Ignoring the data again ...

After the recent cover story in Time about the benefits of marriage for children and society, some have decided to attack the author and the idea that marriage is an institution worth preserving and encouraging.

This piece in The Nation by Katha Pollitt reads like a lot of sarcastic noise. While it is successful at being snarky, it, like most articles of its kind, ignores decades of social science research that show that marriage is best for children. The article ignores the data on the benefits of marriage and the negative effects of divorce and out-of-wedlock birth so that it does not have to confront, head on, a very simple idea - children do best when their parents get and stay married. If this is not the case, someone needs to produce a body of research that shows otherwise - I have not seen it yet.

This article, predictably, offers no data of its own, just meaningless comparisons to other countries (where, by the way, cohabitation is a completely different beast than it is here in the U.S.).

Pollitt also lists several other solutions to improving child well being that she says are more attainable than improving marriages or reducing divorces. You have to see the list for yourself, but the items are far from 'no-brainers' that could be easily implemented. For example, she says that we can achieve "Neighborhoods safe enough for kids to play outdoors and air clean enough so they don't get asthma." Needless to say, we have been trying to create safe neighborhoods and clean air for decades, to no avail (ironically, the cause of much neighborhood violence is fatherless boys acting out).

Would Pollitt give up as easily on the idea of creating safe neighborhoods as she does on strengthening marriage because it is "hard to do"?