In back-to-back recent offerings, The Upshot — New York Times’ data-driven reporting and analysis venture — provided research and reason for the benefit of marriage and families.
In his “Letter from the Editor: Marriage, and When Liberals Are Wrong,” The Upshot editor David Leonhardt — the Times’ former Washington bureau chief and a Pulitzer Prize winner — provided some clarity to the cause-and-effect controversy between changing family structure and economic inequality.
Liberals, he said in an admittedly broad-stroke summary, see economic factors as the ultimate cause of family changes. On the other hand, conservatives see the changes in family structure as the primary cause and economic inequality as an effect.
Both are partly right, he agreed, and yet countered that such an assumption is incomplete. “To be blunter, I’d say family structure is an area where many liberals are putting more weight on their preconceptions (inequality is bad for society) than on the evidence (changes in family structure are both an effect and a cause of inequality).”
Even the liberals who deride the conservative call for marriage as “a panacea for poverty” will admit that marriage does matter. A recent Center for American Progress report, “A Woman’s Nation Pushes Back From The Brink,” stated: “The social science literature is quite clear that children of single-parent families, particularly those living in low-income households, do not fare as well as their peers living in two-parent families, and that these poorer outcomes persist, even when you control for socioeconomic differences.”
The Upshot’s previous-day post, “Study Finds More Reasons to Get and Stay Married” by Claire Cain Miller, cited research that marriage results in a noticeable and long-lasting increase in satisfaction — particularly during life’s most stressful situations.
“Even as fewer people are marrying, the disadvantages of remaining single have broad implications,” Miller wrote. “It’s important because marriage is increasingly a force behind inequality. Stable marriages are more common among education, high-income people, and increasingly out of reach for those who are not. That divide appears to affect not just people’s income and family stability, but also their happiness and stress levels."
In acknowledging Miller’s work, Leonhard added: “Life satisfaction isn’t the same thing as inequality, but they’re related. And a large amount of other research suggests that family structure also drives economic outcomes. The notion that the cline of low-income marriage is no more an aftershock of rising income inequality seems, in a word, wrong.”
It’s oversimplification to think the key reasons to marry or start a family are to improve one’s financial standing or provide stress relief. In fact, marriages and families can bring increased demands on and challenges to finances and stress. However, spouses, parents and children working together can weather storms and turn challenges in achievements and stresses into successes.
No, marriages and families should be based on working toward ideals — love and learning, understanding and unselfishness, faith and friendship, caring and compassion and hope and healing. As efforts are made in marriage and family, tangible benefits — such as economic stability and life satisfaction — can be among the realized results.