Children and the Social Interest in Marriage
By Elder Bruce C. Hafen

Editor’s note: This is chapter 21 of the book Covenant Hearts: Marriage and the Joy of Human Love. Click here to buy this book.

One of my first divorce cases as a young lawyer involved a family with several children. In those days, courts usually assigned custody of younger children to the mother, unless she was simply unfit. But for older children, the judge was supposed to consider, among other things, with which parent the child preferred to live. In our case, the divorcing couple had a daughter about twelve years old.

I don’t remember much else about the case, but I cannot forget the moment in the judge’s chambers when I sat with the other lawyer, the judge, and the twelve-year-old. When the judge asked whether she would rather live with her father or her mother, she began to cry and couldn’t talk. Then she looked at us with anguished eyes and asked, “Why can’t I live with both my mom and my dad? I love them both. Why is this happening? Who is doing this to our family?”

The image of this child feeling so torn apart expresses some of what it means that marriage is a bond not only between a husband and wife but between those two people, their children, their families, and the larger society. The rupture in her parents’ marriage was rupturing her heart — just as, at the other end of the emotional spectrum, the healing and nourishing of a strong marriage feeds a child’s soul.

Divorce can inflict such psychic damage on children that its long-term consequences are in some ways similar to the damage of child abuse, which can last a lifetime. Divorce seldom causes childhood trauma that runs as deep as the trauma inflicted by sexual abuse, and in a few cases, the children are better off with divorced parents than they are living in a family of high conflict.

But the chances are that many adults who divorce do not realize the damage their decision can cause their children, just as many sexually abusive parents are woefully unaware of the damage they do. What to them may seem trivial can shatter a child’s emotional life, imposing a trauma that will unfold for years, hindering the child’s own later marriage and life experience.

Only in the last few years have we begun to see the aggregate personal and social consequences of doubling the divorce rate and quintupling the illegitimacy rate over a period of thirty years. During the 1970s and 80s it was difficult to find a consensus among researchers on these issues, mostly because it takes a generation to demonstrate what happens to children who grow up in single-parent families.

Also, the public had so willingly embraced greater tolerance for alternative family lifestyles that prevailing “politically correct” attitudes created a conflict of interest for many researchers.

For example, in the United States presidential election of 1992, Dan Quayle was essentially laughed off the national stage for taking a stand against the deliberate decision of a popular TV character, Murphy Brown, to have a child out of wedlock. Quayle wanted to underscore his belief that children in single-parent homes are at much greater risk than children with two parents, and he thought society should have something to say about what family structure was best for children.

The public’s initially negative reaction to Quayle reflected the combination of tolerance and ambivalence about personal lifestyle choices that had characterized the 1980s.

Then in 1993, a scholar named Barbara Whitehead published an article called “Dan Quayle Was Right” in the prestigious Atlantic magazine. She said that the Murphy Brown show, and the media’s reactions to it, depicted “unwed parenthood... not only as a way to find happiness but also as a way to exhibit such virtues as honesty and courage.”

She thought the media’s reaction illustrated broader efforts to depict “the married two-parent family as a source of pathology.” All of this, she explained, is part of an attempt to “normalize what was once considered deviant behavior,” such as divorce and out-of-wedlock birth.

She then shared extensive research describing the harmful effects of single-parent households on children, at both the individual and the social levels. In general, despite some admirable exceptions by single parents who succeed valiantly despite the risks, children in single-parent or step-parent families are more likely than children in intact families to be poor, to drop out of school, to have trouble with the law — to do worse, in short, by most definitions of well-being than children in two-parent families.

These children are also more likely to be abused physically or sexually. More have emotional problems, require professional counseling, and suffer from drug abuse. And, contrary to some popular assumptions, they don’t just “bounce back” after divorce or their parents’ remarriage; instead, many of their problems continue for years, enough years that they are much more likely to have troubled marriages themselves.

This is not to say that the children of divorced parents cannot recover from the effects of their experience. Many do, especially when blessed with an understanding of the gospel and the Atonement’s power to repair the breach (Isaiah 58:12). Many establish very secure homes, in which their early life experience actually increases their sensitivity to the factors that maintain a strong marriage. These cases are a tribute to those who succeed against the odds.

Two years later, in 1995, a group of scholars, including Barbara Whitehead, published a document called Marriage in America, which called on the nation to “rebuild a family culture based on enduring marital relationships.” They summarized a large body of research to conclude that the no-fault “divorce revolution” of 1968 had failed to reach its “goals of fairness and economic equality.”

Moreover, the report said, society is sending American children cultural messages that are “either indifferent or hostile to marriage,” thereby “failing to teach the next generation about the meaning, purposes, and responsibilities of marriage. If this trend continues, it will constitute nothing less than an act of cultural suicide.”

This group’s work helped to create the national “marriage movement” of 2000.

The data behind these conclusions showed that despite society’s having spent more on children in recent years in public schools, welfare programs, and other places, child well-being “has not improved. It has gotten worse — much worse.”

For example:

• Juvenile violent crime increased sixfold between 1960 and 1992.
• Reports of child neglect and abuse have quintupled since 1976.
• Children’s psychological disorders have all worsened — from eating disorders to drug abuse. Depression among children has increased 1,000 percent since the 1950s.
• Suicide among teenagers has increased 300 percent since the 1960s.
• Children spend eleven fewer hours per week with their parents than in the 1960s.
• Poverty has shifted increasingly to children.

The number of couples living together increased nearly tenfold between 1960 and 1998. More than half of all first marriages are now preceded by couples living together.

David Blankenhorn drew on these trends to write Fatherless America: Confronting Our Most Urgent Social Problem. His findings describe the products of divorce and births outside wedlock, dealing primarily with youth violence, domestic violence against women, child sexual abuse, and child poverty.

While such complex social ills have many causes, Blankenhorn and his associates concluded that “the decline of marriage” is their common denominator: “The most important causal factor of declining child well-being is the remarkable collapse of marriage, leading to growing family instability and decreasing parental investment in children.”

President Gordon B. Hinckley quoted a similar study in 2003: “Boys raised out of intact marriages are, on average, more than twice as likely as other boys to end up jailed... A child born to an unwed mother is about 2 and one-half times as likely to end up imprisoned, while a boy whose parents split during his teen years is about 2 and one-half times as likely to be imprisoned.”

By 2001, data from the 2000 United States Census showed that the thirty-year trend toward more unwed childbearing and more divorce has remained fairly stable since 1995. Now scholars who have been urging a return to pro-marriage attitudes hope they may “soon be able to say, for the first time in decades, that our national priority is to sustain” the slight but apparent trend toward more family stability.

Still, a group of thirteen recognized family scholars in 2002 published a report that summarized years of data with such findings as the following:

• Children of divorced or unwed parents are more likely than other children to become divorced themselves or have children outside marriage.
• Divorce and unmarried childbearing increase poverty for both children and mothers.
• Children of divorced or unwed parents have higher rates of psychological distress, mental illness, suicide, and educational failure.
• Boys raised in single-parent families are twice as likely to engage in criminal behavior.
• Children living with single mothers, stepfathers, or mother’s boyfriends are at greater risk of abuse.

Church members are not immune to these national trends. For example, the proportion of LDS young people who suffer from emotional and mental disorders seems to have increased substantially in recent years.

Dr. W. Dean Belnap, an LDS psychiatrist who has spent many years working with troubled adolescents, told me he has found that family breakdown is the most significant cause of such problems among LDS youth, because these breakdowns disturb a child’s normal psychological development and identity formation.

A study in 2003 by the Commission on Children at Risk, Hardwired to Connect, validates Dr. Belnap’s conclusion. It reports “the deteriorating mental and behavioral health of U.S. children,” a national “crisis” caused primarily by a lack of “close connections to other people, and deep connections to moral and spiritual meaning.”

And the family, which “is usually the source of the most enduring and formative relationships in a child’s life,” has grown “steadily weaker” since the mid 1960s.

It was precisely to guard against such harm that the state has honored and upheld marriage as a social institution, not just as a private, affectionate partnership but as the very best place — with two parents whenever possible — to raise children.

That’s why the Irish in Galway placed that little crown on top of the heart held by the two cupped hands in the Claddagh Ring. That’s why people in all nations have required a marriage license to start a family and a judge’s decree to get a divorce. That’s why legislatures and parliaments have retained the right to say which relationships, which privileges, and which duties will create and sustain marriages that promote society’s welfare.

All societies, until now, have been unwilling to leave the creation and dissolution of marriages to mere individual preferences, because the way children are reared affects entire cultures. England’s Patrick Devlin once described the traditional understanding:

The association of man and woman in wedlock has from time immemorial been of such importance in every society that its regulation has always been a matter of morals. Whether the union... should be dissoluble or not, and what obligations the spouses should undertake towards each other are not questions which any society has ever left to individuals to settle for themselves. They must be settled according to ideas of right and wrong which prevail in that society, that is, according to its moral law; and because the institution of marriage is fundamental to society the moral law regulates it very closely — much more closely than in most other subjects in which the moral and secular law both operate.

Until the last three decades, our laws and social attitudes reflected this understanding. But today’s environment reinforces the idea that marriage is a private choice, not a public commitment.

Meanwhile, the doctrine of the restored gospel about what parents owe children and society remains clear:

Husband and wife have a solemn responsibility to love and care for each other and for their children… Parents have a sacred duty to rear their children in love and righteousness, to provide for their physical and spiritual needs, to teach them to love and serve one another, to observe the commandments of God and to be law-abiding citizens wherever they live. Husbands and wives... will be held accountable before God for the discharge of these obligations...

We warn that individuals who violate covenants of chastity, who abuse spouse or offspring, or who fail to fulfill family responsibilities will one day stand accountable before God.

Yet recent social and cultural changes have moved so far and so fast that young Latter-day Saints these days are often surprised to discover how different the Church’s teachings are from society’s norms — and, therefore, from what may seem “normal” to them. Here are a few examples of the disconnect between gospel teachings and society’s changing family mores:

It is now far more common than it once was for a single LDS girl to keep a child she has borne out of wedlock, despite the Church’s counsel in such cases to marry or, if that is not feasible, to place the child for adoption. More than a few Laurel advisers have wondered whether to allow a seventeen-year-old single girl to bring her baby to class; however, a Church directive states that an unwed mother should not bring her baby to Young Women classes.

Missionaries all over the world find themselves teaching the gospel to unmarried couples who live together. These couples are sometimes mystified by the requirement that they must marry before they can be baptized.

Some LDS young women, who nearly always want to have children, now say they are frightened by the very concept of marriage, having picked up the message from the current environment that marriage can trap them or tie them down. The connection between a mature marriage and raising spiritually healthy children is not as obvious to our young people as it is to older generations.

These trends have deprived many of the rising generation of a once-instinctive understanding about the influence of family lifestyle and divorce patterns on the character and behavior of children and, hence, society. The entertainment media continually reinforce the assumption that “personal lifestyle” issues about living together, making love, and having children are all matters of strictly personal choice — victimless acts to be decided by consenting partners.

As such attitudes ripple through the culture, it is no surprise that we are losing our collective grasp of what marriage and parenting are about. People all around us are giving up, getting out, and stepping out as if there were no tomorrow — and no children.

A few divorces may actually be necessary to protect children in “high-conflict families” who are “at great psychological risk.” But such cases are rare. In fact, “only a minority of divorces grow out of pathological situations; much more common are divorces in families unscarred by physical assault.”

And divorcing families that have lived with, and perhaps worked on, manageable conflict typically discover that the inevitable messiness of divorce makes things worse for everyone — because “family breakup [itself] generates its own conflict.” The benefits of divorce seldom outweigh the costs, especially if one counts the costs to children.

Amid this confusion, adults who seek to be free from the constraints of traditional family attitudes simply have a conflict of interest in evaluating the effect of their own behavior on children. Barbara Whitehead illuminated this conflict in her 1993 article, when she compared Hallmark cards for divorced adults with Hallmark cards for their children:

For grown-ups: Divorce heralds new beginnings (A HOT NEW SINGLE).

For children: Divorce brings separation and loss. (“I’m sorry I’m not always there when you need me.”)

These cards... point to an uncomfortable... fact: what contributes to a parent’s happiness may detract from a child’s happiness. In short, family disruption creates a deep division between parents’ interests and the interests of children.

After describing the damage done by today’s increased family disintegration, Whitehead reported that the nation is not as alarmed about all of this as one might expect, primarily because the American people (like those in many other developed nations) have simply changed their minds about whether family disruption is bad:

What had once been regarded as hostile to children’s best interests [is] now considered essential to adults’ happiness...

Once the social metric shifts from child well-being to adult well-being, it is hard to see divorce and nonmarital birth in anything but a positive light…

This cultural shift helps explain what otherwise would be inexplicable: the failure to see the rise in family disruption as a severe and troubling national problem.

Nonetheless, in concept it is still true that the state represents the community as a party to each marriage and each divorce, not because the neighbors are trying to pry into private affairs but because of society’s enormous stake in the outcome and the offspring of each marriage. To marry is still to make a public commitment that in bringing children into the world, one accepts personal responsibility for those children and for their influence on the kind of community we create over time.

But the adults who have adopted the cultural message of individual autonomy as today’s primary value find that their own need for space, flexibility, and personal fulfillment simply trumps the needs of the children in their lives. Ironically, many of these adults justify their attitude by urging that children should also have more autonomy — more freedom to do as they please, without so many adults telling them what to do.

I have seen this adult conflict of interest at work in discussions about legal rights for children. Childrearing makes heavy demands on the time, energy, and financial resources of parents and communities. To escape those demands by giving more “rights” to children is a beguiling invitation, because it provides an easy rationalization for adults whose personal convenience is also best served by the idea that they should leave their children alone.

For example, schoolteachers and administrators may find it not worth the patience required and the frustration involved to provide students with meaningful discipline. Marriage partners may think it unimportant to cooperate with each other for the sake of their children. Divorced and unmarried fathers may feel less obliged to make payments of financial support. Parents may be unconcerned about employment or leisure time interests that conflict with their children’s needs.

The growing preference of many adults for a more casual sexual environment also encourages destructive sexual permissiveness among adolescents. For example, a team of distinguished researchers in the field of adolescent pregnancy concluded a large study about rising rates of teen pregnancy with the chilling observation that “for ourselves, we prefer to cope with the consequences of early sex as an aspect of an emancipated society, rather than pay the social costs its elimination would exact.”

In other words, the researchers could clearly see ways to reduce teenage pregnancies, but they were not willing to pursue those policies because they don’t want to curb the morally permissive atmosphere that American adults have now come to enjoy in the media and elsewhere “as an aspect of an emancipated society.”

I once saw a small boy standing alone on a street looking helpless and afraid. He was wearing a big T-shirt bearing the slogan, “Leave me alone.” I thought he would make a good poster child to illustrate the irony in the attitude of adults who willingly abandon children to their “right” to be “autonomous.”

America’s founding fathers had a longer-term view about how to maintain a free and stable society. They spoke in the preamble to the Constitution about “secur[ing] the blessings of Liberty” not only “to ourselves” but also to “our Posterity.” To make our own days and those of our posterity “long upon the land” God has given us, it is essential not only for children to honor their parents but for parents to honor their children.