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Editor’s
note: This is chapter 21 of the book Covenant Hearts: Marriage and
the Joy of Human Love. Click here
to buy this book.
One of my first divorce cases as a
young lawyer involved a family with several children. In those days,
courts usually assigned custody of younger children to the mother,
unless she was simply unfit. But for older children, the judge was
supposed to consider, among other things, with which parent the
child preferred to live. In our case, the divorcing couple had a
daughter about twelve years old.
I don’t remember much else about
the case, but I cannot forget the moment in the judge’s chambers
when I sat with the other lawyer, the judge, and the twelve-year-old.
When the judge asked whether she would rather live with her father
or her mother, she began to cry and couldn’t talk. Then she
looked at us with anguished eyes and asked, “Why can’t
I live with both my mom and my dad? I love them both. Why is this
happening? Who is doing this to our family?”
The image of this child feeling so
torn apart expresses some of what it means that marriage is a bond
not only between a husband and wife but between those two people,
their children, their families, and the larger society. The rupture
in her parents’ marriage was rupturing her heart — just
as, at the other end of the emotional spectrum, the healing and
nourishing of a strong marriage feeds a child’s soul.
Divorce can inflict such psychic damage
on children that its long-term consequences are in some ways similar
to the damage of child abuse, which can last a lifetime. Divorce
seldom causes childhood trauma that runs as deep as the trauma inflicted
by sexual abuse, and in a few cases, the children are better off
with divorced parents than they are living in a family of high conflict.
But the chances are that many adults
who divorce do not realize the damage their decision can cause their
children, just as many sexually abusive parents are woefully unaware
of the damage they do. What to them may seem trivial can shatter
a child’s emotional life, imposing a trauma that will unfold
for years, hindering the child’s own later marriage and life
experience.
Only in the last few years have we
begun to see the aggregate personal and social consequences of doubling
the divorce rate and quintupling the illegitimacy rate over a period
of thirty years. During the 1970s and 80s it was difficult to find
a consensus among researchers on these issues, mostly because it
takes a generation to demonstrate what happens to children who grow
up in single-parent families.
Also, the public had so willingly embraced
greater tolerance for alternative family lifestyles that prevailing
“politically correct” attitudes created a conflict of
interest for many researchers.
For example, in the United States presidential
election of 1992, Dan Quayle was essentially laughed off the national
stage for taking a stand against the deliberate decision of a popular
TV character, Murphy Brown, to have a child out of wedlock. Quayle
wanted to underscore his belief that children in single-parent homes
are at much greater risk than children with two parents, and he
thought society should have something to say about what family structure
was best for children.
The public’s initially negative
reaction to Quayle reflected the combination of tolerance and ambivalence
about personal lifestyle choices that had characterized the 1980s.
Then in 1993, a scholar named Barbara
Whitehead published an article called “Dan Quayle Was Right”
in the prestigious Atlantic magazine. She said that the Murphy Brown
show, and the media’s reactions to it, depicted “unwed
parenthood... not only as a way to find happiness but also as a
way to exhibit such virtues as honesty and courage.”
She thought the media’s reaction
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.
These children are also more likely
to be abused physically or sexually. More have emotional problems,
require professional counseling, and suffer from drug abuse. And,
contrary to some popular assumptions, they don’t just “bounce
back” after divorce or their parents’ remarriage; instead,
many of their problems continue for years, enough years that they
are much more likely to have troubled marriages themselves.
This is not to say that the children
of divorced parents cannot recover from the effects of their experience.
Many do, especially when blessed with an understanding of the gospel
and the Atonement’s power to repair the breach (Isaiah 58:12).
Many establish very secure homes, in which their early life experience
actually increases their sensitivity to the factors that maintain
a strong marriage. These cases are a tribute to those who succeed
against the odds.
Two years later, in 1995, a group of
scholars, including Barbara Whitehead, published a document called
Marriage in America, which called on the nation to “rebuild
a family culture based on enduring marital relationships.”
They summarized a large body of research to conclude that the no-fault
“divorce revolution” of 1968 had failed to reach its
“goals of fairness and economic equality.”
Moreover, the report said, society
is sending American children cultural messages that are “either
indifferent or hostile to marriage,” thereby “failing
to teach the next generation about the meaning, purposes, and responsibilities
of marriage. If this trend continues, it will constitute nothing
less than an act of cultural suicide.”
This group’s work helped to create
the national “marriage movement” of 2000.
The data behind these conclusions showed
that despite society’s having spent more on children in recent
years in public schools, welfare programs, and other places, child
well-being “has not improved. It has gotten worse —
much worse.”
For example:
- Juvenile violent crime increased
sixfold between 1960 and 1992.
- Reports of child neglect and abuse
have quintupled since 1976.
- Children’s psychological
disorders have all worsened — from eating disorders to drug
abuse. Depression among children has increased 1,000 percent since
the 1950s.
- Suicide among teenagers has increased
300 percent since the 1960s.
- Children spend eleven fewer hours
per week with their parents than in the 1960s.
- Poverty has shifted increasingly
to children.
The number of couples living together
increased nearly tenfold between 1960 and 1998. More than half of
all first marriages are now preceded by couples living together.
David Blankenhorn drew on these trends
to write Fatherless America: Confronting Our Most Urgent Social
Problem. His findings describe the products of divorce and births
outside wedlock, dealing primarily with youth violence, domestic
violence against women, child sexual abuse, and child poverty.
While such complex social ills have
many causes, Blankenhorn and his associates concluded that “the
decline of marriage” is their common denominator: “The
most important causal factor of declining child well-being is the
remarkable collapse of marriage, leading to growing family instability
and decreasing parental investment in children.”
President Gordon B. Hinckley quoted
a similar study in 2003: “Boys raised out of intact marriages
are, on average, more than twice as likely as other boys to end
up jailed... A child born to an unwed mother is about 2 and one-half
times as likely to end up imprisoned, while a boy whose parents
split during his teen years is about 2 and one-half times as likely
to be imprisoned.”
By 2001, data from the 2000 United
States Census showed that the thirty-year trend toward more unwed
childbearing and more divorce has remained fairly stable since 1995.
Now scholars who have been urging a return to pro-marriage attitudes
hope they may “soon be able to say, for the first time in
decades, that our national priority is to sustain” the slight
but apparent trend toward more family stability.
Still, a group of thirteen recognized
family scholars in 2002 published a report that summarized years
of data with such findings as the following:
- Children of divorced or unwed parents
are more likely than other children to become divorced themselves
or have children outside marriage.
- Divorce and unmarried childbearing
increase poverty for both children and mothers.
- Children of divorced or unwed parents
have higher rates of psychological distress, mental illness, suicide,
and educational failure.
- Boys raised in single-parent families
are twice as likely to engage in criminal behavior.
- Children living with single mothers,
stepfathers, or mother’s boyfriends are at greater risk
of abuse.
Church members are not immune to these
national trends. For example, the proportion of LDS young people
who suffer from emotional and mental disorders seems to have increased
substantially in recent years.
Dr. W. Dean Belnap, an LDS psychiatrist
who has spent many years working with troubled adolescents, told
me he has found that family breakdown is the most significant cause
of such problems among LDS youth, because these breakdowns disturb
a child’s normal psychological development and identity formation.
A study in 2003 by the Commission on
Children at Risk, Hardwired to Connect, validates Dr. Belnap’s
conclusion. It reports “the deteriorating mental and behavioral
health of U.S. children,” a national “crisis”
caused primarily by a lack of “close connections to other
people, and deep connections to moral and spiritual meaning.”
And the family, which “is usually
the source of the most enduring and formative relationships in a
child’s life,” has grown “steadily weaker”
since the mid 1960s.
It was precisely to guard against such
harm that the state has honored and upheld marriage as a social
institution, not just as a private, affectionate partnership but
as the very best place — with two parents whenever possible
— to raise children.
That’s why the Irish in Galway
placed that little crown on top of the heart held by the two cupped
hands in the Claddagh Ring. That’s why people in all nations
have required a marriage license to start a family and a judge’s
decree to get a divorce. That’s why legislatures and parliaments
have retained the right to say which relationships, which privileges,
and which duties will create and sustain marriages that promote
society’s welfare.
All societies, until now, have been
unwilling to leave the creation and dissolution of marriages to
mere individual preferences, because the way children are reared
affects entire cultures. England’s Patrick Devlin once described
the traditional understanding:
The association of man and woman
in wedlock has from time immemorial been of such importance in
every society that its regulation has always been a matter of
morals. Whether the union... should be dissoluble or not, and
what obligations the spouses should undertake towards each other
are not questions which any society has ever left to individuals
to settle for themselves. They must be settled according to ideas
of right and wrong which prevail in that society, that is, according
to its moral law; and because the institution of marriage is fundamental
to society the moral law regulates it very closely — much
more closely than in most other subjects in which the moral and
secular law both operate.
Until the last three decades, our laws
and social attitudes reflected this understanding. But today’s
environment reinforces the idea that marriage is a private choice,
not a public commitment.
Meanwhile, the doctrine of the restored
gospel about what parents owe children and society remains clear:
Husband and wife have a solemn responsibility
to love and care for each other and for their children…
Parents have a sacred duty to rear their children in love and
righteousness, to provide for their physical and spiritual needs,
to teach them to love and serve one another, to observe the commandments
of God and to be law-abiding citizens wherever they live. Husbands
and wives... will be held accountable before God for the discharge
of these obligations...
We warn that individuals who violate
covenants of chastity, who abuse spouse or offspring, or who fail
to fulfill family responsibilities will one day stand accountable
before God.
Yet recent social and cultural changes
have moved so far and so fast that young Latter-day Saints these
days are often surprised to discover how different the Church’s
teachings are from society’s norms — and, therefore,
from what may seem “normal” to them. Here are a few
examples of the disconnect between gospel teachings and society’s
changing family mores:
It is now far more common than it once
was for a single LDS girl to keep a child she has borne out of wedlock,
despite the Church’s counsel in such cases to marry or, if
that is not feasible, to place the child for adoption. More than
a few Laurel advisers have wondered whether to allow a seventeen-year-old
single girl to bring her baby to class; however, a Church directive
states that an unwed mother should not bring her baby to Young Women
classes.
Missionaries all over the world find
themselves teaching the gospel to unmarried couples who live together.
These couples are sometimes mystified by the requirement that they
must marry before they can be baptized.
Some LDS young women, who nearly always
want to have children, now say they are frightened by the very concept
of marriage, having picked up the message from the current environment
that marriage can trap them or tie them down. The connection between
a mature marriage and raising spiritually healthy children is not
as obvious to our young people as it is to older generations.
These trends have deprived many of
the rising generation of a once-instinctive understanding about
the influence of family lifestyle and divorce patterns on the character
and behavior of children and, hence, society. The entertainment
media continually reinforce the assumption that “personal
lifestyle” issues about living together, making love, and
having children are all matters of strictly personal choice —
victimless acts to be decided by consenting partners.
As such attitudes ripple through the
culture, it is no surprise that we are losing our collective grasp
of what marriage and parenting are about. People all around us are
giving up, getting out, and stepping out as if there were no tomorrow
— and no children.
A few divorces may actually be necessary
to protect children in “high-conflict families” who
are “at great psychological risk.” But such cases are
rare. In fact, “only a minority of divorces grow out of pathological
situations; much more common are divorces in families unscarred
by physical assault.”
And divorcing families that have lived
with, and perhaps worked on, manageable conflict typically discover
that the inevitable messiness of divorce makes things worse for
everyone — because “family breakup [itself] generates
its own conflict.” The benefits of divorce seldom outweigh
the costs, especially if one counts the costs to children.
Amid this confusion, adults who seek
to be free from the constraints of traditional family attitudes
simply have a conflict of interest in evaluating the effect of their
own behavior on children. Barbara Whitehead illuminated this conflict
in her 1993 article, when she compared Hallmark cards for divorced
adults with Hallmark cards for their children:
For grown-ups: Divorce heralds new
beginnings (A HOT NEW SINGLE).
For children: Divorce brings separation
and loss. (“I’m sorry I’m not always there when
you need me.”)
These cards... point to an uncomfortable... fact: what contributes
to a parent’s happiness may detract from a child’s
happiness. In short, family disruption creates a deep division
between parents’ interests and the interests of children.
After describing the damage done by
today’s increased family disintegration, Whitehead reported
that the nation is not as alarmed about all of this as one might
expect, primarily because the American people (like those in many
other developed nations) have simply changed their minds about whether
family disruption is bad:
What had once been regarded as hostile
to children’s best interests [is] now considered essential
to adults’ happiness...
Once the social metric shifts from
child well-being to adult well-being, it is hard to see divorce
and nonmarital birth in anything but a positive light…
This cultural shift helps explain what otherwise would be inexplicable:
the failure to see the rise in family disruption as a severe and
troubling national problem.
Nonetheless, in concept it is still
true that the state represents the community as a party to each
marriage and each divorce, not because the neighbors are trying
to pry into private affairs but because of society’s enormous
stake in the outcome and the offspring of each marriage. To marry
is still to make a public commitment that in bringing children into
the world, one accepts personal responsibility for those children
and for their influence on the kind of community we create over
time.
But the adults who have adopted the
cultural message of individual autonomy as today’s primary
value find that their own need for space, flexibility, and personal
fulfillment simply trumps the needs of the children in their lives.
Ironically, many of these adults justify their attitude by urging
that children should also have more autonomy — more freedom
to do as they please, without so many adults telling them what to
do.
I have seen this adult conflict of
interest at work in discussions about legal rights for children.
Childrearing makes heavy demands on the time, energy, and financial
resources of parents and communities. To escape those demands by
giving more “rights” to children is a beguiling invitation,
because it provides an easy rationalization for adults whose personal
convenience is also best served by the idea that they should leave
their children alone.
For example, schoolteachers and administrators
may find it not worth the patience required and the frustration
involved to provide students with meaningful discipline. Marriage
partners may think it unimportant to cooperate with each other for
the sake of their children. Divorced and unmarried fathers may feel
less obliged to make payments of financial support. Parents may
be unconcerned about employment or leisure time interests that conflict
with their children’s needs.
The growing preference of many adults
for a more casual sexual environment also encourages destructive
sexual permissiveness among adolescents. For example, a team of
distinguished researchers in the field of adolescent pregnancy concluded
a large study about rising rates of teen pregnancy with the chilling
observation that “for ourselves, we prefer to cope with the
consequences of early sex as an aspect of an emancipated society,
rather than pay the social costs its elimination would exact.”
In other words, the researchers could
clearly see ways to reduce teenage pregnancies, but they were not
willing to pursue those policies because they don’t want to
curb the morally permissive atmosphere that American adults have
now come to enjoy in the media and elsewhere “as an aspect
of an emancipated society.”
I once saw a small boy standing alone
on a street looking helpless and afraid. He was wearing a big T-shirt
bearing the slogan, “Leave me alone.” I thought he would
make a good poster child to illustrate the irony in the attitude
of adults who willingly abandon children to their “right”
to be “autonomous.”
America’s founding fathers had
a longer-term view about how to maintain a free and stable society.
They spoke in the preamble to the Constitution about “secur[ing]
the blessings of Liberty” not only “to ourselves”
but also to “our Posterity.” To make our own days and
those of our posterity “long upon the land” God has
given us, it is essential not only for children to honor their parents
but for parents to honor their children.
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