A new Pew report has confirmed what weâ??ve known was coming for the American family: a majority of American children now live in homes without married parents in their first marriage. The reasons behind this â??new normalâ? of the broken American family are complex but are certainly related to factors including the â??sexual revolutionâ? that began in the 1960s, the advent of no-fault divorce, and generational patterns of people having children out of wedlock.
As The Washington Post and virtually all observers note, single parenting (a burden carried mostly by women) is a major feature of this massive change in American family structure. Children of single parents generally face â??more poverty, more instability, and more problems at school, among other things,â? the Post notes. Government initiatives seem unlikely to help, although one hopes that policies could at least stop discouraging the establishment of stable marriages with children. W. Bradford Wilcox and others have proposed some common-sense measures on this front that are likely to win bipartisan support. [Follow the blog of the Institute for Family Studies for some of the best thinking on political and cultural family reform.]
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