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Single Parents and Damaged Children: The Fruits of the Sexual Revolution
| Article
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10650 |
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Section : |
MODERN THOUGHT
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| Issue
Date : |
7 / 1993 |
5,198 Words |
| Author
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Lloyd Eby and Charles A. Donovan
Lloyd Eby is assistant senior editor of THE WORLD & I. Charles
A. Donovan is senior policy consultant at the Family Research
Council, Washington, D.C. Research assistance was provided by
Diane Falk, Jayne Turconi, and Mark Petersen of The World &
I's library and research department. |
Vice President Dan Quayle was right. Murphy Brown--the unmarried TV character who became pregnant on the show--was a bad role model for women, legitimizing and glamorizing single motherhood. But Quayle did not go on to raise or discuss the more difficult problems. Should Murphy Brown have had an abortion? Should she have taken more precautions with contraception so she didn't get pregnant? As she was unmarried, was it wrong for her to have sex? Should she have given up the baby for adoption?
The social science evidence now available shows conclusively that children suffer when they grow up in any family situation other than an intact two-parent family formed by their biological father and mother who are married to each other. As recently as 1960, the biological two-parent family was the norm; in that year, about 75 percent of children in the United States lived with both of their biological parents, who had been married only once, to one another. By 1991 this percentage had declined to about 56 percent. Now, if the darker forecasts are accurate, fewer than 50 percent of children can expect to live continuously throughout their childhood in such families.1
The costs of this ever-increasing decline in families and family support of children are huge: to the children, to the larger society, and to the nation. An increasing number of our children, largely from single-parent homes, are unable to participate constructively and ethically in our economic, political, and social life, although many children from single-parent families nonetheless do succeed in life. Costs include immense and ever-increasing welfare rolls; remedial and repeated education; anomie, crime, and lawlessness; high and increasing rates of teen suicide; dealing with unemployable people; and the financial, spiritual, and civic costs of all kinds of social pathologies. All these impose very great financial expenditures as well as enormous psychic and civic burdens. Indeed, it may not be too much to say that family breakdown--with its attendant pathologies and their costs--is our country's most serious social and economic problem, threatening to overwhelm us and even threatening our very democracy and the society on which it rests, unless somehow curbed.
When it was published in 1962, Anthony Burgess' A Clockwork Orange seemed overwrought in its depiction of the anomie, violence, pathology, and nihilism of some young people. Today, Burgess' fiction appears to have been remarkably prescient; the murders, rapes, thefts, assaults, burnings and lootings, and other crimes and damages committed by feral and often emotionless youths now surpass his
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