History is written by the victors. So it is particularly fitting that New York's own Institute for American Values (where I was once an affiliate scholar) should release two scholarly reports on the marriage debate by Norval Glenn and Tom Sylvester. Professor Norval Glenn is one of the nation's top family scholars, a sociologist at University of Texas-Austin widely respected for his methodological rigor.
Report No. 1, "The Shift," is a painstaking effort to investigate the widespread perception that expert opinion on whether and how much marriage matters actually changed in response to new scientific data.
Glenn and Sylvester analyzed every study on family structure that appeared in the premier Journal of Marriage and Family between 1977 and 2002. They conclude that yes, between the late '70s and the late '80s, a definite change is visible: Scholars began to report increasing concern about the effects of divorce and unmarried childbearing on children.
In the middle of all our culture wars, let us pause a moment to celebrate something uniquely American. Faced with an unprecedented increase in family fragmentation and fatherlessness, widely celebrated by elites at the time as an example of human progress and liberation, Americans took a hard look at the evidence, scientific and personal, and asked: Is this good for children?
Objectively, the answer is no. Divorce and unmarried childbearing hurt kids and communities. They aren't really great for women (or men) either.
The decline of marriage is now visible all over the Western world. But America is the only developed country I know where that fact has launched a serious intellectual and cultural effort to find new ways to strengthen marriage. One likely result of this "marriage movement" (I would argue) is a modest but real decline in the divorce rate, and even something of a leveling off of increases in out-of-wedlock births. Ideas have consequences, and in the marriage debate it is the ideas of Norval Glenn, and other scholars loosely gathered around the Institute for American Values' circle, that have triumphed.
Report No. 2 by Glenn and Sylvester is "The Denial." It analyzes "common arguments" used by scholars to downplay the importance of family structure for children.