on. But then came the road blocks. So tell me about what happened, because we’re getting another error message here, and it’s supposed to be running smoothly. We’re just not seeing that.

MATT SLOANE, CNN MEDICAL PRODUCER: Yeah, so, you know, we’ve been trying to get into the site since October 1 on and off again. I have to say it did work a lot more smoothly this morning. I got through. I picked my state. I put in all of my information and I got through the whole process in eight minutes. And then it said my status was in progress. So I went to refresh it and I got the error message.

There was some interesting discussion of how the web site was going on Fox News Sunday – specifically, this debate between Neera Tanden and James Capretta:

The key point here is that you need to understand that when the leftist says “better health plans”, they do not mean that you will keep your doctors. They are not saying you will keep your hospitals. They are not saying your deductible will be lower. They are not saying your co-payment will be lower. They are not saying that your premium will be lower. Better is not a quantifiable term, and that’s why she keeps saying “better” instead of talking about specific numbers. The specific numbers show that you are going to be paying a lot more for health care, assuming you are a middle-class working American. And that’s why the progressive debater says “better” instead of being specific about numbers. The numbers are not on her side, so she says “better”.

Now, if you ask her what better means, I would suspect that she means that everyone can now have free condoms or free sex changes or free IVF or free drug addiction therapy or free eco-therapy for depression about global warming or something that normal people don’t even want or need. That’s an example of what a progressive means by “better health care”.

News

New study: casual sex linked to poor mental health and suicidal thoughts

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Dina messaged me about this new study reported at Ohio State University, and published in the Journal of Sex Research.

Excerpt:

A new study suggests that poor mental health and casual sex feed off each other in teens and young adults, with each one contributing to the other over time.

Researchers found that teens who showed depressive symptoms were more likely than others to engage in casual sex as young adults.  In addition, those who engaged in casual sex were more likely to later seriously consider suicide.

“Several studies have found a link between poor mental health and casual sex, but the nature of that association has been unclear,” said Sara Sandberg-Thoma, lead author of the study and a doctoral student in human sciences at The Ohio State University.

“There’s always been a question about which one is the cause and which is the effect.  This study provides evidence that poor mental health can lead to casual sex, but also that casual sex leads to additional declines in mental health.”

Sandberg-Thoma conducted the study with Claire Kamp Dush, assistant professor of human sciences at Ohio State.  The research was published online recently in the Journal of Sex Research and will appear in a future print edition.

One surprising finding was that the link between casual sex and mental health was the same for both men and women.

“That was unexpected because there is still this sexual double standard in society that says it is OK for men to have casual sexual relationships, but it is not OK for women,” Kamp Dush said.

“But these results suggest that poor mental health and casual sex are linked, whether you’re a man or a woman.”

The study used data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health.  Adolescents from 80 high schools and 52 middle schools were interviewed when they were in grades 7 through 12 and then again when they were aged 18 to 26.

In all, this study involved about 10,000 people who were surveyed about their romantic relationship experiences across time, as well as depressive symptoms and thoughts of suicide.

Overall, 29 percent of the respondents reported engaging in any casual sexual relationship.  These were defined as any relationship in which the participant reported he or she was “only having sex with partner” as opposed to dating.  This included 33 percent of men and 24 percent of women.

The results showed that participants who reported serious thoughts of suicide or more depressive symptoms as teens were significantly more likely to report having casual sexual relationships when they were young adults.

Casual sex, in turn, was linked to further declines in mental health.  Specifically, those who had casual sex in their late teens and early 20s were significantly more likely to have serious thoughts of suicide as young adults, results showed.  In fact, each additional casual sex relationship increased the odds of suicidal thoughts by 18 percent.

However, casual sex in late teens and early 20s was not associated with changes in depression as a young adult.

I don’t think that parents cannot rely on the schools and universities to tell their children the truth about research like this. You’re more likely to get stuff like “Sex Week” at our institutions of higher education.

Here is what happens at Yale University’s “Sex Week”:

Yale has a long history of hosting sex-themed events at the university that appear, on the whole, to be intended more to titillate students than to educate them. Sex Weekend is organized by students, but is overseen and approved by university administrators, who grant the use of classrooms and university facilities for the events.

Numerous U.S. universities have begun to host “Sex Weeks” in recent years, a trend that was pioneered by Yale. Past events at Yale have included appearances by porn stars, live nudity, sex-toy giveaways, and screenings of a hard-core porn films, including one that reportedly depicted “fantasy rape.”

And don’t forget the workshops taught not by researchers, but by sex shop owners:

The workshop was taught by Jill McDevitt, a 27-year-old “sexologist” who also owns a sex shop in West Chester, Pennsylvaina, which sells vibrators and various sex toys.

She has posted videos of her educational workshops online, including one in which she demonstrates oral sex on a carrot.

So the university administration at Yale is presenting sex to students one way, but not really appealing to their minds with research studies. I think that they want to push young people to engage in premarital sex, especially hook-up sex, without telling them a thing about the consequences of doing so. Doing immoral things definitely breaks down your ability to be moral, and to make moral judgments. And that’s what the left does in order to make sure that the next generation is not conservative. People who have been socialized to think that promiscuity is normal are going to have a much more difficult time transitioning into marriage and parenting. And people who are not married and not parenting typically vote for parties on the political left.If we want to do something to counter what kids are told on university campuses during “Sex Week”, it’s up to us to use evidence from studies like the one above to make a case to them before they get the propaganda.