Get Involved

State of the American Family Today and Why You Should Get Involved

America today does not provide a healthy environment for raising families. Since the 1960s, American popular culture has turned away from family values, and in its place celebrates the single life and self-indulgent lifestyles. This is not only an American phenomenon. All over the world people look up to America and avidly imitate its culture, its noble values of freedom and democracy. Yet at the same time, they also accept America’s dysfunctional values into their cultures.

The defining American value is freedom. Yet freedom as it is currently conceived is only part of the story. America is certainly not “free” from intangibles like fear or despair. It is not free from crime. It is not free from negative images and degrading words being flung into our consciousness by the entertainment industry. Freedom cannot stand unless it is based on trust, yet trust is becoming a rare commodity these days. Can we implicitly trust our neighbors? The local merchant? The local priest? The people who care for our children? The tacit, shared set of values that binds a society together is in grave question in America today.

More and more objective scientific research points to the fact that the host of ills that beset society - crime, drugs, poverty, sexually transmitted diseases, etc. - are rooted in the breakdown of the family. Good families produce good citizens, who produce good nations, which ultimately impact upon the world in a good way. Bad families produce deeply troubled citizens who form a deeply troubled nation, hence a deeply troubled world. The breakdown of the American family since 1960 is illustrated by these statistics showing “seismic” changes in marriage and family patterns:

• Americans are less likely to marry. From 1970 to 2000, the annual number of marriages by unmarried women declined by more than one third.
• Cohabitation has become the widely accepted alternative to marriage. Between 1960 and 2000, the number of married couples in America increased by more than ten fold, from 440,000 to 4.7 million
• Today over 60 percent of married couples live together prior to marriage. Yet despite a wide spread belief that living together before marriage is a useful way to find out a couple’s compatibility and thus avoid a bad marriage and an eventual divorce, the evidence indicates that these couples face a significantly higher risk of getting divorced, in the range of 33 to 48 percent.
• There is a 50 percent chance that a marriage started today will end in divorce. Although a majority of divorced persons remarry, the percentage of adults who are currently divorced has quadrupled since 1960. The divorce rate peaked in 1980, and since then has leveled off at a high plateau that is double the rate in 1960. Contrary to popular belief, an unhappily married adult is not likely to become happier after divorce.
• Each year, about one million children under 18 experience the divorce of their parents. That rate has more than doubled since 1960. Despite considerable evidence that divorce harms children, more than two-thirds of parental divorces do not involve serious conflicts or physical abuse. These are the very divorces that are most damaging to children, who value the love and support of both parents.
• 19.8 million children are living in single-parent families. In 1960 only 9 percent of children were raised in single-parent families, a figure that had changed little over the course of the 20th century; by 2000 that percentage had jumped to 27 percent. This trend has serious consequences, since children raised by single parents have negative life outcomes at two to three times the rate of children raised in married, two parent families.
• One third of America’s children are born to unwed mothers. That rate has increased six-fold since 1960. 85 percent of teenage fathers abandon the girls they impregnate.
• There has been an 850 percent increase in the number of cohabiting couples with children. About 40 percent of all children today will spend some of their formative years in a cohabitating household. Yet less than half of cohabitating mothers eventually marry the fathers of their children.
• Children raised outside the two-parent family are at risk. Boys are twice as likely to end up in prison, even controlling for economic and social factors. Girls are twice as likely to have children out of wedlock. Children are two to three times more likely to have emotional or behavior problems, twice as likely to drop out of school, and twice as likely to have marriages ending in divorce.
• The chances of a daughter being sexually abused by her stepfather are at least 7 times greater than by her biological father.
• Sexually transmitted diseases have increased by 200 percent
• Since 1960, the juvenile crime rate is up 600 percent. More than one-third of all murders are committed by someone under the age of 21.
• One young person attempts suicide every 80 seconds; suicide is the third leading cause of death among teenagers. Family breakdown is the main cause of suicide by young males.

The Pennsylvania Family Coalition believes that the answer to many of America’s problems lies in the restoration of cultural values relating to marriage and the family. We are recommending that America changes the subject of our collective national conversation, moving away from accepting and managing divorce and family breakdown towards a new emphasis on marriage: with the new discussion in creating a “God Centered” Marriage and Family Culture. What America needs is a new moral consensus among public officials, leading to new, pro-family legislation and funding of programs to support marriage counseling and abstinence education.

By Rev. Anthony Flores is the National
Vice President, Pennsylvania Family Coalition

May 5th, 2006