Opus 2015-160: Monday Pulpit: Sources of Poverty, part 2 of ?, More on Absentee Fathers

The best way to keep your children out of poverty is to be married when they are born and stay married.  The following is a lengthy quote from Charles Murray in Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010.  My “page numbers” are from my Kindle edition.   It is lengthy.  Basically it says that even allowing for variations in socio-economic factors the children raised in two parent families are better off than any other situation.  Period.

“No matter what the outcome being examined - the quality of the mother-infant relationship, externalizing behavior in childhood (aggression, delinquency, and hyperactivity), delinquency in adolescence, criminality as adults, illness and injury in childhood, early mortality, sexual decision making in adolescence, school problems and dropping out, emotional health, or any other measure of how well or poorly children do in life - the family structure that produces the best outcomes for children, on average, are two biological parents who remain married. Divorced parents produce the next-best outcomes. Whether the parents remarry or remain single while the children are growing up makes little difference. Never-married women produce the worst outcomes. All of these statements apply after controlling for the family’s socioeconomic status. I know of no other set of important findings that are as broadly accepted by social scientists who follow the technical literature, liberal as well as conservative, and yet are so resolutely ignored by network news programs, editorial writers for the major newspapers, and politicians of both major political parties.”  Kindle Highlight Loc. 2658-72.

It also seems that the fact of being married itself is key.

“...the children of married couples did significantly better than the children of cohabiting parents, who in turn had scores that were only fractionally higher than the children of single mothers.” Highlight Loc. 2765-66

The Biblical standard for family starts with one man, married to one women, for life.  By encouraging and supporting unwed mothers we handicap all of the children in their future potential. We have a Biblical standard.  We have modern research the reinforces that standard.
 What is there that you don’t understand?

Murray, Charles.  Coming Apart.  New York:  Crown Forum, 2012.

To be continued...