Japan’s woman-shy, homebody men

A new breed of Japanese men is provoking a national debate about how the country’s economic stagnation since the early 1990s has altered men’s behaviour, and whether or not it is a bad thing. Known as soushoku danshi, or “grass-eating boys”, the young men in question are notable for their lack of interest in women and consumerism.

They like pottering around the house and going for walks. Some of them spend so much time playing computer games that they prefer the company of cyber women to the real thing.

“In this age of bromance and metrosexuals, why all the fuss?” asks Alexandra Harney, a regular commentator on Japanese television, in an article in Slate:

“The short answer is that grass-eating men are alarming because they are the nexus between two of the biggest challenges facing Japanese society: the declining birth rate and anaemic consumption. Herbivores represent an unspoken rebellion against many of the masculine, materialist values associated with Japan's 1980s bubble economy.”

Surveys suggest that among men in their 20s and 30s, between 40 per cent and 75 per cent consider themselves herbivores. They are more likely to want to spend time by themselves or with close friends; they are often close to their mothers and have female friends, but they're in no rush to get married themselves, according to Maki Fukasawa, the Japanese editor and columnist who coined the term in NB Online in 2006.

Shigeru Sakai of Media Shakers suggests that grass-eating men don't pursue women because they are bad at expressing themselves. He attributes their poor communication skills to the fact that many grew up without siblings in households where both parents worked.

“Because they had TVs, stereos and game consoles in their bedrooms, it became more common for them to shut themselves in their rooms when they got home and communicate less with their families, which left them with poor communication skills,’ he wrote in an e-mail. (Japan has rarely needed its men to have sex as much as it does now. Low birth rates, combined with a lack of immigration, have caused the country's population to shrink every year since 2005.)”

Changes in work have also played a part; the rise of the female executive has dampened macho office culture. More important has been the collapse of Japan’s economic bubble and the salarymen with a job for life who could afford to woo a woman with luxuries. Now, nearly 40 per cent of Japanese work in non-staff positions with much less job security.

"When the economy was good, Japanese men had only one lifestyle choice: They joined a company after they graduated from college, got married, bought a car, and regularly replaced it with a new one," says Fukasawa. "Men today simply can't live that stereotypical 'happy' life."

What about the gay factor?

Ms Fukusawa says that while some may be, the behaviour of the grass-eating men has more to do with rejecting the traditional Japanese definition of masculinity and what she calls the West’s commercialisation of relationships, under which men needed to be macho and purchase products to win a woman’s affection. She sees the new trend as positive and harking back to pre-World War II Japanese society.

Not surprisingly, there is talk of a new trend among women -- “carnivorous girls”, who are pursuing men more aggressively. Will they be the answer to Japan’s slide into a grey and sterile future?

Article by: Carolyn Moynihan

The wrong cure for infertility

Turning baby-making into a technology can have devastating results. 

For some men and women, IVF can seem like a godsend. Inability is always felt as a grievous loss for loving couples. But the clinics which offer IVF and other "assisted reproductive technology" techniques are businesses, and offer services, not love. They make mistakes which devastate lives.

The latest blunder comes from the UK. The Daily Mail’s headlines speak for themselves: "'In ten seconds our world was shattered': Distraught IVF couple discover their last embryo was given to the wrong woman -- and then aborted".

The story continues: "A couple's last hopes of having another child have been shattered after an appalling blunder at an NHS fertility clinic led to their final usable embryo being implanted into the wrong patient. The error was made by an overworked trainee doctor who failed to carry out strict checks that require all fertility procedures to be witnessed and verified. The woman who mistakenly received the couple’s embryo was told of the devastating error shortly after it occurred and agreed to have a termination. It was the only remaining embryo of nine the distraught couple had created using IVF. The blunder at IVF Wales, part of Cardiff and Vale NHS Trust, was rated category A, the most serious level, by the Government’s fertility regulator, the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority (HFEA)."

A number of ethical issues are raised here. It is clear, for example, that these technologies are often running at cross purposes. The same hospital that performs fertility treatment in one room, may well be dealing with contraception, sterilization and abortion in another. On the one hand we want to be fertile, even where it is socially, morally or biologically impossible or undesirable. On the other hand we want the ability to cut off the possibility of new life. This schizophrenic mentality is all part of a society that has lost its moorings and is confused about the nature of sexuality and reproduction.

But this can only get worse. As we move down the road of sex selection, selective breeding, designer babies, and grand promises of eliminating present disease and weeding out future illnesses, we will more and more make utilitarian decisions about which babies should be allowed to enter the world and which should not. The range of what is acceptable life will continue to narrow, and the pressure will mount to restrict conception and parenthood to that which is socially desirable.

But problems in medical ethics are the least of the concerns for these distraught parents. Their reality is quite obvious: their last child was killed. As the grieving mother said: "I kept thinking, 'They’ve killed our baby! Killed our baby!' The hospital offered us private counselling on the spot, but we couldn’t get out of there fast enough. Even our worst fears didn’t prepare us for the devastating news that our embryo had actually been placed in another woman, and that it had to be taken out and destroyed for 'medical reasons'."

Many similar problems such as this have occurred over the years, mostly due to human error. Numerous IVF mix-ups have occurred. Sperm, eggs, or embryos, are somewhere along the line mixed up, resulting in the wrong children given to the wrong parents. A recent example took place in Britain when a white couple had black twins following an IVF mix-up. A study later found that this was due to mistakes, overworked staff and poor management. The report found a "catalogue of serious mishaps" at IVF clinics.

And the various medical concerns continue to make news. Also in the UK, a recent study found that IVF twins are at a much greater risk of illness or early death. As the Times reported last month, "Twins born as a result of fertility treatment are at greater risk of serious illness or dying in the first three years of their life than those who are conceived naturally, a study suggests. Siblings born together after in vitro fertilisation (IVF) stay an average of four days longer in hospital after birth and are far more likely to be admitted to a neo-natal intensive care ward. They are more than twice as likely to die just before or just after birth, although the reasons for this are not clear, researchers at the universities of Western Australia and Oxford said."

The desire for children is normal and deep-seated. But sometimes we must be willing to accept what nature has dealt to us, if the remedy becomes worse that the ‘illness’. Indeed, one can ask if it is even right to speak of infertility as in illness.

One thing is certain, assisted reproductive technology does nothing to cure the condition. The infertile individual continues to be infertile after treatment. Perhaps we should put more money into the causes of infertility. Research should be aimed at solving or relieving these problems, instead of pouring money into treating the symptoms. And other options, like adoption, should be explored more fully.

Indeed, one can also ask whether IVF is good medicine. Bioethicist Donald De Marco reminds us that reproductive technologies "represent a deviation from the traditional aims of medicine inasmuch as they treat a desire rather than a disease".

And as fertility expert Roger Gosden notes, "The desire to bear a child can become obsessive, and the costs of infertility treatment are often heavy. Infertility patients are willing to accept considerable discomfort as they undergo a roller coaster of emotions and medical procedures that would be considered humiliating or even dangerous in other circumstances."

Commenting on this newest story of IVF mix-ups, Bel Mooney offers some helpful insights: "The toll on her physical and mental health (and that of her husband) has been immense and one wonders what the knock-on effect of that on her existing child will be. After all, Mum is always sick or in tears ... Desperate couples on the IVF carousel think: 'Next time we will be lucky' and perhaps say silent prayers as the cycle starts once more. As I said earlier, who can blame them?

"Yet it's impossible not to worry that we have reached an unhealthy state when too many people believe they have a divine right to a child. When you have women in their 50s and 60s living by that misplaced conviction and conceiving babies artificially, something is very wrong. These are fiendishly difficult issues, and any government (and its watchdog) owes it to the public to legislate fairly, to be vigilant, to take responsibility and to warn.

"Many of us have doubts that the HFEA is living up to those standards. But beyond that, perhaps women themselves need to rethink their attitudes to motherhood. I would suggest that any young woman in her twenties, in a serious loving relationship, would be wiser not to postpone trying for a baby. That she should think of fertility as a privilege, not a right. And that -- whisper it -- childlessness might be a fate which (like so many of the other sorrows which afflict our lives) sometimes has to be accepted."

Quite so. And this is not mere wishful thinking. I know of infertile couples who have embraced their infertility. Sure, they still ache for a child, but they have learned to accept their lot in life, and have learned to be grateful for the many mercies and blessings they do experience in a less than ideal world.

Perhaps the desire for a child has becomes that much stronger in a world where we expect everything to be handed to us on a silver platter. Living in an age of entitlements simply compounds the problem here. Perhaps it is time we started looking at life in all its fullness as a gift, instead of an entitlement.

Article by: Bill Muehlenberg is a lecturer in ethics and philosophy at several Melbourne theological colleges and a PhD candidate at Deakin University.

The private world of child abuse

The abusive institutions have closed but adults are still trampling all over the rights of children.

One of the great discoveries of the twentieth century is the rights of children. From their status almost as chattels of a patriarchal society -- as portrayed so indignantly by Charles Dickens -- children have evolved into human beings with dignity equal to that of adults, their own charter of rights and official advocates in the form of children’s commissioners. They even have laws in some countries to stay the parental hand that would administer a swift smack or clip around the ear.

To understand what we have left behind -- in reality, and not just in Dickensian caricature -- we need look no further than a recent report on the heartless and brutal regimes that prevailed in Irish industrial schools and other “childcare” institutions in the first half of last century and, in certain forms, in later decades. To read even a summary of the massive dossier compiled by the Ryan commission is to stare into a world of childhood suffering that makes one feel sick and ashamed of the human race.

Thankfully, such institutions have disappeared from the face of the earth, or at least from developed societies. Contemporary culture abhors institutions so there is no danger that children will run foul of them and be knocked about for it.

But there is another danger, and it is all too evident in the reports of child abuse in private homes that appear with distressing regularity; that is the danger of a culture in which self-expression has become the ruling ethos, and in which adults’ right to choose increasingly trumps the basic needs and rights of children.

The prime example of this privatised abuse is abortion, which, as the direct killing of an innocent human being, is a more fundamental and inhuman form of child abuse than anything the old institutions came up with, and just as hidden. It has been said, with some justice, that abortion is seed-bed of today’s often lethal abuse of infants. Certainly, it creates an excuse for abusers: if you can destroy an unwanted child before birth, why not after?

One such case is before a court in New Zealand this week; it concerns the death of a one-year-old boy while in the care -- supposedly -- of his uncle and the uncle’s partner, who is accused of the abuse.  The case coincides with the release of a report by the Children's Commissioner on risk factors for death and serious injury from assault of children under five years old in New Zealand, which has one of the highest rates of child abuse among the richer countries.

According to the commissioner, “The report also highlights some risks we need to give more attention to in this country. For instance, there is a particular risk when babies are left in the care of young men who are not biological fathers. (Emphasis added.) They are often totally unprepared for the stresses of a crying baby and may already have problems with anger or alcohol abuse.

”International research has found that they often lash out in an attempt to ‘silence’ the child. With knowledge like this we can make sure that funding and resources to reduce child abuse are directed to the right places and at the right people.”

Well, let’s see what happens. It is very doubtful that “resources” will be applied to the real problem: the undisputed right of adults to drift in and out of “relationships” without regard to the rights and welfare of any resulting children.

The fundamental issue is this: all children deserve and need a loving biological father and a loving biological mother in a stable home. The further you move from that ideal -- which most children grow up in -- the more potential for abuse there is.

Far from minimising this potential, however, we are actually embracing adult “rights” that put more and more children at risk. Through our laissez-faire attitude to sex and marriage, through practices associated with in vitro fertilisation, we are creating children who do not know their parents -- especially their father -- or who are alienated from them by divorce. We foster and finance the institutions which facilitate things like divorce and IVF because it makes the parents, or, a parent, feel good.

In these situations in recent times there has been at least lip-service paid to the principle that the welfare or “interests” of the child are “paramount”. Sorry, kids, that is about to go out the window too.

Writing in the Journal of Medical Ethics this month about IVF, B Solberg asks, If a child does not yet exist, what meaning can its “welfare” have? None, he suggests. Children born in the traditional way may have “interests”, but not ones whom we create: “Potential children seem to be outside morality.” 

What really matters in assisted reproduction, says the Norwegian, is the “parental project” of the adults; if it is “meaningful and doable” let them go ahead. He draws the line at providing IVF children for drug addicts, but says the technology ought to be available for homosexual couples, saviour siblings, sex selection -- and anything else that would result in a “functional family”.

Admittedly we are talking here about an obscure article in a journal that appeals mainly to the overheated brains of bioethicists, but it is on just such arguments that the IVF industry depends for its expansion.

In the areas of adoption and fostering there is emerging the same airy disregard for the welfare of children and even the rights and/or interests of birth parents who, for several decades have been treated as partners in their child’s transition to a new family, or a foster family.

Catholic charities in the UK are being forced into a corner where they must abandon adoption work or comply with new regulations which require them to consider homosexual couples as potential adopters, despite their belief that this is a violation of the rights of the child.

Local authorities are handing over children to same-sex couples for fostering against the wishes of birth parents and even when foster care within the extended family is possible. A Catholic mother who placed her 10-year-old son in care after a mental breakdown, is distressed that he has been sent to live with a middle-aged homosexual couple who run a hotel in Brighton. Can the authorities rule out the possibility of sexual abuse in such a case?

Foster care itself is a murky area which in some countries seems on the verge of collapse, as children are farmed out to whoever is on hand and just as arbitrarily removed. Unsuitable foster parents and instability must be the cause of terrible unhappiness to many children. Those who are not able to be placed with foster families end up in group accommodation, which is probably like a mini-orphanage with at least some of the old potential for abuse, including bullying and sexual abuse by other children.

Yes, institutionalised abuse may be gone, but there is absolutely no ground for complacency on that score. Today’s abuse is different, but the fact that it has been privatised makes it not one bit less real or horrific.

And the fact that it occurs in the name of freedom of choice makes it not one bit more excusable. But tackling the assumption that adults must not be impeded in their life “projects” would require a revolution in social ethics that would extend to divorce, sex education, pornography, drug use and, of course, abortion.

In its recommendations on future child policy in Ireland the Ryan report said that existing national guidelines should be uniformly and consistently implemented throughout the State in order to protect vulnerable people. The short title of those guidelines is “Children First”. To put children first, however, Ireland would have to swim against the tide of “adults first” that is lapping the shores of all supposedly advanced societies.

By: Carolyn Moynihan is deputy editor of MercatorNet.

Families matters

Private choices, public costs: How failing families cost us all

"What we know is that marriage is a very significant institution, not just for individuals, but for the social whole." These are the words of Kay Hymowitz, the author of Marriage and Caste in America: Separate and Unequal Families in a Post-Marital Age. She is expressing the consensus of a growing number of statisticians, policy analysts and academics. But Canadians, as a whole, are less inclined to view getting married as a public act with public consequences. We don’t tend to view marriage as the basis of strong communities, as a creator of economic and social capital, or as the original safety net protecting against poverty.

In these tough economic times, we do hear calls from our leaders to focus on the economy, over and above issues of family and community. The reality is that a focus on the economy will mean taking a good look at how we "do family" in this day and age.
The research is absolutely clear. There is a strong link between married parents and stability for children. Children who start their lives with their own married parents tend to be healthier, do better at school, and have stronger relationships as adults themselves. There is a clear correlation between marriage and well being. And that translates into stronger extended families, healthier communities, and finally, a stronger economy. But even in these tough economic times, this isn’t an argument most Canadians are hearing.

The protection that marriage provides against child poverty is the major theme of a new study the Institute of Marriage and Family Canada. Private choices, public costs: How failing families cost us all is a quantitative assessment of the fiscal costs to government, and therefore taxpayers, of broken families.
Historically, the main responsibility for providing children with the necessities of life, from food, clothing and shelter to education and spiritual guidance, lay with parents. Parents in turn were supported by their extended families and communities. As these social bonds grew weaker the number of parents unable to provide for their children has expanded, often as a result of family breakdown, whether that meant divorce, the break-up of cohabiting parents, or the absence of one parent from birth. When families fail, government begins to act as a quasi-replacement family, offering benefits through programs such as welfare, and child care and housing subsidies.

These are the costs we have quantified in our report: targeted benefits to help families afford the necessities of life, and other services such as childcare. The bill, in Canada alone, for the many poverty alleviation programs, which disproportionately support single parent families, is almost $7-billion annually. Were family breakdown to decrease, child poverty would decrease and so would the demand for many of these programs. The potential savings, at a conservative estimate, amount to close to $2-billion.
Certainly, family breakdown is not about dollars and cents. The most devastating damage of broken families involves children torn between warring parents, parents struggling to maintain relationships with their children, and the weakening of bonds within the extended family. But there are financial repercussions, and these can be more easily measured.

Therefore we are calling attention to the importance of stable families by attaching a price tag to those that fail. Through this, we hope to show every Canadian why families matter to us all. An honest discussion about marriage and family is a crucial first step, if Canadians are to understand the consequences, public and private, of the choices they make in their personal lives. More and more Canadian families are failing. The recent census showed that fewer Canadian families with children are married than every before. In 1961, 92 per cent of families were headed by a married couple, while in 2006 that number had fallen to 69 per cent. One in seven households with children is headed by two cohabiting adults, a family form that is less stable than marriage. Another one in seven is headed by a single parent, most often a mother. These families are radically more likely to live in poverty.

Children fare best on many indicators – financially, educationally, psychologically, even in terms of physical health – when they grow up with their own married parents. Family breakdown is one pathway to poverty. If we are serious about finding a remedy for child poverty, or better yet preventing it, we can’t afford to shrug our shoulders and avoid a discussion about why marriage matters, not only for husbands, wives and children, but for us all.

The full report which includes international comparisons between Canada, Australia, New Zealand, the United States and Great Britain can be found and read online.

Rebecca Walberg is the President and founder of the Wakefield Centre for Policy Research.
Andrea Mrozek is Manager of Research and Communications at the Institute of Marriage and Family Canada.

Billboard blight

A rancid advertising campaign shows the difference between sex and love.

“Want Longer Lasting Sex?”; “Want Longer Lasting… Censored”; “Bonk Longer”. Like the plagues that were cast upon the Egyptians, the Advanced Medical Institute (AMI) with its “Nasal Delivery Technology” has descended upon Australian billboards, newspapers, TV and radio, peddling an alleged cure for impotence. Founded in Australia 16 years ago by Ukrainian-born Jack Vaisman, AMI has recently expanded its operations into New Zealand, Japan, the UK and now the USA.

The AMI campaign, however, is not a medical campaign. Rather it is an attempt to reshape our understanding of the human person and the sexual act and to make a great deal of money in the process. From a commercial point of view it has been a phenomenal success.

Sex sells everything from cars to toothpaste. What is happening with companies such as AMI, however, is much more duplicitous. The reason that most of its radio ads and billboards pass through the Advertising Standards Bureau is because they do not use explicit sex or nudity to sell a product. Rather, they are selling a new vision of sex under the guise of medical treatment. AMI cleverly works at a philosophical level and, unfortunately, the code of ethics does not. Increasingly, we live within a legal and political system operating at a rule-based level which is devoid of an ethical framework. But without ethics based on core principles, rules mean very little.

If AMI were selling ways for couples to love each other better, that would be great. But of course it can not. This campaign does however tell us something about ourselves that sometimes we forget. Every single one of us, male and female, young and old, Christian, Muslim or atheist, is searching for connection and love. Deep within every heart lies a spark that pushes the human person to pursue what is true, good and beautiful, even if they are totally wrong on where to find it. Even though the modern world has declared sex to be no more than a recreational activity, it does not really ring true to our experience. Our maleness, our femaleness, and our sexuality have a meaning we cannot ignore.

The biggest problem with these ads is not their crudeness; it is their utilitarian view of the human person and human sexuality. When we live with a utilitarian mindset, the human person becomes another object for our use or abuse. We see the classical examples of this throughout history in slavery, Nazism and abortion, but each one of us must be on constant alert for it in our own lives, especially in regards to sexuality. Karol Wojtyła noted in his book Love and Responsibility that there are more opportunities within the sexual relationship than in most other situations of treating a person as an object of use  - sometimes without even realising it.

Love and sex in our culture are often reduced to no more than lust; in fact a slogan like “lust longer” would more accurately express AMI's goal. But love is a virtue; it is more than an emotion and very much more than an excitement of the senses. Love can only be what it is meant to be when it is directed to another person in their entirety. Love cannot be called love when it directs itself merely to a body.

The book of Genesis recalls how Adam and Eve realised that they were naked and covered themselves after the fall. There is a deep significance in this. With sin came a tendency to see the body before seeing the person. The man and woman covered themselves to protect their bodies from being used in a manner that was not respectful to them as human persons. This experience of the man and woman is at the basis of the Christian understanding of sexuality, morality and social justice. It is a holistic understanding that sees the beauty and value of the entire person and is not limited by any particular strength or defect of their body. When this is understood Christianity is seen as not a killjoy philosophy but as a pointer towards genuine joy. It is a joy that will not be found in drugs that promote longer lasting sex, but in a genuine commitment to selfless love.

By: Bernard Toutounji is the Education Officer of the Life, Marriage and Family Centre in the Catholic Archdiocese of Sydney. www.lifemarriagefamily.org.au.

Married, with children, pays

Money talks at the Economist, and the talk in this item from May, which has just been brought to our attention, is that in most of the developed world it pays to be married with children. That is because most governments offer some form of tax breaks or cash benefits to offset the cost of bringing up children.

In all but one of the 30 OECD countries, a married, one-earner couple with two children takes home more money than a single person with no children on the same annual salary. On that basis, the best countries for families are Ireland or the Czech Republic, where “net” incomes end up higher than gross. Mexico is the only OECD country where married couples with children get no breaks at all.

Lots of comments on this article, including the expected quota of moans about the cost of children, and from pessimists who think the planet is overburdened and could do with fewer children.

Wrong girl, Archie!

Stunning, heart-breaking news: Archie Andrews is going to get married, and he has chosen the wrong girl. Archie Comics Publications has announced that he will soon pop the question to wealthy beauty Veronica Lodge in the 600th book in the series, due to arrive in September. Betty won’t be the only one crying her eyes out.

So help me, I had no idea the series was still running. I read my older brother’s Archie comics as a kid in 1950s -- and that is where I thought Archie, Ronnie and Betty had stayed. Just think of it; they’ve been teenagers for 68 years, locked in a triangle that Alyssa Rosenberg at The Atlantic reckons should stay eternal:

But Archie could never really choose between Betty and Veronica, not because each was too impossibly perfect to resist, but because each girl was half of an ideal. Veronica is beautiful and wealthy, but the promise of glamour and comfort that she offers are shot through with arrogance and more than occasional cruelty and inconstancy. Betty can bake a pie, fix a jalopy, publish an article, or lead a protest, but she’s spent more than 67 years hung up on a guy who takes advantage of her talents and pants after her best friend.

Archie can’t make a permanent choice between Betty and Veronica because he’s not ready to choose—and they’re not ready to be chosen. Their triangle has stayed relevant for seven decades because, as perpetual teenagers, their experiences reinforce the lessons that are so heartbreakingly difficult for us to absorb, that flash fades, carelessness wounds, intellectual compatibility matters, and that being worthy of love doesn’t guarantee you’ll receive it. Archie, Veronica, and Betty are teenagers as they ought to be: lively, curious, brave, and convinced, like all of us once were, that their romances and heartbreaks are the stuff of legend.

But if this cycle must be broken, if the teenagers from Riverdale must move beyond their early explorations of love and grow up, then Archie should have made the mature decision, and the truly romantic one, and gotten down on one knee for Betty.

What the publishers have done is bless a teenage wedding -- “marriage as imagined through a hormone-induced haze, pushing issues like children and mortgages and the question of how your husband or wife will deal with those challenges,” says Rosenberg.

If Archie wanted a life partner, a wife who knows how to work on a relationship through decades of disappointment and joy, Betty Cooper would have been an easy choice. She could have helped him figure out what he wants to do with his life, because she has dreams and ambitions of her own: She wants to be a journalist—a potentially quixotic goal as the industry crumbles in 2009, but then, she has plenty of practice chasing lost causes.

But she doubts that Archie and Veronica will “make it to the aisle, or that the characters will be shown having to deal with the consequences of adulthood—are small. In Riverdale, realism can go only so far, and no matter how many burgers Pop Tate’s Chok'lit Shoppe dishes out, it’s always been clear that unresolved love stories are the comic’s bread and butter.”

By: Carolyn Moynihan

Fighting parents drive teens to drink

The research is clear: adolescents tend to fare better -- academically and behaviourally -- when they live with both biological parents. And that’s a couple of scientists talking. But there is an exception: when their parents frequently argue, young adults are much more likely to binge on alcohol; they also tend to smoke, and their poor school grades are similar to those of peers who don’t have their own mum and dad at home.

The findings, which, at first blush, are disappointing to marriage advocates, come from a study of teenagers in 1,963 households in the US National Survey of Families and Households who were followed up through to their early 30s. Cornell professor Kelly Musick compared those who lived with married parents who often fought, with those living in stepfather or single-mother households.

“Our results clearly illustrate that the advantages of living with two continuously married parents are not shared equally by all children,” said Musick. “Compared with children in low-conflict families, children from high-conflict families are more likely to drop out of school, have poor grades, smoke, binge drink, use marijuana, have early sex, be young and unmarried when they have a child and then experience the breakup of that relationship.” Income and parenting styles did not account for these differences, she added and the timing and sequence of such young adult transitions, are important indicators for success in later life.

Even so, there were advantages in living with married parents. The young people from high-conflict households, compared with stepfather and single-mother families, were significantly less likely to drop out of high school, have early sex and cohabit, and were more likely to attend college. Their big downfall was a marked tendency to binge drink (imitating their parents? or escaping from the bickering at home too often and mixing with the wrong company?) which they did significantly more than kids from single mother homes.

Prof Musick stresses that policy initiatives promoting marriage “need to take account of how variation within marriage relates to child well-being.” Notice that she does NOT say that, because marriage doesn’t invariably bring the best outcomes for kids, it should not be promoted. Remember the opening line: The research is clear…

It is also clear there is a lot of work to be done to support and build up marriages. ~ Newswise, June 2

Article by: Carolyn Moynihan