Kevin and Margaret Andrews

What does it mean to rebuild a culture of marriage?  We approach this question from an Australian perspective, both in a policy and practical sense.  But we recognize that despite the many commonalities in the economic, social and cultural life of the industrialized nations, there are also differences. We do not pretend that our experiences in Australia are universally applicable. Rather, we offer an overview by which you may make a comparison, which may be useful, even if not precisely applicable. The industrialized nations are all confronting many similar social, cultural and political trends[1] To learn from one another, we must tell each other something of our national and cultural experiences. To foster such learning, let us reflect on some global societal changes in recent decades.

I.  SOCIETAL CHANGES AND FAMILIES

For the past two decades, discussion about family has been defined in a negative, backward looking manner by reference to divorce. From the early 1970’s, Western society has undergone a divorce revolution--by which we mean a steady displacement of marriage by a culture of divorce and single parenthood.[2]

While it is not possible to detail the myriad of changes in family structure, it is possible to describe a series of trends effecting families throughout the industrialized world.  Although the majority of dependent children in most industrialized nations still live with biological parents married to each other, an overview of the past 50 years indicates a continuing retreat from marriage.  As the following summary illustrates, there have been a series of changes in family patterns throughout the industrialized world, all indicative of a decline in marriage and a weakening of family life.

People are marrying less.

In Australia in 1947, 44 out of every 1,000 women married in a given year, compared with just 29 in 1991. The crude marriage rate (the annual number of marriages per 1,000 people) fell to 6.2 in 1994, almost as low as during the Great Depression, and half the rate during World War II. The number of people aged over 15 who are married fell from 65.4 percent in 1976 to 57.4 percent in 1994.

These figures reflect trends elsewhere. In Britain, for example, there were 311,000 marriages in 1992, down from 415,000 in 1970. In 1960, for every 1,000 women over 16 years of age, 82 married for the first time. By 1992, this figure had fallen to 47, the lowest rate since statistics have been collected for a century and a half.[3]

Those couples who marry do so at an older age.

In Australia in 1947, the median age at marriage was 25.3 years for grooms and 22.5 for brides. These ages dropped to 23 and 21 in the early 1970s. But by 1994, the median age had risen markedly to 29 years for grooms and 26.6 years for brides.

In 1972, one-third of women had married by the time they turned 20, and eight in ten reaching 25 had married before. By 1991, just one in twenty had married by age 20, and less than half by age 25.

These statistics reflect major changes in the pathways that couples take into marriage. According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics in 1993, about 57 percent of marriages were preceded by a period of cohabitation. The figure more than doubled in two decades.

In the United States, the proportion of couples living together before marriage increased from 11 percent in the years 1965-74 to 44 percent in the 1980-84 and has continued to increase since. The number of unmarried couples has increased more than six-fold since 1970.[4] The pattern is repeated elsewhere. In Norway, for example, 62 percent of childless couples are cohabiting. Among couples with two children, 15 percent are cohabiting.[5]

According to the 1991 Australian Family Formation Project, a fifth of those in existing de facto relationships had been involved in their relationship for three months or less before moving in together; a further 25 percent had known each other for four to six months; and 28 percent for seven to twelve months before they started living together. The study also found that pre-marital experiences contributing most to the risk of marital breakdown are pre-marital cohabitation, having a child out of wedlock, and leaving home at an early age.[6]

There has been a dramatic increase in divorce

In Australia in 1950, there were 5 divorces per 1,000 married women, a figure that fell through the 1950s to just 2.8 in 1961. Following the introduction of welfare benefits for single parents in 1972 and no-fault divorce laws in 1975, this figure leapt to 18.8 in 1976 before falling to 10.6 in 1986. The rate has since crept up to 12 in 1994, quadruple what it was three decades before. The trend is similar elsewhere.

The number of children involved in divorce has continued to grow since the early 1970’s.

“Parental divorce disrupts the lives of nearly one in five young Australians under the age of 20, a disruption related to long-term social and economic disadvantages,” according to Australian Institute of Family Studies researchers Kate Funder and Simon Kinsella.[7]  In the 25 years between 1975 and 2000, a million Australian children will have experienced their parents’ divorce. The pattern is repeated throughout the world. Each year some 300,000 divorces involving children occur in the U.S., more than 80,000 in the U.K., and 60,000 in Germany, to give but three examples.

The rates of remarriage have fallen over the past 20 years.

According, to the sociologist Peter McDonald, the Australian remarriage rate has more than halved in two decades, falling for males from 246 per 1,000 divorced persons in 1971 to 120 by 1991; and for females from 215 per 1,000 to just 101 by 1991. The remarriage rate for men in England and Wales fell from 70.4 per 1,000 widowed or divorced in 1971 to 44 in 1991.[8] Where remarriages do occur, the divorce rate is even higher than for first marriages.[9]

Families are having fewer children.

Throughout the Western world, the familiar population pyramid is being turned upsidedown. Australian demographics illustrate the trend. In 1947, when the nation’s population was 7.5 million, there were 182,000 births. By 1993 the population topped 18 million, but there were only 260,000 births.

The proportion of children born out of wedlock has increased dramatically.

In Australia in 1947, only one in 25 children was born out of wedlock; today it is one in four. This trend is evident in other western nations. In New Zealand, 38 percent of children are born out of wedlock.[10]  In the United States, unwed parenthood has now reached virtual parity with divorce as a generator of fatherless homes.[11]

The proportion of single parent families has increased markedly.

Of the 620,000 single parent families in Australia in 1993, 84 percent were mother-headed. An Australian Institute of Family Studies survey which interviewed parents 18 months after the birth of their child found that 19 percent of de facto couples had separated, compared to 2 percent of married couples. In the United States, 56 percent of all black children live with one parent. The share of all U.S. children who live with both parents declined from 88 percent in 1960.2 to 69 percent in 1995.[12]

Between 1971 and 1991, the number of single-parent households in Great Britain more than doubled (from 570,000 to 1,300,000), as did the number of children living in these households (from one million to 2.2 million). As a percentage of the population, those living in these households increased four-fold.[13]

Families increasingly have both parents in the paid workforce

Perhaps the most profound changes affecting families have been in the relationship between families and work over the past three decades. These changes reflect the participation of women in the paid workforce and the changing face of work.

The proportion of married women in the paid workforce has increased throughout the industrialized world. In Australia, for example, the percentage of married women in paid employment jumped from 29 percent in 1966 to 53 percent today. Just under half of Australian mothers with children aged four years or younger are now in the paid labor force. In the United Kingdom only 57 percent of employees are in traditional employment working full-time for an employer. Twenty-five percent work part-time, 13 percent are self-employed, and 5 percent are contract and casual workers. Sixty percent of couples with children have both partners in the workforce. Labor force participation by married women with children under six years of age increased in the United States from 18.6 percent in 1960 to 59.6 percent in 1993.[14]

Not only has the participation rate of women in the workforce grown while that of men has declined relatively, the areas of work in which women have been employed are in the fields upon which modern economies are increasingly reliant.[15] While much still needs to be done to ensure equal opportunities for women in the workplace and to provide the flexibility required by women pursuing careers, there is a growing body of male blue-collar workers for whom employment is becoming increasingly uncertain.

The changes have also created new tensions for family life. Many women have had to work a double shift, juggling their paid work with family duties. An increasing number of families, cannot choose to keep one parent at home. Many women join the paid workforce for career reasons.  But Australian social researcher Jeanne Strachan identifies three other groups of working mothers. First, there are the former full-time mothers, usually 40, who were home for most of their children’s school years and have gone back into the workforce “for financial reasons to provide the family with extras, but not for the family’s survival.” Second, there are the home-by-4:00 p.m. workers.  Finally, there is the third group, which Strachan calls “the victim workers—the women who, for whatever reason, have no choice as to whether to work or not, and yet have pre-school age children.”[16]

These categories are not mutually exclusive. Women who have turned to outside work through financial necessity often also value the sense of identity and purpose and the break from unpaid work it brings. Paid work outside the home became the symbol for women of changing cultural attitudes. But part of the price is fatigue, concern about insufficient time for children, and anger that men have not recognized or appreciated the costs involved. The consequence is a new tension between the essential family tacks of loving and working.

Yet a series of studies suggest that as many as 60 percent of both men and women would prefer to have the mother stay at home while the children are small. Those who do stay at home, often at the expense of career and family finances, resent the fact that their work is no longer valued by society.[17]  A survey by the Australian Institute of Family Studies finding that more than a quarter of working mothers of pre-school children would prefer to be at home—or at least reduce their outside working hours—brought a flood of positive responses to a newspaper editorial which asserted:

The debate should be about logical policy principles and economic good sense. It is not…the case that married women should move over to make room in the workforce for unemployed men…But it is a tragedy that so many people are reluctantly in jobs with their children being brought up by others, while so many who want work cannot get it.[18]

These changes illustrate the issues facing many people. In the quest for global competitiveness and the maintenance of real standards of living, individuals have increasingly been pulled in two directions, either under the pressure of market forces to obtain additional income, or into increasing dependency upon the welfare state—or both.  These pressures are unlikely to abate. Many families maintained their real standard of living through the 1980’s by finding a second income. Significantly, tens of thousands of women—mothers, wives and sisters—entered the workforce during the 1980’s, sacrificing their first choice in family commitments and often accepting a reduced quality of life in order to provide the additional wages essential to keeping their families afloat.[19]  In Australia, for example, wages as a proportion of the national product were 64.1 percent in 1983.  By 1991, they had fallen to 56 percent.

The problem today is that fewer and fewer families have a non-working spouse to bolster purchasing power for another decade.  Yet the current trend in the declining real value of wages, and the increase in part-time and casual work is likely to continue as the globalization of trade and commerce inevitably reduces the value of Western labor.

The effect of the fall in real wages has been masked throughout the 1980’s by claims of productivity growth.  But much of this growth has been horizontal, arising from the influx of new workers or increases in hour of paid work—rather than vertical, resulting from rises in real hour output and wages.

Throughout the past decade, the gap between the rich and the poor has widened in many nations.  To take the example of prosperous Australia:  Whereas in 1982-83 the top one percent of income-earners equaled the total earnings of the bottom 11 percent, by 1988-89, the top one percent earned an amount equal to the total incomes of the bottom 21 percent.  As the Australian Catholic Bishops noted in their document Common Wealth for the Common Good, this was a “massive redistribution between the social classes.”[20]

Conversely, dependency on the state has risen markedly over the past three decades throughout the Western world.  In April 1993, the Commission of the European Communities called for debate at the community level on the future of social welfare systems, stating that these “systems are now causing budgetary problems for all member states, casting doubt on the future level of social protection governments will be able to afford.”  Elsewhere, governments have progressively targeted benefits and reduced access to welfare.

Many of the current changes in the nature of work are driven by the imperative to sustain a globally competitive economy, to ensure a vital market.  Many also require an efficient and caring state.  Yet a consequence of these developments is that neither employment in the market nor reliance on the welfare state provide a sense of economic security.  In his opening speech for the 1993 Brussels seminar conducted by the Commission of the European Communities, Padraig Flynn highlighted the fact that working life, like family life, is now “marked by abrupt change and discontinuity.”

These changes have a direct impact on young couples contemplating marriage and family life.  Speaking in 1995, the Australian social researcher Jeanne Strachan commented:

Young couples today are the first generation since the war to face the reality that they often can’t obtain, even with two full-time workers in the house, what their own parents saw as fair and reasonable reward for their hard work.[21]

These trends also place increasing pressures on community life and our communal institutions, such as voluntary agencies and community groups.  Families are suffering greater stress today than ever before; participation in a range of community groups is declining at the very time that their services are increasingly called upon; and the most fundamental of community activities—work—is denied to a vast number of people.

In many nations, the population is aging

Aging populations have a major impact on nations.  By the year 2020, many nations will face a major crisis in providing for their aged population.  According to the OECD, the ratio of older people to those in the workforce in 1990 was 19 percent.  But by 2030, this dependency ratio will double to 38 percent across the OECD.  In Germany, it is expected to soar to 49.2 percent, in Italy 48.3 percent, France 39.1 percent, Austria 44 percent, Belgium 41.1 percent, USA 36.8 percent, and Australia 33 percent.[22]

In countries like Australia and the United States, there has been a continual shift of government resources from couples with children to older people.[23] This shift in the allocation of resources continues apace.  Extrapolating from current trends for both nations, we may anticipate that some 40 percent of the population will require long-term care at some stage of their lives.[24]  In Germany, the proportion of the population in the working age group of 26 - 59 is only 36.5 percent, while the proportion aged 60 and over is 35.8 percent.  Demographers predict that the aged will increase to 43.9 percent of the population by 2010, and 67.2 percent by 2050.[25]

A clear trend

All of these changes are having a profound impact on families.  David Popenoe has highlighted five measurable shifts affecting family life:

• First, rising rates of divorce and unwed childbearing, which mean the steady disintegration of the married, mother-father childraising unit. 

• Second, the growing inability of families to carry out their primary social functions: maintaining the population level, regulating sexual behavior, socialising children, and caring for family members. 

• Third, the transfer of influence and authority from families to other institutions, such as schools, peer groups, the media, and the state. 

• Fourth, smaller and more unstable family units. 

• And fifth, the weakening of familism as a cultural value in relationship to other values, such as personal autonomy and egalitarianism.[26]

Taken together, the statistics appear to reveal the steady displacement of a marriage culture with a culture of divorce and single parenthood.  The sanguine view of these developments that society is merely returning to the circumstances of a century ago is countered by the trends which reveal a continuation of these changes.  We believe that these statistics reveal a condition which requires an appropriate societal response to avoid further fragmentation of families and communities, and the alienation of individuals.  A significant number of people are now trapped in poverty.  When day to day stability and predictability are lost in family life, chaos is also likely to develop in our communities.

II.  PROSPECTS FOR CHILDREN

If these developments were associated with an improving lifestyle for our children, they might be applauded.  Over the past three decades Gross Domestic Product has increased to record levels.  The health of many nations has improved, as measured by infant mortality and longevity; and money spent on education has grown.  Children’s rights have been the focus of renewed attention and the ratio of children to parents has decreased.  But few people would dispute that life for our nations’ children is more uncertain today:

• Youth suicide has increased;

• Millions of youth are estimated to be homeless;

• Reports of child abuse rise each year;

• Alcohol and drug abuse amongst teenagers has increased markedly;

• Welfare beneficiaries have increased significantly; and

• Single parent families, even after government benefits, continue to be among the poorest groups in the community.

The latter fact moved Daniel Patrick Moynihan to observe that historically poverty derived from unemployment and low wages; today it derives from family structure.[27]

Liberal and conservative scholars alike are beginning to remark on the consequences of a devaluing of marriage on the well-being of children.  The renowned international family scholar, Urie Bronfenbrenner has said that “amongst post-industrial societies, families, children, adolescents and youth are at the greatest risk in English-speaking countries.”[28] President Clinton’s former Domestic Policy Adviser Professor William Ralston has remarked that “the family disintegration that we are currently experiencing…is harming our children…deeply…[and] dreadfully.”[29]

The popular rationale for divorce for the past two decades has been the proposition that divorce is better for the whole family than a ‘bad’ marriage and that children are reasonably resilient.[30]  However recent research has challenged the belief that it is parental conflict rather than actual separation that is associated with poor outcomes for children following divorce.  The 1994 Exeter Family Study concluded that:

…although most children do not exhibit acute difficulties beyond the initial stage of family breakdown, a significant minority of children encountered long term problems.  Compared with their matched pairs in intact families, children who had experienced their parents’ divorce were more likely to report problems in key areas of their lives, including psychosomatic disorders, difficulties with school work and a low sense of self-esteem.  They were more likely to feel confused and uninvolved in arrangements about their future and to have lasting feelings of concern about both their resident and non-resident parents.  Parental conflict and financial difficulties are clearly important features of family reorganisation that are associated with adverse outcomes for children.  However, in this study it appeared that a more important adverse factor was the loss of a parent and the consequences, which included the risk that history would repeat itself with the breakdown of subsequent parental relationships.[31]

Similar conclusions were reached by Judith Wallerstein in her American study Second Chances.[32]  More recently, Paul Amato found that children of divorced parents are more likely to divorce, have fewer financial assets and earn less money than other people.[33] There is an emerging view amongst social scientists that whereas children are better off when marriages involving physical abuse and extreme emotional cruelty end, the children from the majority of marriages involving low intensity conflict are worse off if their parents divorce.[34]

Some argue that the maternal-child relationship is all important, but as the renowned anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski observed:

In all human societies the father is regarded by tradition as indispensable…no child should be brought into the world without a man—and one man at that—assuming the role of sociological father, that is, guardian and protector, the male link between the child and the rest of the community.[35]

Recent studies support Malinowski’s observation.  In their ten-year study Growing Up with a Single Parent, Sara McLanahan and Gary Sandefur reject the claim that children raised by only one parent do just as well as children raised by both parents:

Children who grow up in a household with only one biological parent are worse off, on average, than children who grow up in a household with both their biological parents, regardless of the parents’ race or educational background, regardless of whether the parents are married when the child is born, and regardless of whether the resident partner remarries.[36]

The Council on Families in America concluded last year that the mounting evidence “points to one striking conclusion:  the weakening of marriage has had devastating consequences for the well-being of children.”[37] The Council did not claim that the weakening of marriage was the only factor contributing to the decline of child well-being, but said it was by far the most important causal factor.  Obviously unemployment and other economic factors also contribute to the general uncertainty facing our young people.

If, as the Report asked, an increasing number of children grow-up each year with little or no direct experience of married life, how do we teach them about the meaning, purposes and responsibilities of marriage? We might also ask what attitudes and impressions do unhappy marriages create for children? And what can we do to lessen the occurrence? Before making some suggestions, we would like to examine briefly some of the reasons advanced for the changing culture.

III.  THE CHANGING CULTURE OF AGE

In 1988, the then director of the Australian Institute for Family Studies, Dr. Don Edgar, identified several major factors shaping what he described as the “new marriage.”[38]  He summarised these factors as fourfold:

Fırst is the certainty of contraception, the careful planning of births and the changing place of children in marriage,

Second is the new preparation pathway to marriage via multiple relationships, prolonged autonomy as an individual earner, de facto living and the resultant confusion about intimacy and commitment.

Third is a growing realization on the part of women that they cannot and ought not rely upon or be dependants of men.  Thus we see improved education, retention of women’s career and labour force participation, with consequent changes in the way marriage and family life function.

Fourth is a legal framework progressively enacting equal opportunity, human rights, joint responsibility for men and women fulfilling the obligations of marriage and parenthood.  It is a de facto “backward” redefinition of marriage, starting from the end point of divorce, and from combined changes in family law and social security provisions.

A number of reasons can be advanced for this changing culture about marriage.  First the culture of rights, combined with materialism, has dominated Western thought since the end of World War II.  Rights became the dominant language of Western culture.  Particularly in public discussion, obligations were ignored.  But as Tocqueville observed, excessive individualism ultimately results in egoism which destroys society.[39]

It is in family that obligations and values are learnt.  Martin Luther King said:

The institution of family is decisive in determining not only if a person has the capacity to love another individual but in the larger sense whether he is capable of loving…The whole of society rests on this foundation for stability, understanding and social peace.[40]

This is not new.  Aristotle posited the necessary relationship between the individual and the community:  if children did not love their parents and family members, they would love no-one but themselves.  The sense of stability and love provided in families is central to the socialization of individuals.  Increasingly it is recognized, to be effective, interaction between parents and children must occur on a fairly regular basis over extended periods of time.

The culture of individual rights was reflected in subsequent changes to laws.  Hence the right to divorce was eased; the right to financial assistance from the state for sole parents enhanced; while the taxation system in many nations was gradually skewed against married couples with children.[41]

Personal fulfillment, and in the absence of it, divorce, is perceived as a right with few corresponding duties.  “Till death us do part” has been replaced with “as long as I am happy.”  Writing in the American context, Daniel Yankelovich observed:

The quest for greater individual choice clashed directly with the obligations and social norms that held families and communities together in earlier years.  People came to feel that questions of how to live and with whom to live were a matter of individual choice not to be governed by restrictive norms.  As a nation, we came to experience the bonds to marriage, family, children, job, community, and country as constraints that were no longer necessary.  Commitments were loosened.[42]

This is not to say that the pursuit of happiness is wrong, or that partners should not have the ability to end a marriage in some circumstances.  Our query is whether we value marriage sufficiently.

In recent times, a number of commentators have begun to point to serious social ramifications of these developments.  The view that fathers are superfluous should be, as the Council on Families in America claimed last year, a major social concern for our society:

First, fathers are vitally important to the task of childrearing.  Certainly, we have never met the child who did not say that she or he wanted to be raised by both a father and a mother.  And children know whereof they speak.  The importance of fathers to childrearing is strongly supported by social science research.

Second, it is extremely important to the larger society that men remain involved in family life.  For men, married fatherhood is a civilizing force of no mean proportions.  Conversely, having a large number of men disconnected from the patterns and satisfactions of family life—and thus much more prone to unhappiness, deviance and crime—has always, and properly, been one of society’s worst fears.  In too many of our nation’s communities today, this fear is becoming a reality.[43]

This is not to belittle the efforts of many single parents who, against difficult odds, are successfully raising their children and who deserve our support; nor is it to ignore the fact that some married couples are failing in their parental task.  Nor is it to suggest a return to the marriage forms of earlier years.  To the contrary, marriage and family life requires a balance of values.  The enhancement of family life for the welfare of children involves the balancing of rights and obligations: between men and women, parents and children, individuals and the community, and present and future generations.  In the past the balance was not always right.  There was often an overemphasis on women’s obligations—to husbands, to children, and to the community—at the expense of individual development.  But today, the goal of balance is often replaced by the contemporary libertarian rejection of all obligation in the name of individual freedom.

A second cause of family disintegration may be seen in the rejection of marriage and family by many intellectuals and academics in the 1960’s.  In 1967, Edmund Leach, then one of the most influential sociologists in the western world was invited to deliver the Reith Lectures on BBC Radio.  There Leach developed his claim that the “family looks inward upon itself.”  According to him, the inwardness of family life intensifies emotional stress between husband and wife, and parents and children—creating a strain greater than most can bear.  Leach concluded:

Far from being the basis of the good society, the family, with its narrow privacy and tawdry secrets, is the source of all our discontents.[44]

Leach’s view of the family was not isolated.  David Cooper and R. D. Laing saw the intense privacy of the family, with its network of introverted, intense and compulsory relationships as destructive of the individual self.  Cooper described the nuclear family as “the ultimately perfected form of non-meeting;”[45] and Laing claimed that the “initial act of brutality against the average child is the mother’s first kiss.”[46]

It was against this background that American sociologist Jessie Bernard wrote The Future of Marriage in 1972.  Bernard argued that the modern marriage is best understood, not in the conventional sense as a union between man and woman, but as separate and unequal “his” and “hers” marriages, which confer health on men and the opposite on women:

We do not clip wings or bind feet but we do make girls sick.  For to be happy in a relationship which imposes so many impediments on her, as traditional marriage does, a woman must be slightly ill mentally.[47]

Bernard proposed a new order consisting of a range of relationship options founded on two bases:  the contemporary feminist critique of marriage[48] and an optimism that human beings can accept any kind of relationship if they are properly socialized into it.[49] Bernard asserted:

There is no Ideal Marriage fixed in the nature of things, that we will one day discover…Every age has to find its own…any form of marriage is transitional between an old one and a new one.[50]

The need to enlarge the role of women and the notion that family roles are in transition remain strong in critiques of family.[51]  As James Wilson has written, “to defend the two parent family is to defend, the critics worry, an institution in which the woman is subordinated to her husband, confined to domestic chores with no opportunity to pursue a career, and taught to indoctrinate her children with a belief in the rightness of the arrangement.”[52]  However, to identify the strengths of couple families is not to defend oppression.  It is a spurious argument which suggests that conventional family relationships mean confining women to domestic roles or condoning abuse within the family.

In her recent survey of health data, the Australian family researcher Moira Eastman has demonstrated the fallacy in Bernard’s thesis:

Despite Bernard’s claims, research in a number of countries finds that being married is correlated with markedly better mental and physical health and higher levels of happiness than being never married, separated or divorced and that this is true for both men and women.[53]

Eastman identified eight myths about family that have currency in academic and popular discussions:  Family is a recent invention; the (traditional) family has almost disappeared; the two-parent family is no longer the norm; marriage is good for men and bad for women; families are unsafe places; no productive work takes place in the family home; family is essentially an extreme right-wing issue; and current family trends cannot (and perhaps should not) be reversed.  She concludes: “The evidence to contradict them is sufficient to support the claim that they are myths in the sense that they are not based on fact.”[54]  Yet Norval Glenn has recently illustrated the anti-marriage bias in many current sociology texts about families.[55]

The second notion prevalent in some discussions about family is the idea that family roles are in transition.  This was particularly evident in many writings during the United Nations Year of the Family.  But reassuring words about transition fail to comfort family members experiencing divorce at a rate three times that of two decades ago, or of the mother and children in difficulty surviving poverty because of insufficient child support, or any one of millions of children growing up in homes where no one has a job.  Call it what you like, people intuitively know that families are under pressure and that their break-up is tragic.

As a consequence, our nations face massive public costs.  Public investment in welfare programs has risen markedly over the past quarter century.  For example, social security benefits in Australia have grown from $1,379 million in 1971 to $33,917 million in 1991—or from 17 to 27 percent of GDP.  Family payments increased from $198 million to $2,466 million over the same period.  And single-parent benefits rose from $40 million in 1974 to $3,057 million two decades later.  In the United States, public aid expenditures have grown from just over $20 billion in 1980 to more than $40 billion by 1992.[56]

While government programs are important, “almost no amount of public investment in children could offset the private disinvestment that has accompanied the decline of marriage.”