Getting that ``MRS" Degree: Based on recent marriage trends, Princeton researchers predict that women with college degrees are increasingly more likely to get married than their lesser-educated counterparts. These data would seem to cast doubt on the notion that greater female economic independence necessarily leads more women to eschew marriage. Perhaps we can have our cake and eat it too? Could this finding also help to reduce (misguided) fears that mainstream marriage advocates want to force women back into traditional gender roles? The distressing prospect of this trend is greater socioeconomic inequality, as less-educated women are also less likely to receive the benefits of marriage. (The full paper is available as a pdf here.) Posted by Tom Sylvester, 9-26-02 | Link.
Another somewhat depressing comic strip in Salon. Posted by Tom Sylvester, 9-24-02 | Link.
CLASP's latest policy brief (Adobe Acrobat Reader needed) on marriage initiatives, written by Theodora Ooms, is an eminently fair assessment of the current debate.
Ooms promotes what she calls a ``Marriage-Plus" policy approach. It's basically a way for moderate liberals rhetorically and substantively to support pro-marriage policies without neglecting elements they deem equally important, such as job training, greater income supports, and so on. It's an attempt to build consensus on a divisive issue as well. (Also see: ``abstinence-plus" education. Of course, some critics of these ``plus" approaches see them as rhetorical appropriations that mask the same old liberal policy proposals.)
P.S. Anyone who guesses the next issue for which a ``____-plus" approach emerges gets bonus points. Posted by Tom Sylvester, 9-24-02 | Link.
Salon's depressing depiction of lifelong commitment. Posted by Tom Sylvester, 9-18-02 | Link.
Civitas, a civil society think tank in England, has just released a report entitled ``Experiments in Living: The Fatherless Family." Posted by Tom Sylvester, 9-17-02 | Link
The Washington Times has a ``Special Report" on pro-marriage welfare initiatives in Arizona, Oklahoma, and West Virginia. Though full of supportive anecdotal evidence, the article raises difficult questions for the marriage movement. For example, Arizona has spent over $1 million in TANF funds on an informational booklet on marriage and subsidies for marriage-education classes. The state pays 85 percent of the cost of these classes for all interested couples, and low-income couples with children receive vouchers to cover the rest. So how many couples have taken these classes? 517 -- a remarkably small number. How many were low-income couples with kids? A total of 26. This last figure does seem to justify the concern that TANF dollars used for marriage promotion will be redistributed to the middle-class. Yes, public policy should explicitly support marriage. And with any new policy initiative, not all good ideas (see here, here, and here) will translate into effective policy. But I hope that marriage advocates don't take this article to be an endorsement. While the Times largely avoided asking the tough questions, critics of the marriage initiatives won't. Can't this money be used more effectively? Posted by Tom Sylvester, 9-27-02 | Link.
Resources on children's moral and spiritual development routinely assume that children have an intact family experience even though, due to divorce and single parent childbearing, it is now more common for children to spend some part of their childhood without an intact family than with one. This is the argument I have made in several articles [``Children of Divorce: Stories of Exile", ``The Prophetic Task of the Churches on Behalf of Children of Divorce" and ``Ministering to Children of Divorce Through Their Lives"] and will illustrate with new research in an upcoming book titled Divided Selves: The Moral and Spiritual Lives of Children of Divorce.
This point was brought home to me again when I was flipping through the latest issue of The Christian Century, a magazine read by many mainline Protestant clergy and lay leaders. The September 11-24 issue contains a feature article on a new book by Susan R. Garrett and Amy Plantinga Pauw, Making Time for God: Daily Devotions for Children and Families to Share, that will be published in October by Baker Books. In the book the authors seek to provide intelligent, spiritually challenging daily devotions for children ages seven to twelve.
On the whole this looks like a wonderful book, one that I would consider buying for children I know in that age group. But I was struck by their January 3rd entry, excerpted in the article. The reading for the day is Genesis 1:26-27, in which God creates man and woman in God's image. The authors' commentary opens a discussion of this idea of being created in someone else's image by asking, "Do people ever tell you that you have your dad's smile or his eyes? Or are you shy, or cheerful, or smart like your mom?"
For an audience of children from intact families, these questions come naturally. How better to get children thinking about the work of the Creator than by asking about the two people who created them? The questions draw upon rich associations a child is likely to have from a lifetime of experience living with his mom and dad. But for a child of divorce, or for a child of single mother who has never met his father, these questions evoke something entirely different. In my interviews with young adult children of divorce, I found that, when they were children, being compared to a parent in looks or personality threw them into a state of anxiety, bringing up feelings of fear, loss, guilt, and more. If they looked or acted too much like one parent, they feared the loss or rejection of the other parent. If people told them they looked like their father, they wondered if this made their mother mad at them. And, in some cases, mothers used a resemblance to the father to hurt the child when she was angry. ``You're acting just like your father!" was a painful reprimand for the child, because it implied the ultimate rejection. ``You are not of me," the mother was saying. ``You are part of the man who is no longer part of my world." Likewise, just as children feared being too much like their father, when in their father's presence they also feared being too much like their mother because, again, it marked them as an outsider, as potentially unwelcome.
So, for a child of divorce, such a seemingly harmless daily devotion will bring up extraordinarily deep and painful feelings of which the authors, by assuming children grow up in intact families, are apparently not aware. What to do? Should half the book be written for children from intact families while the other half is written for those from divorced or single parent families? Should all books for children be written assuming that no one grows up with both parents anymore? The answer is no - the first option is too unwieldy and the second, even worse, would simply normalize the experience of family fragmentation and ultimately hurt children even more. The answer, perhaps, is that authors who write about children's moral and spiritual issues need to learn more. They need to educate themselves about family change and the experience, from the child's point of view, of growing up in a divorced or single parent family. They need to recognize that children's family experiences profoundly influence their moral and spiritual development, including how they hear the major stories of the faith. When authors being to recognize the diversity of experience among children, and begin to temper their comments with more nuanced insights about children's theological experiences, they will then come closer to the truths of all children's lives. Posted by Elizabeth Marquardt, 9-17-02 | Link.
The Orange County Register reports on ``what some call a growing pro-marriage movement meant to slow the divorce rate." Posted by Tom Sylvester, 9-06-02 | Link.
When I first heard the term "blended family" as a 13-year-old child of divorce, all I knew was that my experience of family flux was many things, but "blended" was not one of them. Which is why I was intrigued by a recent posting by Margorie Engel of the Stepfamily Association of America in which she argues against replacing the term "stepfamily" with the term "blended family." She writes: "Children in stepfamilies do not lose their individuality or their connection and active attachment to the parent who is not part of the remarriage of mother or father… and therapists have learned (and research confirms) that when stepfamilies try to 'blend,' they are typically doomed to failure… [Children] know they have divided loyalties. Consider the confusion when both parents remarry and the child is expected to be a full-time member of TWO `blended' families…the concept of a `blended family' sets up unrealistic expectations and makes all aspects of adjustment more difficult than they need to be."
A subsequent posting by a family therapist, Charlene G. Gooch, disagrees: "The non-acceptance of any use of the word `blended' rejects, or at least creates a barrier from, those families whose presentation, in their own words, is of themselves as a blended family… The word is comfortable for some families, whether or not the `professionals' want to argue `what is the `right' definition.' I've had the privilege and pleasure of working with families who referred to themselves as `blended'…Two of these families, in fact, had lived and loved together for several years, had all changed their names to a hyphenated name that created their own `new family,' and were indistinguishable from, dare I say, `intact' families."
When I hear therapists say that "families" speak, it sets off alarm bells in my head. Families don't speak, individuals do. Even within the same family, adults and children often have radically different experiences of the divorce process. The same event that can make a parent very happy - for instance, a remarriage - can make a child very unhappy. The question I posed in my response to Gooch is: If a therapist says that two of her "families" refer to themselves as "blended," whose opinion is she reporting? Did the adults in the family happily tell her that they are "blended?" Or did the children?
I don't know these two particular families, but typically it's the grown-ups who say that they are a "blended family," and here's why: Remarried adults are often pleased to believe that they are "blending" two families, because the family unit built around their (re)marriage has now become, for them, their primary family. But not for their children. However "blended" the parents may feel or act, each of their children now in fact have two primary families, some of whose members may not even know each other. Indeed, the child - and in some cases his or her siblings - is typically the only link between these two families.
In short, the child's fundamental reality is divided, not "blended." The term "blended" represents the triumph in our society of a purely adult point of view - using it in therapy is not a kindness to the child, but rather an offense, because it ignores the child's actual experience, and seeks instead to redefine that experience by using words intended to help the grownups feel better about themselves.
Bridget Maher of the Family Research Council recently told me that the U.S. Census Bureau uses the term "blended families" to describe any family that includes "at least one stepparent, stepsibling, and/or half-sibling." Here we have another example of a term that is first created by apologists, then adopted by therapists, then filtered into mainstream use, and finally adopted by policy analysts and government agencies. I admire Margorie Engel's forthrightness in speaking out about this issue. Posted by Elizabeth Marquardt, 9/5/02 | Link. |
