Tag Archives: Separation

News

New study finds that unmarried women can harm their children by dating

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Marriage proponent Maggie Gallagher writing in Human Events.

Excerpt:

Marriage matters, but why?

For more than 20 years, social scientists have consistently found that children do better raised by their mothers and fathers united by marriage.

For most of that time policymakers have focused on the problem of “father absence,” and it is a real problem. Very few boys and girls have involved, loving, supportive fathers if the man that made them is not married to their mama.

But a new crop of research is challenging the idea that the main or only problem with the decline of marriage is the absence of fathers. An equally big or even bigger problem may be the churning romantic lives of unmarried and divorced mothers.

[…]It’s not just cohabitation that puts children at risk; it’s dating instability as well. Even after controlling for the parent’s marital status at birth, maternal age, race, immigrant status, parents’ education, poverty, gender and low birth weight, the researchers conclude:

“We found that both types of partnership instability (coresidential and dating) are associated with lower verbal ability, more externalizing problems and more social problems, and that coresidential instability is associated with attention problems. Our study is the first to provide strong empirical evidence that dating transitions are similar to marital and cohabiting transitions in terms of their association with children’s school readiness.”

The dating lives of mothers who are not married when their children are born are particularly tumultuous as the researchers note:

“Half of children born to unmarried parents experience three or more changes by age 5. … These findings suggest that children born into alternative family forms are at a significantly higher risk for both academic and behavioral problems at school entry.”

This is an issue that I have long been interested in having observed the effects of this problem firsthand with my friends whose parents were going through divorces. In fact, this situation is even touched on in Shakespeare’s play Hamlet, when Hamlet’s mother remarries very soon and throws Hamlet’s world into turmoil.

Polemics

What are some of the risk factors for divorce?

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Note: I had to make major changes to the previous version of this post because I was too harsh. After getting some much needed chastisement from two of my good friends, I realized that the article was more of a warning to people about what mistakes lead to divorce, and not an endorsement of those mistakes. So below is an UPDATED post which is much more sympathetic.I apologize to everyone who was offended.

I found this article in the Wall Street Journal, which is the most popular article at the time I am writing this post.

The author lists some of the mistakes she made that led her to get a divorce in her first marriage.

This is the first thing I saw that caught my eye:

“Whatever happens, we’re never going to get divorced.” Over the course of 16 years, I said that often to my husband, especially after our children were born.

So she is trying to express an intention here, repeatedly, to her husband. I think the point here is that she did have good intentions but as we shall see that was not enough to prevent the divorce. That’s a warning to others that good intention are not enough.

Here is the second thing:

I believed that I had married my best friend as fervently as I believed that I’d never get divorced. No marital scenario, I told myself, could become so bleak or hopeless as to compel me to embed my children in the torture of a split family. And I wasn’t the only one with strong personal reasons to make this commitment.

I noticed that a lot of people seem to think that being compatible is very important to marriage. But I don’t think that it is the most important thing. For example, you would not expect two cocaine addicts or two gambling addicts, etc. to have a stable marriage. I think marriage is more like a job interview where there are specific things that each person has to be able to do in order to make it work. So again, she’s giving a warning to others that compatibility is not a guarantee of marriage success.

And there’s more:

My husband and I were as obvious as points on a graph in a Generation X marriage study. We were together for nearly eight years before we got married, and even though statistics show that divorce rates are 48% higher for those who have lived together previously, we paid no heed.

We also paid no heed to his Catholic parents, who comprised one of the rare reassuringly unified couples I’d ever met, when they warned us that we should wait until we were married to live together. As they put it, being pals and roommates is different from being husband and wife. How bizarrely old-fashioned and sexist! We didn’t need anything so naïve or retro as “marriage.” Please. We were best friends.

Sociologists, anthropologists and other cultural observers tell us that members of Generation X are more emotionally invested in our spouses than previous generations were. We are best friends; our marriages are genuine partnerships. Many studies have found that Generation X family men help around the house a good deal more than their forefathers. We depend on each other and work together.

So here I am seeing that she rejected sex roles, parental advice, or the moral guidelines of Christianity. Again, she is discussing some of the factors that I at least think contribute to divorce. I think that she is right to highlight the fact that she was wrong to disregard the statistics on cohabitation.

So here are some of the mistakes:

  • reject advice from parents
  • avoid chastity
  • cohabitate for EIGHT YEARS
  • embrace feminism, reject sex roles
  • thinking that good intentions would overcome every challenge

So, what does the research show works to have a stable marriage?

  • chastity
  • rejection of feminism
  • regular church attendance
  • parental involvement in the courting
  • parents of both spouses married

In my next post, I will be posting questions to help men to avoid marrying women like this and getting divorced. Stay tuned.

More related posts

News

New study finds that children of separation/divorce die 5 years earlier

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From Life Site News. (H/T Andrew)

Excerpt:

While many studies have shown the positive effects of stable natural marriage on the physical and mental health of husbands and wives, an eight-decade-long research effort initiated in 1921 by Stanford University psychologist Lewis Terman has found significant negative effects on the children of failed marriages.

The study found that such children died almost five years earlier, on average, than children from intact families.

In 1990, psychologists Howard Friedman and Leslie Martin began a follow-up of the work begun by Lewis Terman, whose main interest lay in a study of 10-year-olds in San Francisco, with the goal of forming a test to identify the potential of high intellectual achievement. One of the results of Terman’s work was the Stanford-Binet IQ test.

Friedman and Martin found that Terman’s original interviews with the children were so detailed and comprehensive that an analysis of follow-up interviews, and a study of the causes of death in the death certificates of participants, could shed some light on the significant factors that affect longevity.

The results of Mr. Friedman and Ms. Martin’s research are published in a book titled “The Longevity Project” and provide some sobering insights.

“Parental divorce during childhood emerged as the single strongest predictor of early death in adulthood,” the authors said.

“The grown children of divorced parents died almost five years earlier, on average, than children from intact families. The causes of death ranged from accidents and violence to cancer, heart attack and stroke. Parental break-ups remain among the most traumatic and harmful events for children.”

The authors noted that the early death of a parent did not have the same effect on children’s life spans or mortality risk as that of parental divorce and family break-up.

I think that depriving a child of a relationship with two opposite-sex parents over the long-term is child abuse. Children need to grow up with someone of each sex who is dedicated to them in a permanent, involved way. When will adults learn to think of what children need, instead of thinking of what adults want? Having a child is a very particular thing. There are certain beliefs you need to have, certain skills, certain assets and certain moral values. It’s not like buying a hamburger. It’s a little person that you are committed to. That little person will impose obligations on you. It is not there to entertain you, it is there to be loved and supported by you in effective ways. It’s not for you to use children like slaves to meet your own needs. Don’t have them if you won’t raise them.

Andrew sent me these articles from the UK about single motherhood by choice and fertility clinics for same-sex couples.