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WHY MARRIAGE?
Part 3:
Marriage Blesses Children
by Norman and Ann Bales
All About Families

When Dan Quayle said that children do better when both parents are in the home, he was ridiculed and condemned for being insensitive to single parents. Few people ever got beyond the sound bite on that one, but it's true. If you want to bring children into the world and give them the best advantage, you will work on building a quality marriage. As a matter of fact, we believe that's the best thing you can do for your children.

On the other hand, we believe that single parents need all the help they can get. Sometimes single parents are trying to do the job by themselves because they don't have any other choice. Can anyone really question the fact that child does better with two parents in the home? After reviewing an enormous amount of statistical date, Sara McLanahan and Gary Sandefur concluded, "If we were asked to design a system for making sure that children's basic needs were met, we would probably come up with something quite similar to the two-parent family." Growing Up With a Single Parent: What Hurts, What Helps (1994).

Children in single parent families should not be punished because they have no control over their status. Before we plan to put them in that kind of arrangement, we need to understand their bleak prospects for the future. They are more vulnerable to health problems, have a higher risk for injury, are far more likely to have problems like depression, attention problems, aggressive problems, etc. There is a greater tendency toward delinquency. They are more likely to live in poverty. They are more apt to have grade problems in school and the young girls who grew up in a single parent home are more likely to experience teenage pregnancy. (Source Glen T. Stanton. Why Marriage Matters. 1997. (Also look at the writings of Whitehead and Wallerstein.)

But what about children who grow up in stepfamilies? While we support every legitimate effort to improve the quality of life in stepfamilies, we also recognize an increased level of difficulty for parents. Stepfathers and stepmothers have an enormous task on their hands when they try to become substitute parents. Barbara DaFoe Whitehead observed, "Although children in stepfamilies enjoyed incomes roughly equivalent to those in intact original two-parent households, they were two to three times more likely to suffer emotional and behavior problems and nearly twice as likely to have developmental and learning problems as children in intact families." The Divorce Culture (1996).

In their recent book, The Unexpected Legacy of Divorce, (2000) Wallerstein, Lewis and Blakeslee reported on the results of observing children for 25 years following the divorce of their parents. They argue that "Children in post divorce families do not, on the whole, look happier, healthier or more well adjusted even if one or both parents are happier." The so-called experts on divorce used to think that children fared better after divorce because the fighting came to an end. Apparently, no one bothered to ask the kids.

Unless there was abuse and violence, the children themselves report that life apart from their natural parents isn't all that great. They have memories of traveling on airplanes by themselves at a very young age in order to visit a parent. They had no control over the decisions about where and with whom they were to spend their time. They felt social ostracism from their friends who lived with intact families. When it was time to go off to college, they wondered where the money would come from. When their parents began a relationship with a new mate or "significant-other" they wondered how long that would last. There are some exceptions, but for the most part, children fare better when their parents are married to each other and stay that way.