One Man, One Woman, One Marriage
Mark Regnerus is an associate professor of sociology at the University of Texas at Austin, and the author of "Premarital Sex in America: How Young Americans Meet, Mate and Think About Marrying."
The intact nuclear family may seem like an endangered species, but it remains the hope and dream of the vast majority of young Americans. They want to marry. Most hope for children. And they aspire to fidelity. (No one aims for “monogamish.”)
Why? Because what sociologists Sara McLanahan and Gary Sandefurwrote nearly 20 years ago remains true today: “If we were asked to design a system for making sure that children's basic needs were met, we would probably come up with something quite similar to the two-parent family ideal.” It has it all: access to the time and money of two adults, a system of checks and balances, and two biological connections to the child, heightening the “likelihood that the parents would identify with the child and be willing to sacrifice for that child, and it would reduce the likelihood that either parent would abuse the child.”
You don’t have to like the suburbs or minivans or soccer or even monogamy to comprehend that the biological nuclear family’s stability and repertoire is tops over the long run.Youth lockups, underperforming schools and therapists’ schedules are not filled with the children of engaged, doting, married parents. I understand: no one wishes for family dysfunction, and many who experience it have not chosen it. Yet to remain neutral on Americans’ decisions about family makes no moral or fiscal sense, even if it does stroke the penchant of a minority to praise privacy, personal liberties and going it alone.
And a minority it really is. An October 2010 Pew Social Trends survey noted that only 4 percent of American adults said it’s “a good thing for society” when asked their opinion about “single women having children without a male partner to help raise them.” (Other household arrangements register higher, but not by much.) Just because Americans’ family behaviors have shifted some doesn’t mean they’ve rejected the ideal. It means they’ve had difficulty accomplishing it. But ideal it remains.
While increasingly complicated families and households have required increasingly complicated family law, “boring” stable mom-and-pop families are often creative incubators and economic juggernauts, consolidating their unique talents and their incomes, and giving birth not only to new people but also to new opportunities for their fellow citizens (like homebuilders and schoolteachers, to name but a couple).
So yes, the nuclear family is still a worthy public policy goal for any political party. What other just, affordable and good option is there? To feign neutrality is to suggest that family structure and stability doesn’t matter for kids, and that the unrestrained legal and social freedom of individual parents to act as they please is the most compassionate way forward.