By Brian Robertson, Reprinted from Insights, 3/14/94

Summary: After three decades of evidence that children from "nontraditional" families face a host of problems, more and more voices are singing the virtues of the two-parent family. The new consensus seems to cross political boundaries.

July 1994 –  It’s the third rule of both academia and politics,” says David Popenoe. “Touch it, and you die.”

When he first started to study family structure 20 years ago, Popenoe never imagined he’d be shouted down at scholarly conferences, vilified as a reactionary and shunned by his peers. But in the highly politicized world of social science, he and others have aroused the ire of the academic establishment by pointing out what many people regard as self-evident: Children turn out better in two-parent families.

Popenoe, an associate dean for social and behavioral sciences at Rutgers University, is not a typical “traditionalist” crusading for a return to the nuclear family. A sociologist of impeccable progressive credentials who insists he has never voted Republican, Popenoe was at the forefront of urban planning research in the mid-sixties, much of which was used by the Johnson administration to create its Great Society programs.

Indeed, Popenoe has graduated from progressive to radical, at least in his milieu. He and a group of like minded sociologists are advocating a notion so out of step with their colleagues that many regard them with alarm. Their revolutionary idea: Intractable domestic problems, from poor school performance to soaring crime rates, might be mitigated by revitalizing the traditional family.

This may not seem to be an especially controversial stance, but it flies in the face of the reigning dogma and daunting statistics. When Vice President Dan Quayle criticized the television series Murphy Brown during the 1992 presidential election, he was reviled widely for attacking single mothers – the victims, claimed his critics, of an unfair wage system that favors men. Once again, merely addressing the breakdown of the family led to charges of covert sexism. Republican strategists dropped the issue for the rest of the campaign, convinced the topic was too divisive. Democrats, on the other hand, relied heavily on themes and images emphasizing family diversity and the so-called politics of inclusion.

Over the past 30 years, the divorce rate in the United States has tripled, as has the percentage of children living in single-parent families. In 1965, the illegitimacy rate among blacks stood at 26% – enough for Democratic Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan of New York, then an assistant secretary of labor, to call the situation a crisis. Today, the rate is 68% and climbing, while the illegitimacy rate among whites has risen to 22%.

There are signs, however, that politicians are listening harder to scholars such as Charles Murray of the American Enterprise Institute. Murray wants to eliminate welfare entirely, arguing that radical steps must be taken to reverse the rising rates of illegitimacy. While few go so far in their proposals, almost everyone acknowledges the need for welfare reform to prevent further subsidization of family breakup.

“The evidence is now accepted by most people that in our welfare programs, there has been a corrupting effect,” says Popenoe, “and there are very few people left who don’t feel that government hasn’t generated or exacerbated the problems in the way the welfare program has been carried out.”

Popenoe’s interest in family structure began in the early seventies in Sweden, oddly enough, where he was conducting research as a Fulbright scholar. “I began to realize that despite the fact that Sweden had marvelous planning, there was a dark side of the welfare state, and that the family was collapsing – flat out collapsing,” he recalls. “Suddenly you had a staggering number of people who were living together without getting married, combined with the highest divorce rate in Europe.”

Even more disturbing, according to Popenoe, was the fact that no one was talking about the effect these trends were having on children. “It was absolutely verboten,” he says. “You could not bring it up because the dominant ideology viewed the traditional family as something that one was well rid of.”

Despite, or perhaps because of, the prevailing taboo on the subject, Popenoe began to study the issue in depth; the resulting 1988 book, Disturbing the Nest: Family Change and Decline in Modern Societies, “blew the whistle,” says Popenoe, on the effects of divorce and illegitimacy on children.

The book got the attention of author David Blankenhorn, president of the Institute for American Values, a non-partisan organization of scholars and writers studying issues of family well being. Blankenhorn agreed with Popenoe about the odd silence surrounding the changing family. He also suspected the silence was the product of serious ideological prejudices.

While conservatives have always been receptive to the idea that traditional family structure is important for children, many liberals feared the specter of an oppressive, patriarchal past, and some found any attempt to quantify family decline ideologically intolerable. In the United States, as in Sweden, the subject has evoked such fervent emotions that even those convinced by the data often keep quiet for fear of appearing politically out of step.

On the rare occasions when a politician or academic has challenged the prevailing orthodoxy, the challenge has met fierce resistance. When Moynihan concluded in 1965 that the chief threat to the urban black community was the breakdown of the family, he was denounced widely as a racist. His report, The Negro Family: The Case for National Action, was proclaimed an exercise in blaming the victim.

Meanwhile, Great Society programs did little to encourage traditional family structures. Fifteen years later, experts still were bickering over what constituted a family when President Carter convened a White House conference to address the plight of children from broken homes.

Although children today are healthier and better educated, they are “worse off than they were in the 1960s,” Popenoe argues, citing soaring rates of violence, drug abuse, delinquency, depression and suicide among the nation’s youth at all socioeconomic levels. Something was wrong, and Blankenhorn and Popenoe sought to convince their colleagues that spending more money on welfare or increasing aid to single parents wasn’t the solution. “Our aim was to change the cultural debate,” says Popenoe.

In the academic world, however, the barriers to frank discussion are formidable. “There’s still prevalent in the world of academia, sociology in particular, the view that to say ‘two-parent families are better’ is controversial,” explains Popenoe. Such claims routinely are countered with cries of protest that favoring a traditional family structure stigmatizes single-parent homes.

Perhaps the strongest opposition to exploring any notion of family decline has come from feminists. “It’s an attack on feminism, because one of the biggest changes in the last 30 years is women in the workplace,” explains Popenoe. “If you even use the word decline to describe what’s happening, everybody’s furious, because it implies somehow that the whole movement of women to the workplace was a terrible mistake, and that they ought to all go back home.”

Although he insists that his concern with family structure is compatible with the women’s movement, some feminists aren’t convinced. Stephanie Coontz, author of The Way We Never Were:American Families and the Nostalgia Trap, holds that the nuclear family is an artificial construct specific to Western societies. She and other feminists say that the decrease of two-parent families is inevitable and desirable.

The traditional arrangement of male breadwinner and female homemaker may have been well-suited to a patriarchal society, claims Coontz, but the new sexual freedom and the increased economic independence of women has exploded outmoded definitions of family. In modern society, single parents, gay couples or any mutually beneficial living arrangement can be considered a viable family. Americans should celebrate this new diversity, Coontz argues; good riddance to Ozzie and Harriet, Ward and June and their bygone era.

“This unitary, normative definition of legitimate domestic arrangements is what my book identifies as ephemeral, and with little regret, because of the race, class, gender and sexual diversity it has masked and the inequities it has exacerbated,” wrote Judith Stacey, author of Brave New Families: Stories of Domestic Upheaval in Late Twentieth-Century America, in a recent issue of Insight (Symposium, Nov. 29). “In contrast, anthropological and historical studies convince me that the family is not an institution, but an ideological, symbolic construct that has a history and a politics. Indeed, it is precisely because the history and politics of U.S. family life have moved at such unsettling speed since the heyday of the Leave It to Beaver Cleavers and the Nelsons that contemporary conflict over family values is so passionate and at times, malodorous.”

There is only one problem with this theory – children. As the facts accumulated on children of divorced and single parents, it became clear that all was not well in the brave new world of alternative family structures. Historian Barbara Defoe Whitehead of the Council on Families in America drew together recent findings in a controversial essay published in the Atlantic Monthly titled “Dan Quayle Was Right.” Children in single-parent families are six times more likely to be poor and three times more likely to have emotional or behavioral problems as children in two-parent families. Their rates of teenage pregnancy and drug abuse are much higher as well, and they are more likely to drop out of high school.

Nor do the negative effects of growing up in a one-parent home end with childhood. The statistics show that children from single-parent families have a more difficult time achieving intimacy in a relationship and in forming a stable marriage themselves. They even have more trouble holding a steady job.

Surprisingly, the statistics are just as bad or worse for children whose parents remarry after divorce; only the presence of two biological parents seems to provide the stability most children need during their formative years.

Scholars such as Coontz and Stacey maintain that the problems associated with growing up in a single-parent home stem primarily from the social stigma still attached to divorce and illegitimacy and the fact that government policy has not caught up with social reality. Instead of further stigmatizing “nontraditional” families, public policy should mitigate the unnecessarily adverse economic effects of divorce and single parenthood, in part by reducing unemployment and encouraging pay equity, but also by favoring the redistribution of work schedules and by stripping away barriers hindering women from reaching high-level executive positions.

Despite opposition from feminists and many others in the academic community, there are signs that Popenoe and company are making some headway toward a new consensus that crosses traditional political boundaries. The real quandary may lie at the other end of the family-breakup equation –divorce.

The question of how the rising divorce rate can be arrested is at the center of a forthcoming book from Blankenhorn, Popenoe and Whitehead called Fatherless America, which explores the idea of reinsti-tutionalizing marriage.

“The problem in the area of divorce and family law is that it’s not national, it’s state,” Popenoe says. Recent changes favoring no-fault divorce were never rationally considered but were ushered in by lawyers who wished to end a “legalistic nightmare.” Although the authors don’t advocate the restoration of fault-based divorce, they believe “some measure of fault” should be reintroduced to force couples to “consider carefully” before splitting up. But ultimately, the only effective method of cutting divorce rates may be in appealing to the old ethic –sticking together for the sake of the children.

“There was always divorce in times past,” says Popenoe, “but if there were children involved it was the worst thing you could do.” As Whitehead points out, statistics show that the number of Americans who think that a marriage is worth holding together “for the sake of the kids” has declined drastically during the last 30 years. They also reflect what Popenoe calls a substantial change in the way respondents view marriage as an institution, from a necessary and desirable social obligation to an optional “means to self-fulfillment.” Accordingly, most couples seem to view the decision to have children in the same light, which has led to a large increase in the number of childless families as well as a more liberal attitude toward divorce among those who have children.

One of the aims of Fatherless America is to revitalize the idea that parental obligations sometimes override personal fulfillment.

Those who hope to open up the discussion of the effect of divorce on children can be encouraged by the course of debate over illegitimacy. Only a year after Quayle was ridiculed for criticizing single motherhood, President Clinton admitted that he believed that the former vice president, as Whitehead said, was indeed right.