Article: Children and the Social Interest in Marriage

Meridian Magazine: Children and the Social Interest in Marriage
She [Barbara Whitehead] thought the media’s reaction [to Dan Quayle] illustrated broader efforts to depict “the married two-parent family as a source of pathology.” All of this, she explained, is part of an attempt to “normalize what was once considered deviant behavior,” such as divorce and out-of-wedlock birth. She then shared extensive research describing the harmful effects of single-parent households on children, at both the individual and the social levels. In general, despite some admirable exceptions by single parents who succeed valiantly despite the risks, children in single-parent or step-parent families are more likely than children in intact families to be poor, to drop out of school, to have trouble with the law — to do worse, in short, by most definitions of well-being than children in two-parent families.