Dave's and Roman's World

Back to the family. Where do we learn, if we're going to learn at all, about such things as cultural stigmas, or, to put it another way, about rights and responsibilities, duties and obligations, do's and don'ts? We learn in the context of family life -- from Mom, from Dad, from grandparents and siblings and cousins. The family is a school that never lets out. It can be a bad or defective school. It can be a place of love and warmth. Either way it teaches. All the more usefully, it teaches if parents believe themselves to be living out a worthy idea for the shaping of human destinies, an idea grounded most of the time in mutual promises and commitments. Better, perhaps, to see commitments breached -- because they can always be repaired -- than never to see them made at all because they seemed outdated or restrictive.

The IAV report observes that when marriage works, "it creates a context in which children can flourish." You see the truth here not just in terms of sexual behavior but at all levels of life. Why isn't the education system any better than it is? Isn't it because relatively fewer parents now than half a century ago understand their family responsibilities to include prodding the young 'uns toward achievement? IAV (which collaborated on the study with the National Center on African American Marriages and Parenting) insists that "the status of our marriages influences our well-being at least as much as the state of our finances." It's Reason No. 1 on a Letterman-style list for rebuilding what we've so long allowed to decay.