Synopses & Reviews
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Sixteen of the top scholars on family life have re-issured a joint report on the importance of marriage. First released in 2002, the newly revised edition of Why Marriage Matters highlights five new themes in marriage-related research. Since 1960, the proportion of children who do not live with their own two parents has risen sharply. This change has been caused, first, by large increases in divorce, and more recently, by a big jump in single mothers and cohabitating couples who have children but do not marry. For several decades the impact of this dramatic change in family structure has been the subject of vigorous debate among scholars. No longer. These twenty six findings are now widely agreed upon. '
Synopsis
State of Our Unions 2010: When Marriage Disappears finds that shifts in marriage mores, increases in unemployment, and declines in religious attendance have played a particularly important role in driving the retreat from marriage in middle America. This retreat from marriage is placing the American Dream beyond the reach of many in our society, imperiling the social and economic welfare of children from middle America, and opening up a social and cultural divide in our nation that does not bode well for the American experiment in democracy.
About the Author
W. Bradford Wilcox is director of the National Marriage Project and associate professor of sociology at the University of Virginia. He is the author of Soft Patriarchs, New Men: How Christianity Shapes Fathers and Husbands. Elizabeth Marquardt is the director of the Center for Marriage and Families at the Institute for American Values, and author of Between Two Worlds: The Inner Lives of Children of Divorce.