Written by Patience Griswold

A recent Gallup survey found that just 29 percent of Americans believe it is very important for a couple who has children together to be married, down from 49 percent in 2006. The survey also found that only 38 percent of Americans said that it is very important for a couple that plans to stay together for the rest of their lives to be married — a disparity that indicates a shift in how Americans think about marriage and family, with fewer Americans seeing the two as going hand in hand.

Several commentators have pointed out that while marriage rates have been dropping for some time, and our culture increasingly minimizes the importance of marriage in forming stable families, Gallup’s research shows a significant and alarming decline in support for marriage among groups that have traditionally been pro-marriage and family, including conservatives, Americans over the age of 55, and people who attend church weekly. While 67 percent of weekly church attendees said that it is very important for a couple who plans to stay together for the rest of their lives to be married, only 45 percent of weekly church attendees said that it is very important for a couple who has children together to be married. Even in the church, a shrinking number of people recognize how important it is for couples who have children together to be married.

Another subgroup that surprisingly did not place a higher value on parents being married was respondents with children under the age of 18. Gallup reports,

Parents of minor children (30 percent) are not significantly more likely than nonparents (27 percent) to view marriage as critical. Those who are currently married (33 percent) are slightly more likely than those who are not married (25 percent) to say it is important, though the current eight-percentage-point gap between these two groups has narrowed from 16 points in 2006.

Cohabitation is not the same as marriage, and the difference is clear when looking at the data for how children fare when raised by cohabiting versus married parents. Additionally, two out of every three unmarried couples who have children together split up by the time their child is 12 years old, meaning that children cohabitating couples are more likely to face the very real loss of fatherlessness or motherlessness than not.

Children do best when they are raised by their married mom and dad because no mother can fill the role of a father, and no father can fill the role of a mother. Children who are raised by their married parents are less likely to experience poverty, less likely to be incarcerated, and more likely to graduate from college, and mere financial support does not fill the void left by an absent parent.

Family stability matters for children, and cohabitation undermines that. Even when cohabiting couples choose to marry, marriages that begin with cohabitation are more likely to end in divorce. Unfortunately, over half of America’s young adults believe that the opposite is true, saying that living together before marriage increases the likelihood of a successful marriage.

Currently, only half of the children in the U.S. are raised by their married mother and father. This is a real loss that comes with significant harm to children, adults, and entire communities. Marriage and family are the bedrock of society and we need to be investing in building strong marriages and families and pursuing policies that encourage the formation of strong families, rather than penalizing them. Coming alongside children and families affected by family breakdown is also vital — children who have experienced family breakdown but are raised in communities with strong families fare better than children who experience family breakdown and are not surrounded by families with stable marriages at their core.

Despite popular opinion, it is very important that couples who have children together be married, and the church needs to lead the way in recognizing this fact by encouraging and strengthening marriages and families. Marriage and family are designed to go hand in hand, and everyone benefits when both are valued.

This article was originally published by the Minnesota Family Council.

Fatherless children are quickly becoming the norm in the United States. At one time, it was primarily young and poorly educated women who became single mothers. Today that trend is changing. Educated women in their mid-thirties are often having their first child outside of marriage. A quick search on the internet results in a plethora of articles touting single motherhood.

Society seems enamored with the idea that women do not need men to “have it all.” Instead, they can have the education, the career, and the child without the burden of marriage. However, what are the effects of eliminating the father’s role in a child’s upbringing and how should Christians respond?

According to the 2020 census report, over 10 million single-parent homes exist in the U.S., and women head 80.5 percent of those homes. Half of the single mothers have never married, a third are divorced, and the remainder are either separated or widowed. Despite many single mothers being more educated than in previous decades, the single-parent poverty rate remains high. Poverty among single mothers is at 29 percent. Food insecurity and hunger are on the rise as a result.

Economic problems are not the only pressing problems experienced by single mothers. Dr. David Popenoe, Professor Emeritus of Sociology at Rutgers University and co-developer of the National Marriage Project, has noted that a father’s involvement in his child’s life is beneficial to the child’s sense of happiness and well-being. Children with involved fathers are more likely to succeed academically and are twice as likely to attend college as children without involved fathers. Fathers also play a role in children developing problem-solving skills, empathy, and independence. The lack of a father can severely stunt these beneficial emotional developments.

For decades, researchers have noted the lasting effects of fatherlessness on children. Poverty, drug and alcohol abuse, and various emotional problems are all associated with the lack of a father figure. There has even been a correlation between fatherlessness and increased suicide rates in children. Children are profoundly affected by the absence of fathers.

There are numerous reasons why women are becoming single mothers, including personal choice. Although Christians may disagree with women choosing to parent alone, it is essential that the church not ostracize them and their children. The church should also not assume that every single mother is parenting alone by choice. Instead, it is up to the Christian church to support single parents lovingly while also promoting fatherhood and the benefits of two-parent households.

James 1:27 offers helpful guidance:

“Pure and undefiled religion before God and the Father is this: to visit orphans and widows in their trouble, and to keep oneself unspotted from the world.”

These single-parent homes are real opportunities for the church to show the love of God. We can accomplish this ministry by making single mothers feel welcome in the church, finding out the needs of the single-parent home, and providing assistance with those needs.

The church should also educate men about the importance of being involved. Even when divorce occurs, men should still play a vital role in their children’s lives, and they need support and encouragement in fulfilling their roles from the church. Male mentors and small groups for men and single-fathers could provide the necessary resources.

We should create opportunities for fatherless children to have positive male role models that help them develop emotionally and spiritually. Sunday school, vacation Bible school, and youth clubs may be the only opportunity for some children to connect to a positive male role model. But if the church is serious, it doesn’t have to stop there.

The church should expose the lies of the feminist movement that tells educated women they can “have it all” without having a marriage. Women need instruction on the value of marriage and the roles played by both parents. The church should encourage women to ensure children have positive male role models even when fathers are absent.

In Proverbs 30:11, we are told,

“There is a generation that curses its father, and does not bless its mother.”

It would seem the birth of that generation is at hand. The lack of father figures has led to all sorts of degeneracy, and feminists are purposefully expunging husbands and fathers. As a result, increasing numbers of children are rejecting authority and cursing their fathers and mothers. For this reason, the church has much work to do in restoring a God-centered understanding of the importance of two-parent households.

Written by Janice Shaw Crouse

More Millennial mothers are single than married

In pre-modern times, the disparity in men’s and women’s higher education opportunities was often defended by the view that women’s education would be wasted because they’d end up “just being mothers.” Of course, we now recognize that a mother’s education plays a vital role in the education of her children and, thus, in the welfare of the community and society as a whole.

Today, when women comprise 57 percent of all undergraduates (as compared to only 42 percent in 1970), there is a new twist on inequality, and it shows up prominently among Millennial women. More Millennial mothers (ages 26-31) are single than married. Only a third of all mothers in their late twenties and early thirties are married, and the determining factor has been known by scholars and researchers for quite a while. Now the difference between single motherhood and married moms is becoming more widely recognized: the less education a young woman has, the higher the likelihood that she will have a child outside of marriage, which is pretty much a one-way ticket to poverty (the poverty rate of children under five years of age living in female-headed households is 57 percent). The other side of this equation is that those moms who are educated have a much higher probability of being married before having a child.

By now, everyone should know the realities that single parenthood is disastrous financially for young women and has predictable, well-known risks for children of single mothers. Yet public discourse continues to focus on “inequality” as the nebulous concept “polarizing” the nation and can only be reversed by expanding government programs and increasing entitlements. Hardly anyone escapes the abundant evidence of the failures of single parenting all around us —— from unruly and unprepared children in the school classrooms to belligerent fatherless boys terrorizing neighborhoods to abused and neglected children in emergency rooms to harried moms and wild kids at the local Walmart. Single mothers are the first ones to say that they can’t do the 24/7 job of parenting all alone, and while many are heroic, even more have given up and “go with the flow.”

A new Johns Hopkins study was just popularized in Time magazine. Using data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (widely known as the NLSY97 — U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2005), the study found that among those who were in their teens and twenties in 1997, 81 percent of all births reported by women and 87 percent of births reported by men occurred to non-college graduates and that 57 percent of those births were outside of marriage. In addition, 64 percent of those women and 63 percent of those men had at least one child outside of marriage. Among those without a four-year college degree, the figure rose to 74 percent among women and 70 percent among men. “It is now unusual,” the report stated, “for non-college-graduates who have children in their teens and twenties to have all of them within marriage.” The implications of that fact are profound for American culture and society; they are highly significant regarding the “growing social class inequalities in family patterns.”

The original scholarly article is quite clear: this “distinctive fertility regime in early adulthood reinforces the growing social class differences in American family life.” The authors are unequivocal about the fact that “nonmarital fertility is associated with greater relationship instability and family complexity… [that] reinforces family inequalities between the non-college graduate and college-graduate populations.”

The evidence regarding the effects of the ongoing dismantling of the traditional family structure for alternative arrangements since the 1960s sexual revolution pervades the social science research, yet public policy lags behind, and the nation’s leaders continue to pretend that the decline in marriage is not the primary cause of social and financial inequality. As the Time article put it, “Motherhood is beginning to show the fissures along income and education lines that have already appeared in other aspects of U.S. society, with a small cluster of wealthy well educated people at one end (married with kids), a large cluster of struggling people at the other (kids, not married) and a thinning middle.”

The bottom line of the Johns Hopkins study is that those unmarried parents who live together tend to break up during the very stressful first years of parenting; the enormous growth in this choice by today’s young adults gives sad validity to what the sociologists call the “multi-partner fertility” and the popular culture calls multiple “baby mamas.” It is long past time for America’s opinion leaders to face up to a harsh reality: the liberals’ myth that all types of families are equally viable (if only we pour enough money into government programs to support them) has produced a toxic brew of family instability, complex family dynamics, and constant changing household structure leading “to the calcification of social inequality.”